Followup Questions on What to do if One is Full of Oneself

[[Dear Sister O'Neal, What do you mean when you say [in your last post] we are not to grasp at God but are to be grasped by God? Also, I have heard the idea of emptying our hands in order to be able to have them filled with more before. Why doesn't it go far enough or why isn't it radical enough and what do you mean when you say the truth of [the situation] is paradoxical?]]

Helpful questions. Thank you! The idea of being grasped by God is a way of speaking of the experience that grounds human faith. Paul spoke of this several times, reversing the "human-knowing-first" way we often think of things being ordered. So, for example, he said, [[Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus.]] or [[But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? (Gal 4:9)]] What Paul demonstrates in these passages and similar ones is twofold, 1) it is very difficult to get away from "me-first" ways of thinking and speaking, even after we have been grasped by God and know that God comes first, and 2) God's activity always has priority in any human movement towards faith or self-emptying. It is not so much that you or I know God, but rather, that we become aware of God already knowing us, and knowing us in the intimate biblical sense that is akin to sexual knowing.

The notion of being grasped by God was made particularly famous by Paul Tillich, a 20th Century Lutheran theologian, when he defined faith as the "state of being grasped by that which is an unconditional concern" ("Glaube ist das Ergriffensein von dem vas uns unbedingt Angeht"). While this definition is a bit opaque for most of us, it is what Paul is speaking of when he builds on his experience of being grasped or taken hold of by the one who promises to be the answer to our deepest hungers and needs, and specifically for Paul, to the prayers and hopes of the Jewish People and the whole of God's Creation. 

We can begin to get a sense of this state of being grasped when we do something where God can speak to us. For instance, we open the Scriptures and, as we start reading, we may begin to find ourselves intrigued and even a bit excited by what we are hearing. We want to read further, meditate on it, ponder it, and consider the world in light of it. Or, for instance, we hear a sermon on the early Church or Jesus's resurrection, and suddenly we ask ourselves if we believe that, or perhaps we feel some wash of fresh understanding, a flash of curiosity,  the quiet flush of consolation, etc. Those are times, I believe, when God has grasped us and seeks a response to that experience. God looks for us to entrust our lives more fully to him and what we have heard, felt, and otherwise experienced. The way God comes to grasp us does not need to be overtly religious or Scriptural. Maybe for you, it is a passage from a Beethoven symphony, a Rumi poem, or the moment the clouds turn magenta and purple at sunset. Anything dealing with truth, beauty, integrity, futurity, hope, and many other things can be an avenue by which we experience our Creator God taking hold of or grasping us.

Emptying our hands is not analogous to emptying our hearts:

When I wrote that the idea of emptying our hands is helpful as a beginning to understand the dynamics necessary for letting go of being too full of oneself, I said, [[The imagery of emptying our hands so they may hold something else is helpful as a starting point, but it really is not radical enough. The truth is, we don't empty ourselves and then allow God to fill the emptiness. Instead, we allow God to gradually displace whatever it is that takes his place and fills us inappropriately. It is all God's work!]] What this means is that our hearts do not function in the same way our hands do. We do not learn to love, especially God, by emptying our hearts. Loving is not about grasping anything. It is about receiving reality as a gift and so too is "emptying our hearts."

Emptying our hearts of hate (or of anything else that is unworthy of or an obstacle to us, for instance) is only accomplished when someone loves us beyond that hate or obstacle, and we accept this love. We cannot "empty" our hearts except by filling it with something else. We can be so badly personally wounded that our capacity for love is dramatically injured, but again, the answer to this kind of injury is being loved (and healed) beyond it and into fullness. We can embrace a form of selfishness and self-centeredness that, over time, seems to empty our hearts, but our hearts have gradually become filled with self, and the only solution is to allow a love that transcends all of this. Emptying one's hands is simple, and one can ordinarily do this oneself. The human heart is radically different. It is not only made for love, but Love itself dwells in it and makes it incapable of ever truly being emptied.

When I spoke about the paradoxical nature of all of this, I was thinking of the way a focus on emptying ourselves of ourselves only makes us the greater center of attention. A heart is emptied only at the moment it is filled with something (or someone) else. If we try to empty ourselves of self, the house, as the Gospels of Luke and Matthew tell us, will be filled with even more unclean spirits, and the situation will be much worse than it was originally. Our salvation from being "full of ourselves" cannot come from ourselves, but only from God and only on God's own terms. It requires we allow God to love us, that we allow God's love to open us to God more and more fully. It means we allow God to displace the unworthy concerns and obsessions of our hearts more and more fully with Godself.  In that way, we come to be our truest selves.

And in all of this, even our yearning for such redemption is the work of God within us. We are truly selfless only when we love others and accept the true Self God gifts us with by loving us into truth and wholeness. We do this by learning to be aware of and attending to the God who has already grasped and taken up residence within us. All of this is paradoxical.