Tag Archives: emptiness

Mary Trump, “Too Much and Never Enough

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The Trump maelstrom is teetering on that abyss of darkness that gave rise to it in the first place.  His niece, Mary Trump, has just released her tell-all book (“Too Much and Never Enough”) about this uncle that she describes as “the most dangerous man in America.”  I’ve read excerpts from her book, and watched a powerful interview of her by Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” in which she described the “currency” of the intimate dynamics of that modern “Robber Baron” family as being money rather than anything near love and respect for others.

The title of her book immediately triggered the Shakespearean dimension of my brain with a line from one of his sonnets, “mad in pursuit and more in possession so.” Shakespeare had his pulse on the human soul and revealed in this sonnet 129 the voracious appetite, one spawn of which is capitalism itself and that spawn’s offspring with characters such as individuals like Trump, the personal “toy of some great pain.”  Shakespeare in this sonnet explored this bottomless pit very elegantly and concluded that it leads to hell itself:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

The heaven that leads men to this hell.

Marilynne Robinson and the Importance of Need

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Marilynne Robinson’s novel, “Housekeeping” and the movie that resulted from it has really stuck with me.  Robinson has a deep spiritual dimension to her life and work because she knows a lot about spiritual depths.  One must in order to write like she does, and in order to gain the respect of someone like Barack Obama so that in his Presidency he flew to Des Moines, Iowa to interview her. That is right!  For him, to interview her!

One line from “Housekeeping” grabbed me when I read it 25 years ago, and even today tugs at my soul, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.”  Need, or emptiness, is what makes us human and is what the Christian tradition has in mind with the doctrine of kenosis, the “self-emptying” of Jesus; this “self-emptying” means “to making nothing.”  It is the knowledge, and experiencing of our Absence, that represents a developing familiarity with the innermost regions of our soul.  Avoiding this neediness/emptiness is what our persona was designed to cover up until we could find the maturity to allow it to become porous a bit so that our innermost being could come to light.  Shakespeare put it like this, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Our materialist, consumer culture offers us a steady array of “stuff” to invest in, to “feed upon,” and avoid this redemptive inner core.  And speaking from experience, religion can offer its own version of “stuff” when dogma and sterile ritual are relied on rather than doing the soul work which would allow this dogma and ritual to have a meaningful impact in one’s life.

Something About “Nothing”

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A friend noted decades ago that I often quipped and joked about negation.  That was the first moment I noticed this feature of my soul and realized just how it influenced the whole of my life.  Poet Anne Carson noted, “The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people. But at a certain point he feels a lack. He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.”

However, I am not a poet.  I am, though steeped in poetry and have been since my mid-thirties when a friend gifted me a book of poems by W. H. Auden.  I think that poets have the ability and courage to dive into that “lack” buck naked, and come back with the gift of poetry.  I don’t think my lot in life is to get that naked, probably because of a lack of courage or the gods’ wisdom that I could not handle the vulnerability.  But the “lack” is present and I am growing more comfortable with it, finding that “chopping wood, carrying water” is effective in assuaging the soul’s experience of this emptiness.

This lack is now being presented to our entire culture in the person of our president.  He illustrates what happens when one sell’s his soul to distractions and is left with a gaping maw in his heart that seeks to destroy everything and everyone.  These distractions are what allow most people to have that “full and satisfactory present” mentioned by Carson above.  These “distractions” are a gift but when they become the soul focus in one’s life, or a culture’s life, a meaninglessness eventually finds expression.  Watch and listen to Trump and one can see meaninglessness and emptiness personified.

Rebecca Chopps On Our Country’s Malady of the Soul

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Barack Obama has answered the bell and has come out swinging, addressing the Republican morass of recent decades that has created our country’s present debacle, and yes, taking not-so-veiled jabs at the figure-head and spokesman for this roiling cauldron of chthonic energy.  I stumbled across a book just last week by Rebecca S. Chopps entitled, “The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, and God,” which is relevant to this cauldron as she explores how language, including religious language, can be used to give expression to hidden dimensions of the heart, individually and socio-culturally. But for this “revelation” to occur, there must be a voice/voices from beyond the pale of the status quo who see into the heart of the poisonous mindset which is always oriented primarily to maintain the prevailing power structure.  Chopps writes as a feminist but also as a Christian…apparently…though if she calls herself a Christian she is certainly beyond the pale of the Christian power structure that would “legitimate” her wearing that label.

