Seeking Empty Space

Today's reading from the Aidan cycle, in the Northumbria Community's Book of Celtic Daily Prayer, is taken from Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Anne writes about needing to try to find balance in life, no matter what forces tend to pull one off center. She finds no easy answers, but she shares a clue - shells from the sea.

There has always been a temptation, in the Christian life, to renounce the world and to retreat into isolation. It's an understandable reaction to what can be a godless and uncaring world. During the so-called Dark Ages, following the fall of Rome, many Christians scattered to the fringes of society. Some found safety and security in monasteries, others escaped to live in hermitages. Modern Evangelicals have tended to speak disparagingly of this flight from the world as an evasion of responsibility, but we have not been immune from it ourselves.

On the other hand, some Christians become so involved in the world that they have no time left, no space available, within which to seek the still small voice. Often, they become activists, running from one good cause to another, while their spirits are starved within them. Eventually, when prayer is crowded out, they become indistinguishable from the world in which they are called to be salt and light.

How can we maintain balance between Christian activism, which is in the world, and Christian pietism, which is not? How can we prevent ourselves from lurching between extremes? Must retreat and engagement always be mutually exclusive?

Anne's answer lies in the simplification of life - cutting out some of the distractions. "The answer," she writes, "is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it." We must seek the balance between solitude and communion, between experiencing God on the mountaintop and serving Him in the valley.

At least part of the answer lies in the deliberate simplification of our lives. We have too few blank pages on our calendars. We are becoming slaves to the electronic organization of our days. We feel guilty if we have even half-an-hour during which nothing is scheduled. We are too busy, too over-committed. Are we afraid of silence? Have we devalued prayer?

A walk on the beach will prove that there are many pretty sea-shells. When we are young, we try to collect them all, but we are soon overcome by the volume. There aren't enough window sills upon which to display them all. They end up, quietly festering, in a plastic bag at the bottom of a closet. But when we are older we discover that one need not collect them all. They are more beautiful, more precious, and more significant if they are few. Our lives can become cluttered far too easily, even with goodness and beauty, if we have too much. Maturity consists in learning that limits are good.

Perhaps we would have less difficulty balancing the pendulum between retreat from the world and return to it, if we had more empty spaces in which to seek God's will. "My life at home, I begin to realize, " writes Anne, "lacks this quality of signifcance, and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space."