All You Need Is . . . Emptiness
Just a few days ago I got an $800 repair bill on our junker car (mice had made a nest in the air ducts and gotten caught in the blower fan, yuck). That was just after the expert stood in my front lawn and told me I needed a new septic system. Money is one of my go-to worries, maybe it’s yours too. We’re often worried about our health, about crises in the lives of people we love. And as the world darkens around us, we’d be crazy not to wonder where we’re going and whether anything we recognize will be left when we get there.
It is the blankness of the future that unsettles us. Blessed Henri Nouwen writes, “We like to occupy—fill up—every empty time and space. We want to be occupied. And if we are not occupied we easily become preoccupied; that is, we fill the empty spaces before we have even reached them.”
That’s what our worry is—a weirdly negative way of filling up the future with some kind of story line. Anything but the emptiness of not knowing.
“It is very hard to allow emptiness to exist in our lives,” Nouwen continues. “Emptiness requires a willingness not to be in control, a willingness to let something new and unexpected happen. It requires trust, surrender, and openness to guidance. God wants to dwell in our emptiness. But as long as we are afraid of God and God’s actions in our lives, it is unlikely that we will offer our emptiness to God.”
The thing that scares us the most—our emptiness—turns out to be the one and only thing we need, the only thing we can offer to God. Instead of projecting worry from the firehose of our fear, we can sit at the edge of the unknown and just be quiet, just be curious. What will God bring out of those mists? Instead of pre-judging what is “good” or “bad,” how can I trust that everything belongs, everything works my transformation? How can I just say yes, yes, and yes?
It takes an adventurous spirit to trust that the unknown that is yet to be filled might be wonderful and marvelous – even with whatever darkness comes along. Thanks, David.
Yes—praying for that “adventurous spirit”!
Finding God in the unknowing is my hope & prayer. I am in control of my “yes.” (God help me, when it feels hard).
‘Finding God in the unknowing’—that’s really the big emphasis for me. So much of faith and religion is about knowing stuff, and getting more and more confident about what you KNOW. When we all know that even the halfway wise, after about 50 years, all say the same thing: my creed is getting shorter and simpler…and more deeply powerful. That’s learning how to unlearn, and unknow—so that we can be open to the One who says, ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing.’