Nothing is nothing

Capital showing an ancient motif indicating the insemination of divine energies 

from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photograph by the author

July 27

Again and again, it occurs to me that there is no real life in me without the presence of a higher energy.

When everything inside me changed in June 2001, I immediately understood this idea quite differently than ever before, and realized that although I was 46 years old, I had never actually been alive until then. Only the inward flow of grace brought me real life — spiritual life — and that life is so differently enlightened that it is only with it I can understand the difference between that life and the life of the material which surrounds me.

I am only real and alive through grace. I am only good when grace acts through me. Left to my own devices, I am invariably sinful, selfish, and unthinking. Perhaps the surprising thing is how adept, clever, and occasionally diabolical my lower parts are in prosecuting these characteristics both inside me and in my outer behavior. The parts of me that have a capacity for spiritual thought, which is usually at least partially enlivened in me, are engaged in a perpetual observation of these things. How silly I am. How vain and selfish. This is how we all are in the moments when do we do not turn ourselves wholly over to the Lord.

How important it is, then, to wait for the moments when openness arrives: and to be patient with myself and towards myself while I await those moments. By myself, no matter how much “work” I do, and how many heroic efforts I think I will engage in, I will do nothing. I can tie myself into some pretty impressive knots during that time, to be sure; and yet in the end nothing is nothing.

I recall my teacher’s admonition that we are arrogant and thinking we can “do” anything at all to raise ourselves spiritually; we can be raised, but we cannot raise ourselves. I think as I grow older and see the world around me more clearly that it is only through humility, a sense of my own nothingness, that I can be raised. For as long as I think of myself as something significant, something better than what I am, like the angel who raises the scales up towards the sky thinking that he can raise the soul more effectively than the devil who cheats, I am just as much an error as my lower parts, who have the same arrogance but don’t pretend as much about it.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.