By Fr Jason Smith

The Awakening Conscience

We ache because we are not full.

In The Awakening Conscience William Holman Hunt places his finger—or brush, better said, on the ache found deep within every person: We either have God who alone can fill us, or we will endlessly try to pursue the things that cannot do so.

By most standards today, the woman in Hunt’s painting should be blissfully happy, if wealth, prestige, social status, gourmet eating, sexual encounters, and the like, indeed left one filled. More…