Lent is to Easter what Advent is to Christmas: the tomb of death becomes the womb of life just as the darkness holds the unseen light. During Advent we hear from Isaiah (and it is echoed in Matthew) “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them a light has shined.” In the dominant culture that often is unwilling to acknowledge the pernicious darkness that it helps create and perpetuate, and inexperienced in entering into the darkness that all true transformation requires, the result often is to bathe in a fabricated light that has no real radiance, no real power but instead slowly slides across the stage of the pageant that is our life like a costumed child, white face encircled with triangular tin-foiled rays. Is it any wonder that so much today that goes by the name religion or, closer to home for some of us, Christian spirituality, is so darn cute?

You have heard me say that before God comes into the world as light, God first comes into the darkness darkly. Perhaps this is a projection rooted in my own deep yearning during times of darkness. But it seems to me that the life-giving voltage and effulgence of the incarnation of God’s love that is cradled in a trough and crossed-out on a tree resides in the willing darkening of God. How can God be “mercy within mercy within mercy,” as Merton suggests, let alone revealed as a bright light, unless and until this God is concealed with us and all creation as dark love, as the dark salve of solidarity, as the sustaining unseen presence of compassion disguised as absence?

In previous posts I have described the spiritual practices of Lent as the movement of creating a vacancy.1 During the Advents of our life we run the temptation of foolishly settling for artificial light and too quickly fool ourselves into believing that we have moved out of the darkness before we fully understand the nature of the dark. Perhaps during this Lenten season of self-emptying and spiritual renewal we run the risk of too quickly and rotely filling up the vacancy like a three letter answer in a crossword puzzle: first letter G, last letter D. Maybe the vacancy we intentionally create is capable of revealing a vacuity of another sort. Maybe the emptiness is there as a place for us to sit and be still. Maybe the invitation is not so much to conceive of God as the puzzle piece who alone can fit, fill in, or fulfill that emptiness –“solved that one, case closed, wipe hands proudly, next”– but that it is God who evokes the spaciousness for our yearning. Even more, maybe it is God who is the yearning and the spaciousness where the yearning yearns not only within us but within all creation. Maybe the spaciousness within is also the spaciousness without enfolding us as the space in which we and the earth community live and move and have our being like a child tethered to life in the womb of Love.

Perhaps the emptiness is a space of grace and not merely an infinite abyss or a hole in the soul that is shaped like God and meant to be filled up, spackled, sanded smooth, and hidden by God. Maybe the space is sacred because it is not filled and can’t be filled, not here, not now. Maybe, for the brave-hearted and poor of spirit, this emptiness, this placeless place within each of us, is the opportunity to fill it with neither our idea of God nor our own compulsive substitutes for God and instead see it as the womb of the Divine from which all real life comes forth. Maybe we can understand it as a sanctuary in which the Spirit can move, kick, swim, dwell. Maybe it is hallowed even in its apparent hollowness because it is a space consecrated for the vivifying movement and precarious love of God.

Perhaps this sacred space is a grotto where God can pray within us, a prayer that is being prayed within us but is not ours, for even, if not especially, in our prayer, we so often insist on being in control. But prayer is not our own private Idaho, any more than is God or our lives, and the emptiness has the capacity to convey and convince us of that. Maybe the emptiness is our body-being’s prayer space where, when words are no longer adequate, the Spirit can pray “with sighs too deep for words.” Maybe the emptiness is a reminder that we are tabernacles in which the real presence resides. Maybe we are called to mindfully carry this presence with us wherever we go and to whomever we meet. Maybe the emptiness is the space where we feel the pangs of God eastering in us.

Perhaps if the darkness can be not only a place to hold the light but also a space for the dark presence of God, maybe the emptiness can serve as more than a void to be filled up and sealed tight by a static God of our own making and instead be hallowed as a Sabbath space within us that is intended for Divinity to move, breathe, dance, heal, re-create, and pray us more fully into life.♦

~ Dan

1 I came upon this idea of consciously creating a vacancy from Gertrud Mueller Nelson in her wonderful book To Dance with God.