The Nothing that's become Something

a thing i talked about at the open & relational theology conference where i weave grief, girard, art, boothby, and star wars into something potentially hopeful

The following was what I read at ORTCON (Open and Relational Theology Conference) in the Tetons a few weeks ago. Maybe I’ll clean it up and publish it somewhere sometime, but for now, here you go. :)

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It was June, 2015 and my little family of four — partner and I, 18, and 13-year-old — were in Colorado. It was a trip I’ll never forget. Not just for the mountains. We had been in them many times. Not just for the family spending time; thankfully that had happened a lot.

No, it was a trip I’ll never forget because it was the first time away without our daughter and as much as I enjoyed the four of us, it didn’t feel right, and it didn’t feel right because it wasn’t right. I kept thinking about us as a unit … we were missing something … we were different … we were 4/5s. This is how I wrote about it in indigo: the color of grief

4/5s
became
the reality
in the span of a heartbeat

her heart stopped beating
in a span of a heartbeat
and we were 4/5s
a fraction

a fraction
doesn’t work
like a whole
something
someone
is missing

it’s more than
just someone missing
it’s also the role
the someone played

her role in our family
was something like
a catalyst or
initiator

we didn’t assign the role
it’s just who she was
from day one
more wind
than weathervane
more thermostat
than thermometer

like, if the boys
were mired in a mood
she could pull them out
but flip the script
and boys had
little chance

she was her own
strong
intentional
capable
person

remember being with
extended family once
when great grandmother fainted
and passed out for a moment

she recovered quickly
but for a few minutes
we were unsure of
how it would turn out

several of the
pre-teenaged cousins
ran to the basement
upset about the event

but even more upset about
our girl not showing
enough emotion regarding possibility
that great grandmother might
no longer be alive

their concerns escalated
in volume and intensity
until finally
our girl stood up
with fists pointed to the ground
and announced
to the whole group

look
i’ll cry
once we find out grandma
is actually dead

the room calmed
apparently
the cousins thought 
the logic was sound

yeah, she could
change the environment
when she wanted

remember the first real trip 
we made as a fraction
“family” vacation 
playing board games
so awkward

at some point during the evening
i sat back and watched
the four of us 
doing our best
learning how to interact 
without her 
less neurochemicals 
less laughter
less volume too

an image 
materialized 
in my mind’s eye
something revealing 
neurological activity
within a group of people

yeah, some kind of
visual spectrometer kind of thing
displaying the interaction
bouncing around  
within a family of five doing life 
you know, interacting
playing
arguing
talking
singing
taking trips together

with her: a range of colors 
burst across the display
without her: areas 
noticeably muted

more than that
there were specific areas of 
the visual projection
the thing displaying 
the interaction
bouncing around  
within a family of five doing life

you know, interacting
playing
arguing
talking
singing
taking trips together
that were completely dark

that night 
after the board games
after the visual spectrometer kind of thing 
yeah, that night
was the worst 

couldn’t relax
couldn’t sleep
rotating ceiling fan
slowly
shadow of cloud and moon

i’d get up and go somewhere 
but there was no place to go 
to get away from my thoughts
to get away from me
to get away 

kept thinking about 
the way she could light 
brothers up

kept thinking about
their neurological activity 
changed forever 
marriage changed forever
me changed 
forever

kept seeing dark spots on 
that stupid visual display
fuckin interactive visual spectrometer-thing
kept apologizing to whoever was listening 
for saying fuck 

just kept thinking about 
how much fun it all 
used to be
before the day
everything 
changed

---

It was the sense of the missing … like, the nothing that was there that captured my attention … she was there … but then she was gone, and that nothingness kept us from being who we were.  

Grief can be considered in many ways; indeed, in indigo, I seek to do just that, but one way it might be thought of is as a gap, a breach, a hole… it’s where the loved one once was. Tthe thing is your love still exists … but the person who used to receive and return the love is no longer present … it’s an empty space … love’s still there, it’s just got nowhere to go. 

I wrote somewhere recently that grief is an ache that winds up going everywhere, generally because it’s a love that winds up going nowhere, specifically.

Grief is a no-where, a hole, a void where all my love continues to rush out of. In philosophical language, maybe we could use the word, lack. So, yes, I became intensely aware of the lack, intensely connected to it’s darkness and emptiness. In some ways, it was the very last connection I had with my daughter. What a strange phenomenon … that love for my daughter included this hole of emptiness that has. just. never. Left.

This thought, as much as anything, catalyzed my need to write indigo: the color of grief. How weird is that? When someone asks me, “What inspired you to write the book?” I can honestly say, “Nothing.” 

