Fullness and Emptiness
- by Brother David Steindl-Rast

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In death, two events happen at once:  being killed and dying.  Nothing is more passive than being killed, even if it’s merely old age that kills one.  But nothing is more active than dying.  The verb “dying” does not even have a passive voice.  I can say “I’m being killed,” but I can’t say “I’m being died.”  Being dyed would make me colorful, not dead.  Dying is something I must do.  It can’t happen unless I give myself willingly to change.  I die to what I was and come alive to what I will be.  Every moment is, in this sense, a dying into life.  Being afraid of death would mean being afraid of life.  Learning to die means learning to live.

To speak of divine life as something we know from experience may seem presumptuous.  But it would be even more presumptuous to speak about it without knowing it.  We either know something by experience, or we do not really know it.  There are moments when, altogether gratuitously, we get an inkling of the ground of our being.  We realize that we are both at home there and on the way there.  Some are bold enough to call this starting point and goal of our heart’s journey “God.”  Nothing else deserves this name.  We can call the two poles of this experience God’s immanence (closer to me than I am to myself) and God’s transcendence (beyond the beyond).  If God were merely transcendent, it would indeed be presumptuous to claim any knowledge of God.  But a transcendence worthy of God must be so transcendent that it transcends our logical limits of transcendence and is, therefore, perfectly compatible with God’s immanence.  Would it not be presumptuous to deny this?  The fact that I am not simply God needs little proof.  And yet, according to Piet Hein,

Who am I             
to deny              
That, maybe             
God is me?

A good many people are afraid of their emotions, especially in their life of prayer.  Emotionalism is indeed a danger, but hardly ever for those who recognize it as a danger.  If you are one of those, you may, in fact, need encouragement to give free rein to your feelings.  Most of us are apt to repress our emotions.  Our upbringing, our social customs, even our teachings on prayer, lead us to distrust our emotions or at least to hide them.  That is why people whose emotions flow freely strike us as over-emotional.  Emotionalism in prayer is an imbalance that results not from too much feeling, but from too little else.  The balance is not redressed by curtailing the emotions, but rather by adding to them our intellectual and moral energy.  All we have must go into our prayer.  (Note that this includes tact and good taste, two ingredients that will go a long way in keeping the expression of our emotions from disturbing others.)

To have faith does not primarily mean believing something, but rather believing in someone.  Faith is trust.  It takes courage to trust.  The opposite of faith is not disbelief, but distrust, fear.  Fear makes us cling to anything within reach.  Fear clings even to beliefs.  Thus, beliefs can even get in the way of faith.  In genuine faith we hold our beliefs firmly, but lightly.  We trust in God, not in our particular understanding of God.  That is why people of deep faith are one at heart, even though their beliefs may differ widely.  When beliefs become more important than faith, even small differences created insurmountable barriers.  When we grow in gratefulness, we grow in faith.  Gratefulness implies trust in the giver.  A grateful person says “Thank you!” and only afterward checks what’s inside the gift-wrapping.  Faith is the courage to respond gratefully to every given situation, out of trust in the Giver.

Whenever things go wrong in society, in a person’s psyche, or in one’s spiritual life, we may be sure that fear in one form or another lies at the root of the trouble.  Most of us are fear-ridden people.  All of us live in a fear-ridden society.  But nothing is gained by this discovery if in addition to all our other fears we now begin to fear fear.  Why not rather look at fear as the necessary condition for courage?  Piet Hein writes:    

To be brave is to behave
Bravely when your heart is faint.             
So you can be really brave             
Only when you really ain’t.

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