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At my local parish, a priest addressed a group of newly single adults who were struggling with the nauseating feeling of loss and grief that come with death or divorce. He cautioned us, "Be careful not to rush into new relationships just to fill the void in your lives. You have to learn to live with the emptiness .... Wait. Wait."
But the waiting can be hard. Unwanted aloneness can cause agony. One night, very late, I was sitting at my small kitchen table. Alone and wrapped in my old terry cloth bathrobe, I believed my whole life had shriveled up into an endless parade of days. Having discovered a painful and unpleasant truth about a man I'd recently been dating, I'd been feeling very sorry for myself. And I wanted that sorrowful emptiness filled up—at almost any cost ....
The next day when I went to the grocery store, a middle-aged woman collapsed of an apparent heart attack as she stood in the checkout line. Her gray-green face looked corpse-like as she lay against the cold, hard tile floor. The woman was not wearing a wedding ring and there was no emargency contact number among her things.
At that moment, anything seemed better that being that woman, alone and unconscious on a cold, hard floor. I hurried home. Within minutes of unloading my groceries, I called the man who recently had betrayed me and made plans for the evening. I did not want to spend another night alone in my kitchen.
I did not run out of that grocery store and rob a bank. Nor did I get drunk or use drugs. I didn't drive my car too fast or pick a fight with my mother. [I was not tempted] in those ways. Instead, I could not muster the courage to be alone and empty and afraid.
The desert of our weaknesses can be frightening, our emotional and spiritual emptiness starkly painful. We can choose to avoid this pain and fear, but the devil is in the avoidance. That was the wisdom of the priest who told us to "Wait. Wait." Many times my rushing to fill the vacuum has caused grief for me and others. Never once, however, have I been disappointed in waiting for the Lord. God is in the desert. God knows what I look like in my bathrobe, all alone late at night. And never once has God suggested that the sight is pathetic. Instead, in those empty hours, God says, "Talk to me. Then be still and know that I am God." [From "Brave Emptiness: The Geography of Demons," Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XVI, No. 3 (May/June 2001, (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2001), 34-35.]
Kramskoĭ, Ivan Nikolaevich, 1837-1887. Christ in the Desert, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library,
Prayer for Lent:O God, who makes all things new,
new stars, new dust, new life;
take my heart,
every hardened edge and measured beat,
and create something new in me.
I need your newness, God,
the rough parts of me made smooth;
the stagnant, stirred;
the stuck, freed;
the unkind, forgiven.
And then, by the power of your Spirit,
I need to be turned toward Love again. Amen.[From The Awkward Season: Prayers for Lent by Pamela C. Hawkins (Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 2009), 30.]
Wilderness
February 2015
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