A fast during Lent encourages us to search for what we might release, and to look for something we hope to receive. Letting go makes room for what can come if we are open and have made space. Often what we receive is unexpected. Our hope can be superseded by what is given, though time may be required to recognize it.
We are not in charge of what happens. We may find that despite planning to release one thing, we discover something else has gone, and maybe that is what we needed to let go of. Typically, at the center of all our specific releasing, is the truth that we are no longer in control! That is the common thread linking our specific fasts.
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To let be what is, and rest in the belief that apart from all my effort, the river of God will carry me, is neither despairing resignation nor abdication of responsibility. Instead, this is active emptiness. For all who are addicted to their own agency, letting go is the hardest of all, though it is truly the path for inner healing.
If we deliberately loosen our grip and intentionally resist asserting or attempting control, we have not settled for a future we cannot ultimately shape, we have chosen it. We are active in our inactivity, rich in our poverty, and enlightened in accepting our own perceptual darkness.
We have to be far more deliberate to be empty than to be filled. Avoiding all the noise, fire and fury, and clutter of a world that offers too much and gives little to satisfy, is needful but difficult. The current existential vacancy of chronic loneliness, the lack of meaning or purpose that seems to be plaguing so many people, and absence of values or virtues in a world awash in pragmatic reasoning, is not the same as the emptiness through which one resolves to be open toward the transcendent. This latter emptiness will nourish us.
In human history, have people ever had so much and so little at the same time? The more the possessions, opportunities, perspectives, and information, creating for each of us a bewildering multiverse of possibilities, the more we feel adrift within. Do you sense it? Do you see it in the despairing eyes of people trying to find or make meaning, while being caught in a whirlwind of chaos and unable to establish order for their lives?
Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the empty, for they will have in abundance. Personal, inner emptiness, a fast from the chaos, can fill us with a simple, quiet peace.
The complexity of our world, the attending worries and uncertainties we have as we see the potential for both harm and good, leave us bewildered and anxious. What can a person do?
If I choose to be actively empty, can I trust that I will be filled by peace and joy, that the universe is somehow longing to fill me with what technology, human advancements, and material possessions cannot give? Do our ancestors, long dead, know what we have lost with all our “progress”?
The answer is not to reject nor flee from what is our time, but to inhabit it differently, choosing an active emptiness which cannot be owned, possessed, controlled, or enslaved by our world. Emptiness is inherently simple, the opposite of the overwhelming complexity which bombards us constantly. Keep up, don’t fall behind, buy more!
Life, which is from God, will teach us what we need to know and give us what we need to grow, when we are open to receiving it. Once our activity is directed toward listening, slowing down, looking within, making space, and emptying ourselves of ourselves, we are practicing the type of “descent” of which Jesus spoke when he said, if you lose your life, you will find it.