We are born rich in space and time, but the pressure is soon on to fill all the space and use all the time. So we fill the holes with learning and experience, relationships and accomplishments, with knowing, doing and having, and gradually these become our identity. We try to establish our worth through our fullness. Plugging all the gaps becomes an obsession.
But one day we realize that the emptiness we are so afraid of could be our best friend; that the inner space we have tried so unsuccessfully to fill is in fact the spiritual dimension in which we discover a relationship with God. There, at the centre of our being, we also find our true self. In acknowledging and cherishing inner space, we realize a wealth of meaning and peace and oneness we had not dreamed possible.
A recent turning-point for me was to discover that I needed to practise aloneness with God. So much of my sense of identity had come through filling my space with other people; even my relationship with God came more through others than directly. A thought, an inspiration, a heart-wrenching vista of nature had no meaning for me until it had been bounced off someone else. Now as I practise the presence of God over the washing-up, while driving or in a space created especially, I am beginning to find a personal sense of meaning in a relationship with him alone. It certainly does not mean that I no longer need other people, but it means I no longer have to look for my self-worth in them. This leaves them free.
There was a magnificent sunset the other evening and the old gum tree in the garden was aglow with the pink of it. As I noted it and turned away, for there was no one to share it with, I felt God saying to me, 'Stand still and don't move. Feast your eyes on it because I have painted it for you alone.' I was deeply moved.
My fear had not been of God, my fear was of emptiness, of nothingness and holes. Now there is a new marvel: the limitless possibilities of a divinely-encompassed space as against the self-defined limitations of a full-up life. We can rejoice in and affirm our own and one another's holey-ness.
And then there is wholeness - a strange consequence of accepting our holes. Being a whole, together, centred sort of person - what a dream! Much of my life has been fragmented, spent in rejection of those parts of me I don't like, rejection of my shadow. The closer you are to the light, the blacker and more clearly defined your shadow - but the normal illogical human response is the contrary. When I feel at my blackest I assume God to be at his furthest.
It is not a matter of condoning or condemning, but of recognizing, accepting and gratefully learning from all those areas in me that do not exactly reflect the glory of the Lord - and entrusting them into God's hands. They have a valuable part to play and I am not whole without them. So often the thing we most hate or scorn turns out to be the best instrument for revealing to us the deepest truths about ourselves.
'Hating the sin but loving the sinner' needs to apply as much to my relationship with myself as to anyone else. I then seek inner change because I want to be the best that I can be for Christ's sake, rather than because I feel foul and worthless as I am.
And then there is the wider wholeness, where one's faith life and work life and family life, the public and private, are one, complementing and feeding one another. This brings hope for a fragmented world as well.
Holiness - 'without which no one can see God' - is something we can all aim at and never reach, at least not in this present state. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of it in another person, though it is apparently impossible to see in ourselves. Holiness starts when the hole within us is nurtured as a vacancy for intimacy with God.
There is not much that is considered holy today. There is perpetual, widespread desecration. Yet still something inside each one of us desires the sacred, and it is that thing inside each one of us which is the sacred.
There, in the depths of the inner mystery that is me or you, lies our connection with all the story and search of humankind from the beginning of time to the end; our connection with all of creation, cosmos and earth, that bears us, feeds us, clothes us and accommodates us; our connection with our own individual meaning in relationship with God, who dreamed us and who woos us from before the day we are born; our connection with all that is truly and for ever holy.
