Essential Nothingness
“But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” Job 28:12 NASB
Where – The goal of growing is not to be finished. If you ever reached the finished line, there would be no reason to continue. Might as well be dead. Life is about the continuous project of change, of growth, of direction—not destination. And in order to participate in this continuous project, two things are necessary: desire and emptiness. Without desire there is no motivation to change. Without emptiness there is no space for change. So God created us bereft of desire and partially filled. It is incumbent upon those of us who wish to grow to find our desire and fill our emptiness.
What this means is that the absence of desire—of the deeply intense motivation to change our worlds according to our wishes—is not something granted to us at birth nor is it something fixed in the heavens. It is our desire that must be discovered; our personal intensity to alter existence as we wish. This is really the Jewish idea of the yetzer ha’ra; not some resident evil enemy but rather the hunger the causes transformation. Of course, it can’t be steered in many directions, only some of which align with the purposes of the Creator. But it is absolutely essential for life, for living, for being animated in this world.
“ . . . the essential project of growth is the discovery of desire, of what Sefath Emeth calls, ‘attraction,’ this must pervade the inner world at all times—the empty times as well as the ecstatic times.”[1] Desire demands direction. As Israel discovered, if God is not “in the midst,” then there is nothing worth pursuing. Or perhaps we should say, if God is not “in the midst,” then everything else beckons to be pursued, and the final result is that nothing is worth having. Without the Creator’s direction at heart, man is an oxymoron.
But direction, even spiritually attuned to the Creator’s purposes, is not enough. There must also be emptiness, the space for freedom, for discovery, for ecstasy. Life without emptiness becomes ritual, routine, regiment, filling in the necessary gaps so that we can keep that inner void at bay. The man who follows the rules but does not acknowledge his emptiness becomes an idol, a useless religious symbol absent of power. We know these people who look at us in mirrors while we run from the haunting images on the other side of the silvered glass. We know those who refuse to stay in the dark because they encounter something in themselves that is terrifying. We know the people who would rather be right than loved—because love loves empty space to express its care. As W. R. Bion noted: “Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available.”[2] And love needs a lot of space. “ . . . we are poor indeed if we are only sane.”[3]
Topical Index: growth, desire, emptiness, love, where, ayin, Job 28:12
[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 237.
[2] Ibid., p. 234, citing W. R. Bion, Cogitations.
[3] D. W. Winnicott, “Primitive Emotional Development,” in Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (Basic Books, 1958), p. 150.
