Fullness and Emptiness
- by Brother David Steindl-Rast

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Whatever we encounter is either thing or nothing.  In his poem “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens distinguishes between “the nothing that isn’t there and the nothing that is.”  Meaning is “the nothing that is.”  Meaning is no thing.  And yet the nothing that is meaning is far more important to us humans than all things taken together.

Observing the way an anemone opens to the morning light, Rilke asks:  "And we, when are we ever fully open to receive?"  Openness in this sense stands for a basic attitude towards life, for a readiness to receive life in fullness.  But is openness in itself fullness or emptiness?  Think, for example, of hope’s openness for surprise.  Hope is fully open only when it is drained empty of all hopes.  Even the shape of the letter O, the initial of openness, is ambiguous:  The empty circle is the symbol of fullness.  The interplay between fullness and emptiness pivots on openness.

Until we recognize the pre-eminent role that opportunity plays in the scheme of things, our notion of gratefulness must remain deficient.  Whatever exists within this given world is gift.  But the gift within every gift is opportunity.  Most of the time, this means opportunity to enjoy.  Sometimes it means opportunity to labor, to suffer, even to die.  Unless we wake up to the countless opportunities to enjoy life, how can we expect to be awake when the opportunity comes to serve life?  Those who realize that the gift within every gift is opportunity will not think of gratitude as passive.  Gratefulness is the gallantry of a heart ready to rise to the opportunity a given moment offers.

Nicholas of Cusa expressed what the human heart had always surmised:  All opposites coincide in God.  This insight has weighty implications for any attempt to speak about divine realities.  The closer we come to saying something worthwhile, the more likely that paradox will be the only way to express it.  “When am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).  “In losing one’s life one will find it” (Matthew 10:39).  “In spite of that, we call this Friday good” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets).

Abraham Maslow, who put the Peak Experience on the map of psychology, insisted that it could in no way be distinguished from mystic experience as described by the mystics.  And yet, most (if not all) of us have Peak Experiences, moments in which we are overwhelmed by a sense of belonging, of universal wholeness and holiness, moments in which everything makes sense.  Acceptance is a word often used in describing Peak Experiences.  Fro a moment that seems outside time, we feel fully accepted and can fully accept all that is.  Gratefulness pervades every aspect of these peaks.  The religiousness at the core of a person’s religion is fueled by those moments of overwhelming gratefulness.  One’s religion is seen as valid in the light of those experiences of heightened awareness.  It is measured by standards glimpsed from those peaks of grateful acceptance.  That is why we can call gratefulness the root of religion.

We must distinguish prayer from prayers.  Saying prayers is one activity among others.  But prayer is an attitude of the heart that can transform every activity.  We cannot say prayers at all times, but we ought to “pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17).  That means we ought to keep our heart open for the meaning of life.  Gratefulness does this, moment by moment.  Gratefulness is, therefore, prayerfulness.  Moments in which we drink deeply from the source of meaning are moments of prayer, whether we call them so or not.  There is no human heart hat does not pray, at least in deep dreams that nourish life with meaning.  What matters is prayer, not prayers.  But prayers are the poetry of prayerful living.  Just as poetry gives expression to one’s aliveness and makes one more alive, so prayers give expression to one’s prayerfulness and make one more prayerful.

To prevent questions from weighing us down we must raise them.  The longer we wait, the heavier they get, like a thatched roof in the rain.  People who are afraid of raising questions run the risk of getting crushed under them.  When we raise a question all the way, we find that the answer to every “Why?” is “Yes!”  This sets us free.  But even the raising of questions to lesser degrees is freeing.  Questions can free us, e.g., from misconceptions, above all from the misconception that we can know anything unquestioningly.  For this reason, we have made an effort in these pages to question basic terms for what they really mean – terms like communication, belonging, or meaning.  Basic terms are the foundation on which logical reason rests.  When the foundations are slightly off, the superstructure may suddenly topple over. Keen questioning is no luxury.

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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).