The Void and Poverty
Before my participation in monastic interreligious dialogue I felt intuitively that my identity as a disciple of Jesus Christ, both man of Nazareth and God, could not, if it were to grow in a true and living way, do so without a relationship to “the other,” “the other” whose identity is constructed with other references and who does not follow Jesus of Nazareth.
I have always been attracted by Buddhism. I cannot put a date to the start of this profound attraction. I say this very humbly, but it seems to me I was “born with it.” Buddhism has therefore very naturally become my special partner: the other who joins in dialogue, the opposite pole to what I am, different and yet so close at the same time, within me and outside me (very different too from the ideas I had formed on the subject), stimulating, confusing, bewildering and questioning all at once.
Thanks to experience, a conviction gradually settled deep within me: it is the Void that is at the heart of encounter. For there is no true meeting without this “empty space” between us and at the heart of each partner in dialogue: emptying of self, availability, openness, receptiveness, poverty of the self, poverty for the other . . . welcoming of the other into oneself . . . the dissimilar other who is perhaps going to turn everything upside down, but may also transform and enrich us!
This Void, for me, as a nun of the Order of St Clare, agrees with the most radical poverty, which captivated Francis of Assisi and which he personified as “Lady Poverty.” This really meant for him the Poor Christ in Person. When I contemplate, as Clare invites us to do, the Poverty of Jesus Christ, at once man of Nazareth and God, this Void bursts upon the eyes of the heart.
The Poverty to be seen in the kenosis of Jesus, therefore, sends us to the wound in the heart of the Absolute that is found in the heart of the Trinity, condition of Inter-Trinitarian Dialogue, and consequently both in the heart of every human being and in the heart of every deep and true human relationship.
I should like to contemplate this Void-Poverty in three forms of dialogue: in the heart of the Trinity, in the heart of everyone in search of the Absolute, and in the heart of the relationship to the other (especially the poorest and those who do not believe in the way we do).
1. In the heart of the Trinity:
In his Wonder and Poverty Maurice Zundel allows us to enter the experience of Francis of Assisi: “God is God because he has nothing.”
This last phrase is deserving of further examination If God’s only connection to being is the love that continually gives itself away, thus impoverishing itself, ceaselessly going forth, passing through “non-being,” is it not possible to suggest that here we have an entrée for dialogue with our Buddhist friends? “It is from all to nothing that Love pursues us,” wrote Hadewich of Antwerp, a thirteenth century Flemish mystic.
2. In the heart of each one:
If we are in the image of God, in the image of Christ, there is therefore at the innermost center of each one of us this void . . .
Timothy Radcliffe expressed this very well in a conference he gave to Benedictine Abbots on 6 September 2000, even using several terms that are part of Buddhist vocabulary:
The height of humility, for a monk, is when he discovers not only that he is not the center of the world but that he is not even the center of himself . . . there is a void at the centre of my being, where God can pitch his tent … At the centre of myself there is not a solitary or Cartesian “I,” but a space filled by God.
Perhaps herein lies the ultimate vocation of the monk—to reveal the beauty of this emptiness . . . to be individually and in community temples in which the divine glory can dwell.
This has nothing to do with renunciation of identity, but identity comes into sight only through the continual letting-go that lies at the heart of the relationship. “Seek yourself, find yourself and when you have found yourself, leave yourself,” Meister Eckhart used to say to his novices. And Master Dogen said, “To know the Way of the Buddha is to know oneself. To know oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be affirmed by all the beings of the cosmos” (Shobogenzo, ch. 3).
3. In the heart of the relationship with the other, different from me:
Experience must live, not only contemplate. For my part, my encounter with Buddhism always places me, in a rather abrupt manner, before the need to enter truly into what is at the heart of our life as disciples of Jesus: the Passover mystery of Death and Resurrection. “If you do not accept death, you cannot have the experience of Awakening!” some roshis tell us. They know well what a strong chord that must strike for us Christians. Acceptance is never made once and for all. Each time I hear something like this I feel that I have been given a blow that is as salutary as being hit with a keisaku.
I often call to mind certain striking Buddhist texts: “Ordinary folk look outwards, monks look inwards. But the true way is to let oneself fall into the void. However, people are afraid of emptiness, for they do not know that the emptiness is not empty.” (Obaku Kuin, +850)
Yes, perhaps we must let ourselves proceed together towards the experience of the Void as to a life-giving spring . . . Together! Interreligious dialogue should make us always more vulnerable, without calling into question our belonging to Christ. On the contrary. There should be no risk of a common offensive against a-religious materialism, for it is not a matter of “being strong against the other” but of joining together—different as we are—to share our vulnerability.
I should like also to add that attention to the poor is the fruit as well as the condition of this cleansing dialogue. Stripped of every claim and of all wealth, even interior wealth, we may perhaps be able to love the poor in their extreme destitution, as our contemplative vocation invites us to do.
Conclusion
“Brothers, today let us begin, for so far we have done nothing!” said Francis of Assisi in the last days of his life. And the Great Wisdom Sutra calls us to “Go on, go on, go on beyond the beyond, all is accomplished. . . . ”
I have always been attracted by Buddhism. I cannot put a date to the start of this profound attraction. I say this very humbly, but it seems to me I was “born with it.” Buddhism has therefore very naturally become my special partner: the other who joins in dialogue, the opposite pole to what I am, different and yet so close at the same time, within me and outside me (very different too from the ideas I had formed on the subject), stimulating, confusing, bewildering and questioning all at once.
