Sunday, March 23, 2008

Easter and emptiness

"Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness -- a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd, Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him." -Frederick Buechner

I read something else by Buechner, and he was talking about the empty tomb and emptiness. It's stuck with me. The first feeling on Easter morning was one of profound loss and emptiness.

And so what are we supposed to hear in that silence??

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