On Emptiness.

A blessing for all who long.

Dear fellow pilgrim,

Today we had to dig ourselves out of six inches of fresh fallen snow. While my husband was shoveling my daughter and I waded through knee-deep snow towards the bus stop. “Will the bus come, mummy,” she purred excited, “or will we build a snowman instead?”

The school bus came and off she went to kindergarten. I waded through the snow around the block taking in the winter wonder land of our neighborhood, the quiet blanket of white which covered the old season like a tender blanket.

The last days I had felt so empty, so without words, so in need for a tender blanket myself. I first blamed hormones. Then my husband. Then the world. Until the snow came to my rescue.

Covering the world like an unwritten tablet, the millions of tiny snow stars cracked my heart open.

Isn’t it emptiness we need most this season - this wintering, this waiting, this Advent?

Isn’t it emptiness the experience the mystics aim for? And isn’t it an empty heart we need in order to receive the Divine gift?

And though I often mistake the feeling of empty as melancholy first it all of a sudden made sense to me: Isn’t it emptiness I need in order to guide us through the 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations? The empty longing that the Divine has for us, and our faint echo of it?

And so with this empty heart cracked open I offer you, dear reader, two things: my invitation to join us on this journey towards the Divine light, and this humble midweek blessing, embracing emptiness:

Embracing Emptiness.

Karwendel, 2nd highest mountaintop of the German Alps, opening up in-front of my lens.

It was a sunny winter day during our last Sabbatical in Munich when a cable car tossed us out on the hill top, the second highest of the German Alps. Our eyes were blinded by all the white of the snow welcoming us to the roof of the world.

Taking in the breath-taking scenery I was reminded of the essence of all wintering: To embrace the empty spaces, the tuned-down colors, the slowed-down pace, the sacred spaces inside, and outside, guiding our view to what truly matters.

So today, our midweek blessing is an invitation to practice the “art of sacred pausing.”¹

To pause a bit within that sacred emptiness.

You can do so by using the above photo for a Visio Divina, a sacred reading practice of an image.

• So just look at the image until it slows down your breath and your thoughts about other things. Things which need to get done or thoughts of worry.

• Cover the inner noise just as the snow blanket covers the vibrant life ready to sprout into bloom again next summer.

• Stay with the image and just look. Look with your inner eye. Listen with your inner ear.

• Let your outside gaze bring you slowly inside yourself, where wide and empty inner fields and mountain slopes lie. The places of openness and not knowing, the places of dormancy and retreat.

• Look at them like you might on a winter walk. Let them lift your view to the horizon, slow your breathing, and quiet the chatter.

And may be, suddenly the white space will begin to reveal its secret to you. You will see what you have not seen before. Maybe a bench to sit down and rest. Maybe a piece of sky to relax into. Perhaps a silhouette shaping into a meaningful form…

What do you see?

And

may the depths of winter

with their vastness

and emptiness

embrace you kindly,

cradle what lies

dormant in you,

until the days of

greening.

With great love, Almut

About Almut

Almut Furchert, Dr. phil., Dipl. Psych. is a German American scholar and practitioner, a psychologist turned philosopher turned writer, traveler, photographer, retreat leader and mother of a kindergartener. She has taught and published on authors like Kierkegaard, Buber, Frankl, Yalom, Edith Stein, and Hildegard of Bingen. Almut is also a Benedictine Oblate and lives with her family in a little college town in MN.

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1. as Tara Brach had it in her profound interview with

Kirsten Powers

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