Thanks to experience, a conviction gradually settled deep within me: it is the Void that is at the heart of encounter. For there is no true meeting without this “empty space” between us and at the heart of each partner in dialogue: emptying of self, availability, openness, receptiveness, poverty of the self, poverty for the other . . . welcoming of the other into oneself . . . the dissimilar other who is perhaps going to turn everything upside down, but may also transform and enrich us!
This Void, for me, as a nun of the Order of St Clare, agrees with the most radical poverty, which captivated Francis of Assisi and which he personified as “Lady Poverty.” This really meant for him the Poor Christ in Person. When I contemplate, as Clare invites us to do, the Poverty of Jesus Christ, at once man of Nazareth and God, this Void bursts upon the eyes of the heart.
I have no knowledge of God except through Jesus. The unique greatness of Christianity is to have presented a poor God, as if there were a wound in the Absolute. God, child in a manger. No human being could invent that. It has to be a revelation. (Jean Sulivan, Matinales)
The Poverty to be seen in the kenosis of Jesus, therefore, sends us to the wound in the heart of the Absolute that is found in the heart of the Trinity, condition of Inter-Trinitarian Dialogue, and consequently both in the heart of every human being and in the heart of every deep and true human relationship.
I should like to contemplate this Void-Poverty in three forms of dialogue: in the heart of the Trinity, in the heart of everyone in search of the Absolute, and in the heart of the relationship to the other (especially the poorest and those who do not believe in the way we do).
1. In the heart of the Trinity:
In his Wonder and Poverty Maurice Zundel allows us to enter the experience of Francis of Assisi: “God is God because he has nothing.”
The testimony of Saint Francis wells up from this spring. St Francis of Assisi is precisely the Christian who, without doubt, experienced the Trinity to the highest degree, since for him poverty became the very centre of his adoration. It is absolutely inconceivable that Saint Francis would have embraced poverty so passionately—so that he considered it as his betrothed, his bride, to whom he gave the title of “Lady Poverty” . . . and to whom he gave such a place, a unique place that is God’s own—unless poverty were for him God himself. This is why this man, unique in Christian history, who is not at all a theologian, is still the greatest doctor of the Church. It is he who, in his innocence, could take this image of Lady Poverty to the very limit, that is to say, to identify Poverty with the Trinity.
In this absolute resignation where all possessive appropriation is completely excluded, Divinity appears as antipossession whose only connection with being is the love that is being’s gift. (From the preface.)
This last phrase is deserving of further examination If God’s only connection to being is the love that continually gives itself away, thus impoverishing itself, ceaselessly going forth, passing through “non-being,” is it not possible to suggest that here we have an entrée for dialogue with our Buddhist friends? “It is from all to nothing that Love pursues us,” wrote Hadewich of Antwerp, a thirteenth century Flemish mystic.
2. In the heart of each one:
If we are in the image of God, in the image of Christ, there is therefore at the innermost center of each one of us this void . . .
Timothy Radcliffe expressed this very well in a conference he gave to Benedictine Abbots on 6 September 2000, even using several terms that are part of Buddhist vocabulary:
The height of humility, for a monk, is when he discovers not only that he is not the center of the world but that he is not even the center of himself . . . there is a void at the centre of my being, where God can pitch his tent … At the centre of myself there is not a solitary or Cartesian “I,” but a space filled by God.
Perhaps herein lies the ultimate vocation of the monk—to reveal the beauty of this emptiness . . . to be individually and in community temples in which the divine glory can dwell.
This has nothing to do with renunciation of identity, but identity comes into sight only through the continual letting-go that lies at the heart of the relationship. “Seek yourself, find yourself and when you have found yourself, leave yourself,” Meister Eckhart used to say to his novices. And Master Dogen said, “To know the Way of the Buddha is to know oneself. To know oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be affirmed by all the beings of the cosmos” (Shobogenzo, ch. 3).
3. In the heart of the relationship with the other, different from me:
Experience must live, not only contemplate. For my part, my encounter with Buddhism always places me, in a rather abrupt manner, before the need to enter truly into what is at the heart of our life as disciples of Jesus: the Passover mystery of Death and Resurrection. “If you do not accept death, you cannot have the experience of Awakening!” some roshis tell us. They know well what a strong chord that must strike for us Christians. Acceptance is never made once and for all. Each time I hear something like this I feel that I have been given a blow that is as salutary as being hit with a keisaku.
I often call to mind certain striking Buddhist texts: “Ordinary folk look outwards, monks look inwards. But the true way is to let oneself fall into the void. However, people are afraid of emptiness, for they do not know that the emptiness is not empty.” (Obaku Kuin, +850)
Yes, perhaps we must let ourselves proceed together towards the experience of the Void as to a life-giving spring . . . Together! Interreligious dialogue should make us always more vulnerable, without calling into question our belonging to Christ. On the contrary. There should be no risk of a common offensive against a-religious materialism, for it is not a matter of “being strong against the other” but of joining together—different as we are—to share our vulnerability.
I should like also to add that attention to the poor is the fruit as well as the condition of this cleansing dialogue. Stripped of every claim and of all wealth, even interior wealth, we may perhaps be able to love the poor in their extreme destitution, as our contemplative vocation invites us to do.
Conclusion
“Brothers, today let us begin, for so far we have done nothing!” said Francis of Assisi in the last days of his life. And the Great Wisdom Sutra calls us to “Go on, go on, go on beyond the beyond, all is accomplished. . . . ”
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