Emptiness tends to frighten people used to fullness. It is a distasteful state; many even believe emptiness to be a moral failure. Reflect on the emotional connotations to the word: empty cups, empty pockets, empty-headedness, empty souls. It is a hard word in English, hard to pronounce clearly, demanding a carefulness that reflects our fragility in this place of emptiness.
Emptiness doesn’t need to frighten us. It isn’t a moral failing and it isn’t a communicable disease. Emptiness is simply a state of being, demonstrating our pouring out, our leaving behind, our making space and way. The basket already full to bursting cannot hold any more food. Our lives full to overwhelming, spilling over, need some emptying to make room.
The emptiness that happens in moments of defeat can also open the way for new possibilities and new energy to enter in. We might have done everything we could and failed to reach our goal, but in that emptiness we can pause and recollect ourselves, our bigger goals, new strategies, engage in retelling and remembering and then preparing to begin again, with new energy.
The emptiness that happens when we lose someone we love hurts, as we hold onto what was good and what can no longer be repaired, as we wait in that longing and wait in that stillness, until our hearts are ready, slowly and tentatively and then more and more surely to love boldly again, to risk relationships that matter.
The emptiness that happens when we clear away the extraneous stuff – the obligations that turn out not really to be duty, the accretions of habits, the physical things we become caretakers for – is a practice of opening ourselves again to possibilities that we were previously too full to appreciate or grasp.
Holy Saturday is a day of emptiness on the christian calendar – a day of loss, a day of mourning, a day of clearing, a day of pondering, a day of waiting, a day of getting comfortable with what can happen when emptiness happens. Of course, that emptiness happens with a full tomb, and tomorrow? What happens when the tomb is emptied? But, wait, that’s tomorrow. Here is today and it is wide open for making room.
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