Fullness and Emptiness

This website explores ways of coming more fully alive.  Self-fulfillment is a value of which we are conscious today.  But we sometimes fail to notice that people who live fulfilled lives are surprisingly selfless.  At moments when we experience life in fullness, we are, if not selfless, at least self-forgetful.  Don’t we all know this from experience?

The fullness for which the human heart longs is always available.  But we cannot lay hold of it.  We cannot grasp it.  Fullness flows into us in the measure in which we become empty.  T.S. Eliot states:

In order to possess what you do not possess        
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not             
  You must go through the way in which you
                     are not.

Our web-pages speak of gratefulness, faithfulness, prayerfulness, and other aspects of life in fullness. But for fullness in all its forms, emptiness is the necessary condition.  With this in mind, I have collected here some key words and commented on them briefly.  Every month you will find new entries until the collection is complete.  The list is designed to aid your memory; but here and there it may go further and point beyond any fullness words can convey to an emptiness you can only savor in silence.

-- Your Brother David

The fact that you are not yet dead is not sufficient proof that you are alive.  It takes more than that.  It takes courage – above all, the courage to face death.  Only one who is alive can die.  Aliveness is measured by the ability to die.  In peak moments of aliveness we are reconciled with death.  Deep down within us something tells us that we would die the moment our life reached fulfillment.  It is fear of death that prevents us from coming fully alive.

For a long time now, our society seems to have had a blind spot regarding authority.  We blindly assume that human beings are by nature resistant against external authority.  The opposite is true.  The average person is excessively prone to yield to the pressure of external authority, even when it conflicts with the inner authority of one’s conscience.  Examples are the atrocities committed by ordinary citizens in dictatorships, or the widespread submission to peer pressure in every society.  Given this human weakness, the task of external authority is not to entrench and enforce itself, but rather to build up the inner authority responsible by constantly encouraging those subject to it to stand on their own two feet.  Putting words in print gives them an appearance of authority.  This book appeals to one authority only:  the reader’s own experience.  And since it deals with experiences of the heart, it appeals to the authority of the heart.  This appeal is a twofold one. It is a question and a challenge.  The question is:  Does this ring true to your heart’s experience?  The challenge is:  Wake up and allow your heart to experience the full range of reality.

All we know of being is becoming.  Being alive, being grateful, means becoming alive, becoming grateful.  Being human means becoming what we are.  If you stop becoming you cease to be what you were.  T.S. Eliot says:     

In order to arrive at what you are not             
You must go through the way in which you are.

The movement of life is the process of becoming.  Yet, in this process being and non-being, fullness and emptiness are inextricably one.  Remembering this may save us from speaking too glibly about fullness of life.

That we belong is a given fact.  This means that it is both fact and gift.  Belonging is the basic fact.  All other facts rest on belonging.  And it is the basic gift.  Every other gift celebrates, in its own way, belonging.  Belonging is mutual and all-inclusive.  Whatever there is belongs to whatever else there is.  Every longing somehow longs to realize belonging more fully and thus more fully to be.  Because belonging is a fact, we are at home in the world, wherever we may find ourselves.  And because belonging is a gift, gratefulness is the right response to life, whatever happens.

We know that communication broadens and deepens communion:  mutual understanding, a sense of community, common action.  What we tend to forget is that communication also presupposes communion.  We need at least the basics of a common language before we can begin to communicate.  There can be no communication across the gap of an absolute vacuum.  Fortunately, there is no such gap anywhere.  At heart, everything hangs together with everything.  All communication is rooted in this most basic communion.  This insight becomes relevant when we conceive of prayer as communication with God.  If there is a gap, God is on our side before we ever start to bridge it.  Or, as Thomas Merton put it, prayer does not consist in an effort to get across to God, but in opening our eyes to see that we are already there.

The root meaning of TEMP is measure or measuring.  The ending of the word contemplation indicates an ongoing process. And the prefix (con=cum=with) tells us that this is a process of measuring two things against each other, pairing them up, putting them together.  Thus, contemplation, rightly understood, puts together above and below, seeing and doing.  Contemplation translates vision into action, on earth as it is in heaven.  Action without vision would be confused action.  Vision without action would be barren vision.  Contemplative vision takes its measure from above.  Contemplative action puts order into the chaos below.  If we don’t want to lose our way, we must keep our eyes on the stars and our feet on the ground.  That means we must all be contemplatives.

Continue to D, E, and F definitions...

From Brother David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness (New York, Mahwah, New Jersey:  Paulist Press, 1984).