day 2: for emptiness

It might seem that we have to generate the sense of openness, freshness, joy, revelry, or stillness we touch in such moments. From the Buddhist perspective, however, such a state of being is already there within us and has been so since the beginning. It’s tantalizing to think that perhaps expansiveness lies waiting to be uncovered within us while we go searching for it everywhere else. It’s not something we go toward so much as it is what we are left with when all our running around ceases. Our deeper nature is simply what’s left when we put down the endless task of trying to be somebody.

Ralph De La Rosa, cited in Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts (146)

I have lived with clinical depression since I was a young child (although it wasn’t diagnosed until I was a young adult). I am afraid of the pit, the chasm, the canyon of blankness that lives within me.  This is where my emotions seethe, so for most of my life I have been afraid of expressing strong emotion in case I am swept away in my distress, completely hollowed out to the point where there is no point to my being alive.  I have lived with the fear that this blank at the heart of me makes me inherently unloveable, even, especially, by God.

Making room to spend time with, even to glance at, this ‘empty’ secret centre of myself, is an unwelcome thought.  To drop all the masks, the curated, constructed public self.  To stop and rest into the love my family and friends tell me they have for me.  This becomes almost unbearable, for I know I am a fraud. I see all the ways I grasp for control, trying to ration out my energy, trying to evade inner silence, trying to cover up my failings, trying to disguise all the horrible things I really am. 

And yet, God still asks me to come and be in Her Presence, every day.  That means making room to spend time with the inside of me.  It means deliberately attempting to empty myself out, to get myself out of the way, so that I might encounter God, so that I might behold God. For the last ten years I have been trying to practice a daily session of ‘centering’ prayer, following the guidance of Father Thomas Keating:

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I welcome everything that comes to me today, because I know it’s for my healing. 

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.

I let go of my desire for power and control.

I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval, and pleasure.

I let go of my desire for survival and security.

I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.

I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within. Amen.

Such a centering on the Presence of God within requires a commitment to stripping back all of the things that drive me, a stripping back until the false ‘I’ is empty, because the True Kate is revealed: and she is full of the God-Self.

We are afraid of emptiness.  Spinoza speaks about our “horror vacui”, our horrendous fear of vacancy … It is very hard to allow emptiness to exist in our lives.  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.

Henri Nowen, Bread for the Journey (70)

During painful times, when you feel a terrible void, think how the capacity of your soul is being enlarged so that it can receive God – becoming as it were, infinite as God is infinite.

St. Elizabeth of the Trinity

surrender. (iPhone image)