smiling about the fullness
you can’t add to and the emptiness
that you can fill.
This beautiful poem suggests the dual rhythm of emptiness and plenitude at the heart of the life of the soul. Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch.
Death is not the end; it is a rebirth. Our presence in the world is so poignant. The little band of brightness that we call our life is poised between the darkness of two unknowns. There is the darkness of the unknown at our origin. We suddenly emerged from this unknown, and the band of brightness called life began. Then there is the darkness at the end when we disappear again back into the unknown. Samuel Beckett is a wonderful writer who has meditated deeply on the mystery of death. His little play Breath is only a few minutes long. First, there is the birth cry, then a little breathing, and finally, the sigh of death. This drama synopsizes what happens in our lives. All of Beckett’s works, especially Waiting for Godot, are about death. In other words, because death exists, time is radically relativized. All we do here is invent games to pass the time.
WAITING AND ABSENCE
A friend of mine was telling me a story about a neighbor. The children from the local school were going into town to see Waiting for Godot. This man took a ride on their bus. He intended to meet some of his drinking colleagues in town. He traveled in with the schoolchildren to the theater and went immediately to the two or three pubs where he thought his friends would be; but they were not there. Since he had no money, he ended up having to watch Waiting for Godot. He was describing the experience to my friend: “It was the strangest play I ever saw in my life; seemingly the fellow who was to play the main part never turned up, and the actors were forced to improvise all night.”
I thought that was a good analysis of Waiting for Godot. I think it was the kind of review with which Samuel Beckett himself would have been very pleased. In a certain sense, we are always waiting for the great moment of gathering or belonging, and it always evades us. We are haunted with a deep sense of absence. There is something missing from our lives. We always expect it to be filled by a definite person, object, or project. We are desperate to fill this emptiness, but the soul tells us, if we listen to it, that this absence can never be filled.
Death is the great wound in the universe and the great wound in each life. Yet, ironically, this is the very wound that can lead to new spiritual growth. Thinking of your death can help you to radically alter your fixed and habitual perception. Instead of living according to the merely visible material realm of life, you begin to refine your sensibility and become aware of the treasures that are hidden in the invisible side of your life. A person who is really spiritual has developed a sense of the depth of his or her own invisible nature. Your invisible nature holds qualities and treasures that time can never damage. They belong absolutely to you. You do not need to grasp them, earn them, or protect them. These treasures are yours; no one else can ever take them from you.
BIRTH AS DEATH
Imagine if you could talk to a baby in the womb and explain its unity with the mother. How this cord of belonging gives it life. If you could then tell the baby that this was about to end. It was going to be expelled from the womb, pushed through a very narrow passage finally to be dropped out into vacant, open light. The cord that held it to this mother-womb was going to be cut, and it was going to be on its own forever more. If the baby could talk back, it would fear that it was going to die. For the baby within the womb, being born would seem like death. Our difficulty with these great questions is that we are only able to see them from one side. In other words, we can only see death from one side. Many have had the experience, but nobody has come back to tell us about it. Those who have died stay away; they do not return. Therefore, we cannot actually see the other half of the circle that death opens. Wittgenstein summed it up very nicely when he said, “Death is not an experience in one’s life.” It cannot be an experience because it is the end of the life in which and through which all experience came to you.
I like to imagine that death is about rebirth. The soul is now free in a new world where there is no more separation or shadow or tears. A friend of mine lost a son who was twenty-six years of age. I was at the funeral. Her other children were all there as the coffin was lowered into the grave. A terrible wail of sadness rose up from the brothers and sisters. She put her arms around them and said, “Nà bigí ag caoineadh, níl tada dhó thios ansin ach amháin an clúdach a bhí air”—that is, “Let ye not be crying because there is nothing of him down there, only the covering that was on him in this life.” It is a lovely thought, a recognition that the body was merely covering and the soul is now freed for the eternal.
DEATH TRANSFIGURES OUR SEPARATION
In Connemara the graveyards are near the ocean, where there is a lot of sandy soil. To open the grave, the sod is cut on three sides. It is rolled back very carefully from the surface of the field, but it is not broken off. Then the coffin is put down. The prayers are said and the grave is blessed and filled. Then the sod is rolled out over the grave so that it fits exactly over the opening. A friend of mine calls it a “cesarean section in reverse.” It is as if the womb of the earth, without being broken, is receiving back the individual who once left as a clay shape to live in separation above in the world. It is an image of homecoming, of being taken back completely again.
It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “Being here is so much.” It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. The more lonely side of being here is our separation in the world. When you live in a body you are separate from every other object and person. Many of our attempts to pray, to love, and to create are secret attempts at transfiguring that separation in order to build bridges outward so that others can reach us and we can reach them. At death, this physical separation is broken. The soul is released from its particular and exclusive location in this body. The soul then comes in to a free and fluent universe of spiritual belonging.
ARE SPACE AND TIME DIFFERENT IN THE ETERNAL WORLD?
Space and time are the foundation of human identity and perception. We never have a perception that does not have each of these elements in it. The element of space means that we are always in a state of separation. I am here. You are there. Even the person that you are closest to, the one you love, is still a separate world from you. That is the poignancy of love. Two people become so close that they really want to become one; but their separate spaces keep the distance between them. In space, we are always separated. The other component of perception and identity is time. Time always separates us, too. Time is primarily linear, disjointed, and fragmented. All of your past days have disappeared; they have vanished. The future has not come to you yet. All you have is the little stepping-stone of the present moment.