Here I will share a couple of paragraphs from Chopps’ book:

Proclamation, in feminist discourses of emancipatory transformation, resists and transforms the social symbolic order.  Proclamation is a form of resistance to the practices and principles of modernity that control, dominate, and oppress.  But proclamation resists by way of transformation, seeking to provide new discourses by a variety of strategies, methods, and ways, and to transform the ruling principles and order into ones that allow, encourage, and enable transformative relations of multiplicity, difference, solidarity, anticipation, embodiment, and transformation.  Transformation occurs by creating new images of human flourishing, new values of otherness, and multiplicity, new theoretical practices of solidarity and anticipation.

This is reminiscent of one of the most powerful of Paul Tillich’s sermons, “The Shaking of the Foundations” in which he argued that the purpose of the church is to, “rattle the cage” (my term) of the status quo.  But the status quo does not want to be “rattled” and will arm itself to the teeth in an effort to deny any affront to its comfy zone of satisfaction, where “they bask, agreed upon what they will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light” of the unquestioned assumptions which give them privilege and power.  This is also obviously so with the power structure of religious culture though often those most ensconced in that power structure are basking even more in the comfort of a falsetto humility which does not permit any consideration or discussion of their motivations.

I conclude with another paragraph from Chopps:

Through discourses of emancipatory transformation, proclamation enables those marginalized voices who so often have not been heard, to speak: to speak of the beauty, hope, pain, and sorrow they have known on the margins.  Proclamation also speaks within the ambiguities of the order, the ambiguities, for instance, of the bourgeois who, though promised freedom in his autonomy, discovers few genuine possibilities for the community, relationships, and love he so desires.  Unable to find any “authentic meaning” the bourgeois attempts to fill in the empty spaces of his or her soul through the attainment of material goods that great momentary satisfaction with increasingly diminished returns.

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Marilynne Robinson on Subjectivity, Dissent, Rationality, and Faith

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Marilynne Robinson is one of the most astute social critics and feminist writers in our contemporary world.  In the current edition of The New Republic she has an article about Martin Luther and the dissent that he introduced which led to the Protestant Revolution.  She points out that Luther was a very conflicted soul, certainly “haunted” and driven by forces he was not aware of, but appearing at a ripe moment in history and has proving to be a pivotal figure in Western Civilization.  I also can see how one could even argue that the direction he led us was not even in the best interest of mankind, given our present day capacity to allow “dissent” to become such a way of life that even a “rational” body like the U.S. Congress is anything but rational.

Even in her youth Marilynne was a thoughtful sensitive soul, very “aware” of her own subjective experience and the world in which she lived, even that of flora and fauna. The following is from an article in Christianity Today magazine about Robinson’s keen spiritual sensitivity.  The writer pointed out that she developed a keen sense of observation, including the Ineffable, recalling that she could sense God’s presence there long before she had a name for him. “I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me,” she writes, “barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it.” Perhaps they were, but in a culture in which “it was characteristic to be silent about things that in any way moved them,” the young Robinson was, in her deepest experiences, alone.”

“There were mentors, though. She remembers her grandfather holding an iris blossom before her, quietly commending its miracle of form, and the “patient old woman who taught me Presbyterianism,” offering Moses’ burning bush and Pharaoh’s dream of famine as wonders to contemplate. In their reticent attention, both mentors gave Robinson a way to stand before mystery and gradually behold it. “It was as if some old relative had walked me down to the lake knowing an imperious whim of heaven had made it a sea of gold and glass, and had said, This is a fine evening, and walked me home again.”

