We all expect things out of the cards we have been dealt in life. \u00a0We expect to find \u00a0the right someone and be married for life. \u00a0Or to land the job that will finally make \u00a0us happy. \u00a0Or to live long enough to see our children grow up, go to college, and \u00a0start families of their own.<\/p>\n
We expect things not just as individuals but as societies. \u00a0In first-world America we \u00a0expect \u00a0that trains run on time, that our grocery stores will have food on their \u00a0shelves, that \u00a0we won’t die from polio. \u00a0We expect that the stock market will one day \u00a0rise again. Or, that our politicians, however \u00a0corrupt or disconnected they might \u00a0be, will eventually do what we are demanding they do- or be voted out of office.<\/p>\n
At heart expectation is desire. \u00a0Desire as entitlement: that what I want I deserve to have. \u00a0Entitlement insofar as “I” or “we,” the source of the desire, presume to be at the center of our universe.<\/p>\n
Even our smallest, pettiest expectations can be great to the degree that they fill a void that would otherwise be there in the absence of our desires. \u00a0While the object of these desires can be good in and of itself, the desire for some future possession of the object can rob us from an experience of God’s grace in the present moment. \u00a0A moment in which our hearts can be free to desire God and God alone.<\/p>\n
Only when we have been emptied of these attachments can grace truly enter in and make a home in our hearts. \u00a0“Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void,” Simone Weil writes, in Gravity and Grace<\/em>.<\/p>\n But if the void is an act of God, making us aware of our need for God and God’s grace, human will can still play a role: “we can fix our will on the void,” Weil writes. \u00a0In other words, the compulsion to buy that next cute pair of shoes online when my shoe rack rivals Imelda Marcos’? \u00a0We can choose to look beyond this desire to be well-dressed, impress others or seek escape from something else. \u00a0We can acknowledge whatever is driving our urge and then look beyond it to the emptiness this compulsion is trying to fill.<\/p>\n In a sense this act of the will is a bit like slaying dragons, because our expectations have taught us to believe in a non-reality. \u00a0A false mode of existence whereby what we acquire materially is what makes us lovable, worthy or significant. \u00a0When in fact nothing could be less true.<\/p>\n And when we slay the dragon and face the void, we can choose to sit there. \u00a0In that emptiness. \u00a0In the void. \u00a0And it is there we can wait with open arms to receive the grace of God.<\/p>\n Weil puts it like this: \u00a0“The extinction of desire (Buddhism)- or detachment- or amor fati<\/em>– or desire for the absolute good- these all amount to the same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes. To detach our desire from all good things and to wait…Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void- to will the void. \u00a0For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. \u00a0But this void is fuller than all fullnesses. \u00a0If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void…The good seems to us as a nothingness, since there is no thing that is good. But this nothingness is not unreal. \u00a0Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal.”<\/p>\n These days our nation has been forced to stare in the face of failed expectations here, there and almost everywhere. \u00a0We as individuals and families, many of us, have watched our variations on the “American Dream”\u00a0fall apart. \u00a0Like little children on Christmas morning, we have run downstairs with great expectation to find only coal in our stockings. \u00a0Maybe now more than ever, we are ready to be “in the void.” \u00a0Maybe many of us are already in it. \u00a0If so, God’s grace is finding us, and may it fill us to the brim.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all expect things out of the cards we have been dealt in life. \u00a0We expect to find \u00a0the right someone and be married for life. \u00a0Or to land the job that will finally make \u00a0us happy. \u00a0Or to live long enough to see our children grow up, go to college, and \u00a0start families of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140,63,13,130],"tags":[99,141,142,61],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addiction","category-sin","category-spirituality","category-suffering","tag-buddhism","tag-desire","tag-detachment","tag-simone-weil"],"yoast_head":"\n