Fullness and Emptiness
- by Brother David Steindl-Rast

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It is through understanding that we find meaning.  In every meaningful situation there must be something that has meaning.  Word is the broadest sense.  There must also be Silence, the horizon of Word, the mysterious matrix from which Word emerges.  And there must be Understanding or else the meaning never arrives.  Word, Silence, and Understanding are the three dimensions of meaning as it were.  But what happens when we understand?  We give ourselves to the Word so wholeheartedly that it can take hold of us.  When the Word takes us home into the Silence from where it has come, we understand.  But going along with the Word is something that requires effort.  It means doing what the Word sends us to do.  When we listen so deeply that we hear where the Word sends us and fulfill that mission, we understand.  Anything else is not understanding, but at best an attempt to overstand.  It is not possible to understand swimming unless we get wet.  If we want to understand life, we must live.

Quite unawares, one can get trapped in a world in which only the useful counts.  The life expectancy of people who make usefulness their highest value drops abruptly after retirement.  Common sense tells us that aliveness in not measured in degrees of usefulness but of enjoyment.  Yet public opinion tries to persuade us that we do not need what is of no use.  The contrary is true.  What we need most urgently is not what we can use, but what we can enjoy.  This distinction is crucial.  Our deepest need is not use but enjoyment.  The most enjoyable things in life are superfluous – music, for instance, or mountain climbing, or a kiss.  “Superfluity,” as the word suggests, is an abounding overflow after the vessel of mere utility has been filled to the brim (like the stone vessels at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee – John 2:8).  In the word “affluence” the same idea of flowing is present, but only influx is what counts.  In a utilitarian society there is only usefulness and more usefulness without the sparkling overflow that keeps it from getting stagnant.  Enjoyment is not measured by what flows in, but by what flows over.  The smaller we make the vessel of our need for use, the sooner we get the overflow we need for delight.  This was well understood by the beggar who said, “Two coppers I had; for one I bought me a bun, for one daffodils.”

If it were not for vacations, our schools would hardly deserve to be called schools.  Traced back to its Greek origin, the term “school” means a place of leisure.  Nowadays, this sounds like a joke.  But the joke is on us.  Originally, schools were conceived as places where people had leisure enough to find themselves.  In our time, many young people need to take a year off from the rat-race of school in order to find themselves.  Schools are now geared toward purpose rather than meaning, toward know-how rather than wisdom.  What enriched your own life more, the useful things you did at school or the enjoyable things you did on vacation?  For most of us, vacation means fullness of life.  Yet the word is relegated to vacuum and vacancy.  Here, too, fullness and emptiness are closely related.  “Be still and see that I am God!” (Ps 46:10).  In the emptiness of silence you will find My fullness.  Instead of “Be still,” St. Jerome translates, “Make a vacation!”

In the earliest days, men and women who believed in Jesus Christ were simply known as followers of the Way (Acts 9:2).  Only later were they labeled Christians (Acts 11:26).  To escape being paralyzed by labels, one must continually trust the dynamic experience of being on the way.  When Jesus says, “I am the Way” (John 14:6) we would limit his claim pitifully by thinking of one way among a thousand others.  This cannot be the meaning of his word.  Rather, whosoever is “on the way” to God is on the way of Jesus whose name means “God saves.”  And whoever follows the deepest longing of the human heart is “on the way.”  It matters little what label we give to that way.  Holding on to the sign post does not mean “being on the way,” even if that street sign bears the right label.  What matters is walking.  All those who move forward are on the way.  But this means finding one’s way by leaving the way behind with every step forward.

G.K. Chesterton reminds us in one of his puns that wonders will never be lacking in this world of ours; what is lacking is wonderment.  We need not look beyond natural laws for wonders.  Natural laws themselves are wonderful enough and worth wondering.  Piet Hein writes:

We glibly talk of nature’s laws
But do things have a natural cause?
Black earth becoming yellow crocus
Is undiluted hocus-pocus.

If you can’t wonder at what is natural, what would it take to make you wonder?  As long as you are full of yourself, you are incapable of wonderment, and life seems empty.  But in wonderment you lose yourself.  “Lost, all lost in wonder,” you are emptied of your little self, and suddenly you realize how wonderful everything is, how full of wonder, how full.

When we find something meaningful, we say it “speaks” to us; it has a message.  In this sense, any thing, person, or situation can be understood as word.  Karl Rahner, who has taught me by his writings, thinks of word as a sign that embodies its meaning.  Raimundo Panikkar, who has taught me not only by his writings but by his friendship, explores in his own way how word, silence, and understanding are related.  What most determines my use of “word” here is the basic biblical truth that “God speaks.”  If God speaks, the whole universe and everything in it is word.  This is the biblical way of saying that everything makes sense the moment we listen with the heart.  We will find this to be true if we have the courage to listen.  That courage is called faith.  The listening is called obedience.  That term comes from the Latin ob-audiens and means thoroughly listening.  Its opposite is ab-surdus, which means thoroughly deaf.  We can escape from absurdity by learning to listen to the word in everything we encounter.

Human activity is of two kinds: work and play.  We work in order to achieve some useful purpose.  But we play for mere enjoyment.  Play is meaningful in itself.  We can become so purpose-ridden in our work that even after work we can no longer play; we can at best give ourselves another work out.  Usefulness is crowding out enjoyment.  What a waste of time!  But we can rescue work from becoming mere drudgery.  We can learn to work playfully.  That means doing our work not only for its useful results, but also for the enjoyment we can find in it all along when we do it mindfully, gratefully.  Grateful work is playful work, leisurely work.  Only leisurely work is, in the long run, efficient.  Only when we work playfully are we fully alive.

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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).