Fullness and Emptiness
- by Brother David Steindl-Rast

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The various religions are so many ways of being religious.  It is this underlying religiousness we have in mind when we speak of religion as distinct from the religions.  We would need an action word, a verb, to express what religion is all about.  But, while we have “religion, religious, and religiously,” we cannot say that someone is “religioning.”  Praying is the verb that goes with religion.  Praying (in the widest sense) is what keeps religious experience from drying up into nothing but religious structures.  Experience is the starting point of religion.  Inevitably, intellect, will, and emotions grapple, each in its own way, with the experience of ultimate belonging.  The intellect interprets the experience, and so we get religious doctrine.  The will acknowledges the implications, and that accounts for the ethical side of religion.  The emotions celebrate the experience by means of ritual.  But a religion is not automatically religious.  Those three main areas of every religion are always prone to shrivel up into dogmatism, legalism, and ritualism unless they are continually rerooted in live experience.  This process is prayer.  Prayer puts religion into the religions.

There is a negative meaning to silence and a positive one.  Negatively, silence means the absence of sound or word.  In these pages we focus on its positive meaning.  Silence is the matrix from which word is born, the home to which word returns through understanding.  Word (in contrast to chatter) does not break the silence.  In a genuine word, silence comes to word.  In genuine understanding, word comes home into silence.  For those who know only the world of words, silence is mere emptiness.  But our silent heart knows the paradox:  The emptiness of silence is inexhaustibly rich; all the words in the world are merely a trickle of its fullness.

In our day and age, the word “sin” is so prone to be misunderstood that it has become quite useless.  The reality once called sin is still with us, however, and so our time had to find its own term for it.  What other ages called sin, we call alienation.  Living language hit upon an apt word here.  Alienation suggests an uprootedness from one’s true self, from others, from God (or whatever else ultimately matters), and all this with one word.  The word “sin,” too, suggests uprooting and separation.  It is related to the word “asunder.”  Sin tears asunder the wholeness in which all belongs together.  Sin alienates.  An action is sinful to the degree to which it causes alienation.  Without alienation there is no sin.  Drawing the consequences could prove liberating for many, indicting for others.  It could mean a significant shift of emphasis in ethics from a pre-occupation with private perfection to social responsibility.  It could help us to see that in our time “working out our salvation” means overcoming alienation in all its forms.  The contemporary term for salvation is belonging.  The path from alienation to belonging is the path from sin to salvation.

For Plato, philosophy was a loving dedication to wisdom.  Hence, surprise and the ability to be surprised were for him the beginning of philosophy.  It is through the capacity for surprise that wisdom surpasses cleverness.  Cleverness is prepared and will not be surprised by the unexpected.  But wisdom, as Piet Hein sees it, is prepared to be surprised even by the expected.

Half a truth is often aired
And often proved correct:
It’s sensible to be prepared
For what you don’t expect.

The other half is minimized
Or totally neglected:
It’s wiser still to be surprised
By what you most expected.

To recognize that everything is surprising is the first step toward recognizing that everything is gift.  The wisdom that begins with surprise is the wisdom of a grateful heart.

On a superficial level, the giving of thanks is merely a social convention.  Its forms vary greatly.  In some societies the absence of all verbal expressions of thanks indicates not a lack of gratitude, but rather a deeper awareness of mutual belonging than our society has.  To the people in question, an expression like “thank you” would seem as inappropriate as tipping family members would seem to us.  The more we lose the sense of all of us belonging to one big family, the more we must explicitly express that belonging when it is actualized in some give-and-take.  To give thanks means to give expression to mutual belonging.  Genuine thanksgiving comes from the heart where we are rooted in universal belonging.

Wholehearted thanksgiving engages the whole person.  The intellect recognizes a gift as gift.  Thanksgiving presupposes thinking.  The will, in its turn, acknowledges the interdependence of the giver and thanksgiver.  And the emotions celebrate the joy of that mutual belonging.  Only when intellect, will, and emotions join together does thanksgiving become genuine, that is, wholehearted.

What our heart longs for is truth, but what we can express are merely truths.  Truth is one.  But its countless aspects can be expressed in conflicting truths.  Their limitations bring them into conflict.  All we can grasp of the truth is limited truths.  But grasping is not the only attitude we can adopt toward truth.  Instead of grasping for truths, we can allow the truth to grasp us.  It is one thing to take a bucket full of water out of the ocean.  To swim in the ocean is quite a different thing.  The truths we can grasp are necessarily limited as our grasp is limited.  But the truth to which we give ourselves is limitless and one.  The truths tend to divide us, but the truth that upholds us unites.

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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).