life on planet earth on Emptiness

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

The truth is simpler… and more alarming. [This] is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism…. We have been going round the paths, and suddenly we see our path goes round a hole,...

Resentment indicates we are still trying to fill the emptiness with something we think we deserve. Gratitude is the sign that God has filled the hole; indeed, that God has become the Whole in Whom we ...

Our hunger is the exile’s hunger, but it is also the first step in our homecoming. We hunger, and in doing so learn the shape of our emptiness is the world’s great emptiness in or to prepare room for ...

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

The ego is incredibly busy – in other words, it is always drawing attention to itself. It is incredibly busy trying to fill the emptiness. And it is incredibly busy doing two things in particular – co...

I learned a long time ago that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me. First I outran it by traveling and dancing and drinking two-for-one whiskey sours at Calypso on State...

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.

A person may fight ferociously to win success, to be better than everybody else, and then one day find it all seems empty and meaningless.

People shoot for happiness, but they often feel empty, alone, and without meaning…People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering…Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefi...

Here is the path to the higher life: down, lower down! Just as water always seeks and fills the lowest place, so the moment God finds men abased and empty, His glory and power flow in to exalt and to ...

Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.” The term here—worthless—is a compound, literally: without profit. It is “the quality of being useless, good for nothing.” Pg.11...

God, we come with hesitant steps and uncertain motives to sweep out the corners where sin has accumulated, and uncover the ways we have strayed from Your truth. Expose the empty and barren places wher...

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for pe...

There is an invisible pattern in the design of deprivation: deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens it. And the more heightened the desire, the greater our satisfaction will ultimately be. It ...

There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert's emptiness, up the mo...

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused...

Creation as it felt to God — since then every artist has felt an echo, a sympathetic vibration: a craftsman who squints at his finished product and reckons, “Very good”; a performer who cannot suppres...

God, our heavenly Father and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: We praise and thank you today and always! You are worthy of our praise simply for who You are: You are good and You are strong, ...

Lord of all the universe, Lord of all the world, Lord of all nations, peoples and tongues, Lord of all the Church—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: We come to You who alone are adequate in all things, at a...

Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave us a new circle of fri...

I’ve often shared the story of my first experience of solitude and silence at the beginning of 1990. It was led by one of my mentors, Wayne Anderson, as part of a class I was taking at Fuller Seminary...

This past week I have been at a reunion with college friends (this is the main reason I missed last week's update). It's been significant for a number of reasons. I hope to unpack a few other ...

‘Space’ means an area of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority. Space may be imagined as week-end, holiday, a vacation, and is characterised by a kind of...

Thus the whole death is not the biological phenomenon of death but the spiritual reality whose "sting... is sin" (1 Cor. 15:56) - the rejection by man of the only true life given to him by G...

One day Saint Francis and brother Leo were walking down the road. Noticing Leo was depressed, Francis turned and asked, “Leo, do you know what it means to be pure of heart?” “Of course. It means to h...

Revenge and forgiveness are major themes of Michael Christopher’s play, The Black Angel. In it, Herman Engel is Nazi general responsible for killing over 200 French Jews. Convicted of his crimes by th...

There is nothing in this world so empty as getting what you want.