Emptiness

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?”

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, referred 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 a 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.