Emptiness and Wordlessness, In a Good Way

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton says, “In order to know and love God as He is, we must have God dwelling in us in a new way… not only in His greatness but in His littleness, by which He empties Himself and comes down to be empty in our emptiness and so fill us in His fullness” (40).

One of the interesting things about mystics like Merton is that they push metaphors until they break down. All metaphors break down, of course, but most of us try to keep our metaphors in tact, to stop before they crumble. Mystics, though, they just plow through. They want to make sure you know that the words they’re using aren’t the reality they’re trying to communicate. “God’s bigger than the words,” they’re saying. “Stop getting hung up on them.” In The Cloud of Unknowing, the unknown author spends whole chapters discussing how when he says “up” towards God, he doesn’t really mean up, and when he says “in” towards ourselves, he doesn’t really mean in. Merton is more concise in his unraveling: God empties Himself to come to us in our emptiness and in His emptiness fills us.

“Fills us with what?” I ask the text. “You said He’s empty?”

“Exactly,” Merton says. “You’re getting it.”

I’m really not getting it.

“Empty” is repeated three times in this sentence, once as a verb (“empties”), then as an adjective (“empty”) and finally as a noun (“emptiness”). The verb and the adjective apply to God and only the noun applies to us. While for God emptiness may be a process or a descriptor, it isn’t what He is, the way the noun indicates it is for us. God may empty himself, but we have emptiness, we are emptiness. This emptiness is a lack of being, the state we are in when we’ve yet to discover God in ourselves (or allowed Him to find Himself there). Merton says “He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be” (33). Without God, we have not fully begun to be, and we are made of emptiness and lack.

It is interesting that in order to make us like Himself God comes to us by making Himself more like us. Because we are empty, God empties himself. There is a dilution, a making-less-of that happens as God works to be with us in our lack of being. I wonder, though, if Merton’s idea of God coming to us in “littleness” signals that it is not exactly that God empties Himself and makes Himself smaller for us, but rather that He offers us those parts of us that exist in Him in order to be with us. In His vastness, God knows what it is to be small; in His totality, He contains emptiness too.

I’m only beginning to get it.

If I find this deliberate breaking down of metaphor exasperating, it’s because I am a word person. I want the metaphors to hold. I know they’re made up, but it feels like I’m in a linguistic hammock hanging over nothing. I don’t want the mystics untying the rope. Every time I read “In the beginning was the word,” I think, exactly right, thank you, guy who called himself John. Words were there in beginning. God spoke the world into being. Merton says He speaks us into being too: “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself” (37).

I love words. They’re the thing that comes most easily to me. I doubt my parents ever said “Use your words,” but, if they did, my English degrees only partially cover the ways in which I’ve obeyed them. I’ve stacked words like bricks, planted them like flowers, I’ve left them there to rise, thrown them like punches, I’ve made them up like a bed, and then I laid down on them.

As much as anything, I’ve used my words to pray. When I was twenty-three, I started writing down my prayers, and now I have untold numbers of notebooks full of inked out prayers. These are my if-your-house-was-on-fire-what-would-you-grab items. They’re the way that I’ve come to know God and come to know myself in the last five years. No matter what I’ve felt, it’s shown up in these prayers. I’ve found words and I’ve rallied them, made them march in tight cursives sentences.

There is only one time I can think of one time when I reached for words in prayer and it didn’t work. I was alone in my apartment that day, and I laid down on the ground to look at the plastic stars my roommates and I had stuck to our ceiling. I felt so small and so empty, like all I was was the air inside of me, like every time I breathed out I was letting go of everything I was. I couldn’t find the words to describe to God what I was feeling, to ask Him to make it stop, so for a moment I just was with Him, without the words. All the wordlessness and emptiness flooded me. And then, right there, in that abyss of wordlessness, that nothingness that I’ve always been afraid of, God came. I felt Him be empty and hurt and wordless with me. I felt Him be little with me, felt Him fit Himself into my smallness.

All my metaphors broke down, all my words went away, and it turned out that’s what had been filling me, and in that emptiness there was new access to God.

Simone Weil, another one of my favorite mystics, says that “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void” (Grace and Gravity 10-11). I like this grace on grace. She says that when we find the grace she calls “supernatural” to keep open the space within us, God’s grace rushes to fill it.

There are a lot of empty spaces in my life right now. Not places where there aren’t words—I’m not that stripped down yet—but places I don’t have stories anymore. I find that getting married and graduating means I have to rewrite the story of who I am in ways that I didn’t expect. So many of my go-to narratives no longer fit.

My approach to this has been to try and tell the stories, to get other people to try and tell me there. You probably think I’m being metaphorical here, but I’m not. Once one of my roommates looked at me in the grocery aisle at Winco and said, “I think it’s weird that when you’re sad you tell stories.” I do. Right now I’m writing down stories of myself, trying to remember the important parts of me. I’m making Austin tell me stories of us, of who we are together and individually. Stories, like words, are the linguistic barrier that keeps me from plummeting.

But, I think, perhaps the thing to do is plummet a little. Perhaps instead of writing and searching for words, I should be reaching for the grace to hold the void, to lean into the emptiness. The thing is though, I still don’t really know how to do what I did that morning I gave myself and my words up. I’m still only starting to get it.