Here are the opening pages of the book …

absence
is protagonist now

it’s weird
absence is nothing
a no-thing
but it’s very much something
a some-thing

it has no form but
it forms me
it has no energy but
but it energizes me
i’m full of its emptiness

only now occurs to me
(ninety-nine months beyond
daughter of lightning
flash of car wreck)
that all these words
might be an attempt to
absorb the shock
control the effect
fill the emptiness

as if the thing-ness of words
can fill this wordless no-thing

i have an image of 
youngest son 
maybe age five
poolside
struggling to get a toy
out of his pocket

he’s wrestling wet shorts
hands reaching
turning round and round

i watch him for a
whole hour one minute
as he spins
never getting anywhere

a boy chasing an object
like a dog chasing a tail
a world chasing a sun   
a sun chasing a galaxy
a galaxy chasing a cosmos

that’s me
trying to trap
questions with my creeds
shadows with my candles
lightning with my eyes

that’s me
trying to address
the no-thing
with me
always

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Now that I’ve located the nothing in your mind’s eye (haha, what a weird sentence), I invite you to just place it off to the side for a moment. Do you see it? Nothing over there off in the corner of your mind? 

I turn to the work of René Girard for a moment. I want to highlight something I think gets missed a lot with Girard, which is his connection with his friends in the world of theory. (To be honest, I'm not even sure what to call this group… structuralists? post-structuralists? Psychoanalytic guys? Theorists? People who spend a great deal of time missing the point?)

Anyhow, a casual reading of Girard leads some people to think he created these ideas out of thin air, that he was sitting around reading Proust and Dostoevsky one day and just conjured up mimetic theory. While I do think he sees something novel in Proust and Dostevsky, maybe in ways no one else ever has, there's just no way he's not being influenced by the Hegel's, Freuds, and Jacque Lecan's of the world. (Btw, that’s Jacque Lecan not Chaka Kan. )

It's Lecan, in particular, who is interested with the lack in the other. Something that he calls Das Ding (The Thing). When I first heard this, I thought it was a silly name. It probably still is, but it's kind of grown on me because, in its generic, nondescript-ness, I see a certain connection to what Lecan was attempting to say. 

Ha, when I say “What he was attempting to say …” honestly, I’m not really sure I understand much of Lecan. I rely upon three friends to help me … Tim Suttle, Peter Rollins, and Rick Boothby, someone who lost a son a few years ago. It's Rick's writings, in particular, that have helped me see something.

Lecan and Girard say we are constituted by the other, primarily by the lack we perceive in the other. Boothby says that this mysterious, enigmatic lack both disturbs and enthralls us with the other. Initially, it's the lack in our mother, then the other, and ultimately with God. 

In his fantastic book, Embracing the Void, Boothby teases out these ideas in very interesting ways and goes onto to say that love itself is the commitment to the enigma of the other and to the enigma of God. In other words, God herself, according to Boothby, must have a sense of unknowing … a void … a nothing.

In reading his thoughts about the space of unknowing within God, at that point a few years into wrestling with all this nothing thinking, I gotta say that my heart leaped a bit. I think I felt a little like Elizabeth, Mary's cousin. Do you remember that little passage in Luke? When Elizabeth heard about the news of Mary's pregnancy, her son leaped within her. Haha, what a strange thing to have my heart lurch with hope at the recognition of a no-thing!

What I’ve been intuiting is a no-thing … a very dark space, maybe even cave-like, death-like within me… but at the same time, a space that is directly connected with my daughter. What I’ve been intuiting is the utter weirdness of grief entangled with love. And I’ve come to suspect that God herself has this same kind of entanglement with grief and love. And I began to think of all of this as the "hole" within the "whole." (Not original with me, but gosh, I love that phrase.)

And there’s more, cuz all this thinking was resonant with what I understood might be happening in the life (and death) of Jesus. Jesus, the one I think embodies this love in more interesting ways than anyone I’ve ever heard about, also experienced this nothing … for surely, it’s not a stretch to interpret his cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” as the cry of someone in direct contact with the no-thing…  the absolute terror of the “hole” within the “whole;” the grief within the core of God. 

So what? Well, here are three things this helps me with (cuz that’s what preachers do, we give you three points) …

1-Helps me feel at home with the darkness and not feel isolated, kicked out, separate from God. The no-thing is not evidence of sin, or any number of synonymous ideas of wrongdoing, immorality, out of God’s will, unholy … the no-thing is a refraction of the luminous darkness (which depending upon who you are reading is either a Howard Thurman or Buddhist or St John of the Cross saying.)

2-Helps me to be rooted in compassion for the other. I see much religious activity as an attempt to suppress the no-thing, the denial of which winds up being manifested into a lot of dysfunctional behavior, including the suppression and denial of actual people (i.e., marginalization).  Compassion is empathy and action. —Marjorie Hewit Suchocki 

3-Helps infuse hope for maybe all this lack and void stuff is revelatory of something deeper that we might step into in dimensions beyond this dimension. Maybe heaven itself is a reframing of lives oriented around the no-thing; a some-thing that brings comfort and instills hope for the future. 

