The Space Between

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about words without knowledge and how important it is to listen.  We have two ears and one mouth for a reason.  Much of what we do is filled with words, words, and more words.  In church, we describe God with words.  We praise God with words.  We share the word of God.  We express ourselves with words.  It helps that there is some music thrown in as well, but even the music is filled with words.  

Last year in February, I went to a Jesuit retreat centre and was in silence for eight days.  I’d only every done about 48 to 72 hours before this.  Eight days felt very long.  My life is surrounded with words, especially now with phones.  Texts, emails, podcasts, and apps, all filled with words and sounds, spoken or read.  How often do we sit in silence in today’s world?  Eight days filled with silence made me realize that I was burying some pain that I still needed to process and heal.  It’s amazing how the noise in our lives can distract from feeling what we need to feel.

There’s a story in the first book of Kings about the prophet Elijah.  He has just performed a tremendous miracle that went against the powers of the nation and he is running, knowing that his life is in danger.  He is on a mountain, where he experiences God, not, as it is written, in the strong winds that split the mountains and broke rocks into pieces, and not in earthquake or in fire, but in the sound of sheer silence.  

In the book of Job, that we have been reading throughout the season of Lent, Job also encounters God, but this time God through a whirlwind and poetry.  Job and his friends have been speaking for 35 chapters, words about why Job is suffering and why God has caused it, about Job’s innocence or lack thereof, all theorizing about why God allows suffering in the world.  Words, words, and more words.  I like to imagine, that at the end of chapter 37, there is a pause, a gap before we enter into chapter 38 and hear God’s response to Job.  I like to imagine that Job and his friends have run out of words and that they sit in silence, pondering what has been said, maybe finally at a loss to say anything more.  An hour?  A day? A week?  Eight days?  Time enough for them to come to terms with their humanity, their ignorance, their incapability to help Job through his suffering or to help him explain it.  Then, and only then, are they open to hearing God.  Then, and only then, in the sound of sheer silence, might they hear what God has to say.  

The technical term for my imaginings is called midrash, reading into the story, looking at the space between the words, the white space on the page that surrounds each letter, each word, each phrase, helping it to make sense to my own experience.  Again, there is so much more beyond the words, beyond what is being said.  We need to look deeper.  Yes, we need to be aware of the context, the culture, the people of the time, but sometimes we just need to sit with the silence, with what we don’t know, with what’s not being said.  

Have you noticed that our gospels don’t tell us what happened on Holy Saturday, the Sabbath day, the day after Jesus was crucified and the day before they discovered his empty tomb?  Mark’s gospel in particular, details every day from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, even in three-hour intervals on Friday, but writes nothing about the Sabbath day.   The story picks up again with the women approaching the tomb of Jesus, where he was placed after his death.  In some ways, because it’s the same every year, most of us don’t notice this absence, but maybe we should take notice?  What happened on Saturday?  Is this silence telling us something?

In our Easter story, from Mark, the first gospel written, the ending is odd.  There is much debate about how this gospel ends.  There have been an additional ending tacked on to this gospel, because there was discomfort with the way it ended.  The last words of the gospel, without the alternate endings, are: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (16:8)  They said nothing?  But what happened next?  Surely word got out somehow?  Isn’t the whole point to share the gospel, the good news?  How can it end so abruptly, without sightings of Jesus, as the other gospels include?

According to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, in their book, “The Last Week,” the author of Mark’s gospel has said everything that needed to be said.

1. Jesus was sealed in a tomb, but the tomb could not hold him; the stone has been rolled away.
2. Jesus is not found in the land of the dead: “He is not here.  Look, there is the place they laid him.”…
3. Jesus has been raised.  And as the angelic messenger tells the women this, he explicitly mentions the crucifixion.  Jesus “who was crucified” by the authorities “has been raised” by God.  The meaning is that God has said “yes” to Jesus and “no” to the powers who killed him.  God has vindicated Jesus.  
4. His followers are promised, “You will see him.”

That’s all that’s needed.  The extra stories are nice and they help us to imagine how Jesus would have been experienced after they found him missing from the tomb, but the author of Mark didn’t find these stories necessary.  It’s possible that the author wanted us to create our own stories, our own midrash, in the silence that followed.  

Rob Bell, an author and preacher, had a podcast a few weeks ago called, “That Pause.”  Once in a while, he will bring in his learnings of science to his message on faith.  This time he was talking about empty space.  He said,

“Before the modern era, for many people, the way the universe was seen is there is empty space and there are objects in empty space, moon, sun, planet earth, furniture, a car, that person, objects in empty space.  But what we now know from quantum physics is that empty space itself is filled with particles and those sub-atomic particles are coming and going from existence, they’re bonding, they’re splitting, they’re forming atoms, those atoms are forming molecules.  That actually empty space is filled with…what the physicist Paul Davis talks about as, chrystalized conundrums of pulsing energy.  The empty space itself is filled with particles.  These particles are doing things, they’re bonding, they’re splitting, they’re aware of each other, they’re entangled, they’re changing their spin, there’s all sorts of things happening within what you and I would think of as empty space. 

So, the beautiful thing and the metaphor here is to think about this empty space, to think about that pause, the stillness, before you speak, before you respond, before you act, when you listen to your deepest intuition, to your deepest Christ wisdom, when you pause, when you are still, to know the divine.”

Sometimes when we take the time to stop speaking and listen, just be open to what the universe is trying to share with us, we realize how much we don’t know, how vast is the mystery that surrounds us, how seeking answers isn’t always what is needed.  In Job’s final words, his response to God, Job first says, “I lay my hand on my mouth.  I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further.”  And then later, in his last sentence, Job says, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in ashes and dust.”   In our current context and in our growing awareness of shame and how it affects us, a different interpretation of Job’s last words is offered by Harold Kusher, author of, “Why Bad Things Happened to a Good Person.”   

Having heard God say to Job, It will not be a perfect world, but it will be a world marked by great natural beauty, inspiring human creativity, and astonishing human resilience, and I will be with you in all of those times, [Job responds]:

“I repudiate my past accusations, my doubts, even my anger.  I have experienced the reality of God.  I know that I am not alone, and, vulnerable mortal that I am, I am comforted.” (Ch. 10, pg 44)  

I can hear in these words how the disciples of Jesus may have responded to their experience of Jesus and his empty tomb.  Some betrayed him, some doubted, almost all abandoned him to his fate.  But in this empty tomb, in the angel’s message that their friend and teacher was not there and had been raised and would soon be seen by them in a new way, there awoke in them a joy beyond words, a mind filled with questions but a heart bursting with love for their friend, knowing that there was so much more to come, that it was not over, and it’s still not over.  

We continue to experience that reality of God, through our suffering and our joys, in our relationships, in a child’s laughter, in a beautiful sunset or a loud crack of thunder, a hug from a friend, or the awesomeness of a great blue whale or the view from a mountaintop.  In the gaps between, in the stillness within, we find the divine and we know we are not alone, vulnerable mortals that we are, we are comforted.

May we be open to the unanswered questions, the open endings, the gaps, that pause.  May we know we are not alone in the stillness, the sheer silence, the empty space, and the empty tomb.  In fact, may these gaps and these empty spaces, be where we find comfort when in need, discomfort when we need to be challenged.  May they be places where we might find the divine and the wisdom of Christ.  May it be so.  Amen.