Her subjective “aliveness” is best illustrated in her first novel, “Housekeeping” in which an Aunt cares for two young nieces and leads them into her eccentric, “hippy” world of myth and magic.  One of the nieces eventually rejects this life for the “normal” while the other takes off with her aunt for a vagabond life of adventure in an ethereal world of which most of us are oblivious, where distinctions are nebulous.  The most memorable line in this novel for me is, “Emptiness can blossom into all the compensations it requires.”  Robinson knew, and still knows, that the realm of the imagination holds riches untold for humankind if we are but willing to find the courage to venture there, allowing our intellect to be refreshed by the energy that lies there.

Here is the context from, “Housekeeping,” in which the aforementioned quotation occurs, “For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”

Space, Silence, No-thingness, and Spirit

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Caritas
(St Andrews Cathedral)
These stones speak a level language
murmured word by word,
a speech pocked and porous with loss,
and the slow hungers of weathering.
And there, in the broken choir, children
are all raised voice, loving the play of outline
and absence where the dissembled god
has shared his shape and homed us.
At the end of the nave, the east front stands
both altered and unchanged,
its arch like a glottal stop.
And what comes across, half-said
into all that space, is that it’s enough
to love the air we move through.
(by Rachael Boast)

The “air we move through.” That captured my imagination as it brought to mind the notion of “space” that people like Eckhart Tolle and Richard Rohr speak of, words which can be thought of as referring to the domain of “spirit.” For, “space” is the context in which we breath and live but it is a context that is only “there” but we can never apprehend it with our rational mind. It is the foundation of this ephemeral world that we take for granted but which is ultimately specious, though infinitely important as an expression of what I like to call the Divine or the Ineffable. It is the domain of the heart, the Spirit, of Life which gives meaning to this “dog-and-pony show” that I refer to so often. I heard a lecture by Richard Rohr recently in which he used the term Silence, a different name for the same phenomena, and describing it as “the safety net which lies underneath the tight-rope walker, those of us who walk the razor’s edge.”

I now want to juxtapose the above poem with one by Eugene Mayo that I have always loved, entitled, “This Wind.”:

By E. L. Mayo

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.
I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind like this
But there’s no taking
Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind we breathe and ride upon.

 

“Unaccomodated Man”–The Absence that we Are

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King Lear gave up his kingdom, became estranged from his family, became very disconsolate, lost his eyesight and even  his mind,  and suddenly found himself out on the heath, pelted by a pitiless storm and retreating to a hovel where he lamented,  “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare forked animal…” Shakespeare saw clearly that man was other than he takes himself to be, that the trappings of his life merely cover up his internal nakedness. He realized and repeatedly emphasized the absence that we are.

And, when we get to the point in life where we entertain this spiritual impoverishment and experience the loss of our “kingdom”, the trappings of our ego-bound life that we have always taken to be of such great importance suddenly appear to amount to nothing. And when we get “naked”…as King Lear did literally after the above quote…we can discover meaning in our life and meaning for all of these trappings which until now have been merely “accomodations.” At this point many, if not all, of these “accomodations” can still be ours but they will not be the core of our identity any longer. We will have them. They will no longer have us.

Listen to what Thomas Merton said about this subject in his book, Seeds of Contemplation:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself in glory to make myself perceptible…as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface….But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structures of pleasures and ambitions have no foundation. I am my own mistake…..The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.

Shakespeare, Merton and other great spiritual luminaries recognized that entertaining this “absence that we are” is an essential task in life and is a spiritual enterprise. They recognized that only when we embrace our emptiness, not just cognitively but emotionally, can we find the fullness of our Source. This is what Jesus had in mind when he said that to find our life we must lose it, we must lose the ego investments in ephemeral things in order to embrace the Essential. And, this also often means “losing” our religion as we have to forgo the ego-ridden, “letter of the law”, approach to spirituality and this often feels like we are losing our faith. Sometimes we have to lose our faith to find it.

 

We Are “Needful Things” at Heart

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Jenny Kissed Me is an excellent blog featuring a steady array of very thoughtful poetry. (http://jeglatter.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/let-go-of-everything-that-does-not-serve-you/) In the poem linked here, she describes emptiness as a place of fulfillment and strength and uses the image of the mother’s breast as the model of need fulfillment. “Dear One, Let go of everything/That does not/Serve you/Then lay, rest//And suckle here,/Until your emptiness/Becomes/A strong new you.”

