Many of us
spend much of our life organizing ourselves so that our time is well occupied. This
becomes more evident when we reach the age of retirement. We look for things to
do: volunteering, visiting friends, tourist trips, reading. Some of us find
ourselves watching more television, going more often to the movies or concerts.
Much of this is both enriching and meaningful. But, how many of us spend time doing
nothing: I mean just being still, not even thinking, paying attention to what “comes
to us?”
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| (By Robbert van der Steeg (originally posted to Flickr as Eternal clock) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) |
I have been
reading some of the correspondence of John Howard Griffin. You will remember
that he wrote “Black Like Me” after ingesting, in the 1960s, a chemical that
turned his skin black. He then spent about a month living as a Black man. His
book caused a sensation in those days of the struggle for civil rights. What is
perhaps a little bit less known is his struggle with the aftermath. The
chemical wore off but provoked a cancer, diabetes, severe heart problems. He endured years of extreme pain, blindness, and
amputations. Through it all he displayed an enormous humanity. He did not at
all see himself as a hero. Quite the contrary he was very conscious of how he
rebelled against his fate.
All this
leads me to consider what is at the heart of the human condition. Most of us
want our lives to be meaningful. But what about those times, years, when there
is no sense that what we are living through has any meaning at all – either for
ourselves or for others: Times when we are totally isolated, in pain of one
sort or another, feeling perhaps even that we are a burden to others?
In the
Christian tradition, there is a strain – one I often refer to – that insists
that God is the ultimate source of goodness and meaning in our lives. We live
for the encounter with that ultimate “ground of being,” as Paul Tillich, used
to refer to it. Yet, God is also always well beyond us, a call that draws us
but to which we never really “arrive.” Victor
Frankl, a psychoanalyst, survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and a friend
of Griffin, reffered to this journey in his book “The Search for Meaning.”
In this
context, the experience of God can only happen when we have been emptied of
everything else, everything that could distract us, everything that could take
God’s place. St. Paul refers to this in the letter to the Corinthians when he
speaks of Christ’s kenosis, of how the Divine Word did not cling to divinity
but came among us as human, divesting itself of all the divine prerogatives
even to the point of death and death on a cross.
It is very
hard, in practice, to actually make the option for emptying, that is to say,
accepting that, at some point and at some level, what life offers us is empty
and emptiness, and that we opt to embrace that emptiness as the threshold to the
presence of God.
I remember a
priest from Colombia giving us a talk long ago about how to deal with the
enormous physical and psychological violence that was consuming Latin America
in the 1970s and 1980s. He suggested that we might be tempted, as indeed I was
and at a very deep level, to feel that God was absent. No, he said, this is
precisely the time when we should be attentive to God’s presence, in that deep
and very dark void. For it is only there that the true God, the God of Jesus
Christ, will be found. Easier said than done!
Yet, he was
right and still is. Those who embrace that path manifest enormous strength and
provide hope for others. It is privilege to meet such people along the way of
life and it is even more a gift to be able to make the same option.
