St. Mary Catholic Church

What is it about emptiness? Lent 2010

What is it about emptiness?

For a while now, I have been intrigued—emotionally touched in a mysterious way—by emptiness.  Whether it’s an empty room in a house, just a floor and walls and a window to let light in, an empty field on the side of the road, unplowed, untouched, or white space on a page, emptiness speaks to me.

Those of you who have seen my office know that there isn’t much in it.  I like my desk clear, and the tables around me empty of papers and things.  In all honesty, I have trouble thinking when there’s clutter around.  It’s freeing, isn’t it, to be unconfined by things and thoughts?  To be free to dream.

Just the other day, Cindy Bernardin shared with me a story about an empty room in her former house, dubbed it “the room with no furniture.”  It was a room of pure potential.  When Cindy threw a party, the room became the party room.  When her kids’ friends came over to play, the  absence of “stuff” in the room let their imaginations run wild.  The room had the potential to be anything—to become whatever they dreamt it to be.  And when the family of Joel, a friend of Cindy’s son—also a Biblical prophet—was remodeling their house, Joel told his parents that he, too, wanted a “room with no furniture.”

I think this sense of childlike wonder—this dream of what can be—lies at the heart of my own fascination with emptiness.  Perhaps there’s something very sacramental about emptiness.  Perhaps emptiness is a window through which we can discover something about who God is, and—since we are created in God’s image and likeness—who we are.  God is the very essence of potential.  Everything that can be is fulfilled in its truest form in God.  And that includes us.  This window to seeing God allows us to reflect on our own lives, to consider how we can fulfill the humanity into which we are created.

Perhaps emptiness is also a window to seeing how God sees—not a bunch of fallen, broken people who can’t seem to get their lives together (though we might certainly feel that way at times!)—but a people of potential, a people ready to be filled with what we really need—with grace.  With love.

This season of Lent is about self-emptying.  It’s about potential.  It’s about change.  It’s about letting go of all those things that clutter our hearts and minds and letting God’s transformative grace fill us.  Lent is about becoming radicals—revolutionaries—people who give without counting cost, fight for goodness heedless of wounds, who labor for the kingdom without thought of reward!

This whole self-emptying idea has been around a long time.  Since the time of St. Paul, theologians use the Greek word kenosis to talk about it.  Kenosis begins with Christ, alone and wandering through the desert for 40 days, giving all he had to the people he loved, dying on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, in fulfillment of his potential—in fulfillment of God’s plan.  Likewise, our Lenten fast is about kenosis—about really reflecting—really fasting from those things that fill our lives (probably not chocolate, potato chips, or coke!)—so that we can be filled with God’s grace, transformed by God’s love, and fulfilled in our humanity.

Lent is the time to find that empty room.  To climb to the mountaintop and leave this world behind, so that we can see what can be—a world transfigured and renewed.  And to do that, we’ve got to give it away.