Clinical theory offers object-relations theory to explain the “needfulness” of the human heart, suggesting as the subject begins to formulate it “needs” objects with which to constitute itself. Or, better stated, it needs objects against which to define itself, this process of definition often described as “object separateness.” The mother, according to this theory is the first object, the “primary object”, and her breasts are the “primary” part of her as they are quickly learned to be satisfaction for a primary need, physical hunger.

But a primary dimension of the human experience will always be “emptiness” or an “object hunger” which we will return to if we do anything meaningful in life. If our ego is mature…if we have “ego integrity”…we will be able to let down our boundaries here and there and step into that “neediness” and there find a Strength that we will not find otherwise.

Marilynne Robinson wrote a marvelous novel entitled Housekeeping about twenty years ago, a novel that was turned into an excellent movie by the same name. In the novel she noted something that grabbed me even before I knew why, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.” Robinson knew that need, though a very scary dimension of the heart, is fertile territory if we dare to go there. And, by describing it as “fertile” I am assigning it femininity and I do so deliberately; for, there in the maw of primordial hunger is our Source and it/He/She is the Ultimate compensation that can be found there. But, unfortunately, addiction of all varieties is always a ready temptation when we visit that matrix of life.

However, emptiness is antithetical to everything we are taught in Western culture and this is not unrelated to the misogyny that we making inroads into in the past 100 years. Our culture emphasizes “be strong” in an ego-maniacal way, not realizing that real strength is found in weakness. Sounds a whole lot like the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t it? Hmm.

And let me close with a facetious note. Stephen King wrote a short story entitled “Needful Things.” I sometimes like to think that this is a good description of the human race.

 

“Unpacking My Heart with Words” Review

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When I started this “literarylew” adventure about two years ago, I prefaced my efforts with a line from the book of Job, noting that “my heart is full of words, like a taut wine skin, about to burst.” I then borrowed a line from the other important body of Holy Writ in my life, Shakespeare, and proposing that I would “unpack my heart with words.”

As I have been “unpacking” in word, and in the “deed” of my day-to-day life, I’ve realized that when you “unpack” anything at some point you empty it out. You realize the obvious, the suitcase or box is empty and you can quit unpacking. But when you “unpack” the heart, you do discover and experience “emptiness” but you find that it is a never ending “emptiness” and that, paradoxically, in some very uncanny way you are full when you are empty.

Now part of me is still very vain and wants the above to conclude with some report of an epiphany of sorts, some glorious spiritual experience which puts me up with the luminaries of the past and present. And, I might add, this “unpacking” spiel kind of invites it! But, it ain’t there! And I’m so glad I don’t want it to be and in part this is because of cowardice. I have a hunch it would be too painful. “It is what it is” or “I am what I am” or the Popeye the Sailor Man version, “I yam what I yam.” I know emptiness more than before but mine is mercifully a very prosaic emptiness. Thus I’m not a poet, huh?

We so miss the point. And we do it persistently, brazenly, and deliberately. This is because we do not like to confront our emptiness for doing so exposes our frailty and foolishness, showing us to be veritably “strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage.” Now, don’t get me wrong. My life is now also daily “strutting and fretting” but I view it with a different perspective now. I don’t take it (i.e., myself) so seriously and, paradoxically, realize just how infinitely important “it” is. The Infinite becomes manifest through each of us as we go about our day-to-day lives humbling chopping wood and carrying water.

I want to share again Lao Tzu’s thoughts about this emptiness:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness:
�Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.
(trans. By Witter Bynner)

 

Much to do about nothing

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I have looked for years for this version of the 11th verse from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. It is translated by Witter Bynner:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.

Written in the 6th century b.c., this marvelous wisdom has volumes to speak to us, though these “volumes” are qualitative, not quantitative. It is only in our emptiness that we find our fullness, in our nothingness that we find our somethingness, in our death that we find our life.  And this death can take place long before the death of our body.