To try and illustrate that point I turn to that old holiness cinema classic, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. The show came out in 1977. I did not see it, of course, because I came from the holiness Nazarene tradition where we made a practice of denying ourselves access to films that celebrated such lack, such darkness, such nothingness… Ha, but in a plot twist, eventually, I did see the show … a bootlegged VHS copy … ironically, at my youth pastor’s house. Oh, the deep and mysterious ways of love.

Anyhow, as you may remember, Obi Won Kenobi responds to Luke’s questioning about his dad by saying, “Darth Vader betrayed and murdered your father.” Now, that response takes on a whole new meaning later in the show, once that iconic line is spoken, and everyone say it with me, “Luke, I am your _______” That knowledge — that Vader is pops— reframes OWK’s line; even more … it reframes the entire story.

Once that info is revealed … it brings a sense of meaning and enjoyment to the entire movie. Suddenly, in a nano-second, the viewer has a flashback, almost like a wave at the speed of light, scanning back through the movie and then forward again up until the present. Instantly, everything feels different: You’re selecting out all the clues that you had missed … no wonder OWK responded to Luke in such a way … no wonder Luke and Princess Leah didn’t hit it off romantically … no wonder Luke has powers … that line, provided a way for viewers to go back and find meaning. In a moment, the viewer recognizes the depth, the nuance, the creativity of what has gone on before and the viewer loves it.

The film almost shouts that it’s organized around a “lack, a no-thing” (i.e., Lack of truth on OWK’s part, and lack of Luke having a father which turns out to be the why of the whole show.)

And it also points to more questions, prompting the viewer to search more, because the search for more always leads to the search for more. (It’d be Girardian and Lecanian to say that desire always leads to more desire.) In some ways, that’s what the culture has been doing for 45 years now … searching for more … more backstory on the Star Wars’s characters, more movies, more series, more Reddit threads about Lucas’s ideas, on and on and on, and all of it, I suspect, animated by it’s organization around lack. (Btw, to read more about this film, and others, organized around lack see Ryan Engley’s article.)

Does this have something to with our lives? Hmm, I suspect so … look, I don’t have a corner on grief, but my life has been organized around voids, no-things, lack … my whole adult life (i.e., Murders, houses burning down, best friend dying, living paycheck to paycheck planting churches, life threatening illnesses to our children, our daughter’s death, all of which fueled theological changes that got me officially kicked out of denomination, lost paycheck, lost estimation of friends and colleagues, then my niece died, mom died, covid, father died, all the while doing the work we started down in Haiti that never ceases to be fight with the lack—their lack of resources, their lack of safety in hurricanes, their lack of opportunity, and now a political lack that has turned into full humanitarian crisis.)

And the worst part of all of this? I have experienced all of this, while experiencing the lack of God’s response in fixing it all. So much so that I began saying along with that Jewish saint, that young lady who died in the concentration camps, Etty Hillesum “… but one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You (God) cannot help us … Alas there doesn’t seem to be much You yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives.” (Wish everyone would read A Life Interrupted.)

All this to say, that I’ve come to know the lack/absence/nothing to be very, very real … and yet there is some-thing in the no-thing. Because my lived experience has been that the absence has become a type of presence and has motivated me in ways I wouldn’t be motivated without its non-presence-presence.  

Btw, this is thinking that is congruent with science and the sacred text. Contrary to popular belief, the earliest tradition in Christianity didn’t interpret tohu wa bohu of Gen 1:2 as a complete nothing. I mean they might of meant nothing in the sense that it wasn’t a thing, but not nothing in the sense that literally nothing existed.

And regarding science … a vacuum, for example, is said to be empty, and yet the quantum physicist notes a certain fluctuation of energy. It might be microscopic, but there’s something there.

→The point is, neither biblical cosmogeny nor quantum mechanics necessitates a complete lack of matter before Genesis one.

If the physicst is roughly saying the same thing as the early church tradition which roughly matches up with my lived experience… well, it’s not a guarantee, but it’s enough for me to say that by faith … maybe heaven is, well, of course, it’s not sitting around playing harps, rather, it’ll be things revealed to us that will help reframe our life and give us a sense of enjoyment about the lack we lived through. Maybe in a nano-second, the experience I have in that dimension will provide a way for me scan backward and forward that provides a sense of fulfillment, meaning, and even enjyment.

And even more, maybe it’ll give us insight into how to live further. For I suspect that heaven isn’t the end, but the beginning of some entire new adventure that is, itself, possibly, maybe, potentially oriented around some kind of no-thing … a deeper hole within even a greater whole!

The good news is the lack might be the depth, the incompleteness just might be the completeness, the end might be the beginning, death might be life, and the no-thing …  it just might be evidence of a some-thing beyond even our wildest imaginations.

Ah, may it be so.

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Hey, if indigo has meant something to you, would you consider adding a review to Amazon or Goodreads?

Hey, Jim Palmer gave a presentation at this same conference that dovetailed nicely with my thoughts. You should check it out.

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