What is emptiness?  In the second chapter of his lengthy missive, the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, speaking for Yahweh, ancient Israel's God, asks the nation, "Why do you walk after emptiness and become empty?"  It is a good question, really, a question all of us should ask ourselves regularly.  But we can only answer it if we decide what emptiness, for us, is.
     For a Buddhist, emptiness is positive, a state to which one aspires, as it represents one's success in shedding the temptations of impermanence to enter an untroubled eternal destiny.  For almost every other religion, emptiness or, put another way, nothingness, is essential to finding real meaning.  As we let go of what we have, as we relinquish what we know to embrace what we do not, we find what really matters.  We empty ourselves so as to be filled.
     Outside of religion, however, most of us would agree that, if we wish to live meaningful lives, we will devote ourselves to pursuing things of importance, things that last, things that do not take us into unnecessary or undesirable places, things that do not bring us into emptiness.  Although we will not all agree on what is most important, we will probably agree on what is not, except for, perhaps, things having to do with religion.
     Therein lies the problem.  For the religious, that which is important is a function of what has been received, believed to be, and internally considered and processed as divine communication, whereas for the non-religious, it is solely a product of individual meditation or social consensus.  On the other hand, there are things, be they qualities of character or standards of conduct, which both sides agree are important, and it is these on which we can proceed.
     Yet there is a deeper question still.  If we are talking about emptiness, we are in fact affirming that we have meaning, that we have purpose.  Emptiness means nothing unless there is a fullness from which it begins.  So it seems that if we are not to, as Jeremiah urges, pursue emptiness and become empty, we should live in a way that recognizes that we and life have, in and of themselves, value.
     But if we are to be credible, we must also recognize that this value can only be value if absolute value in fact exists.  Otherwise, we have no honest way to claim that value exists at all.  Everything really would be emptiness, the emptiness of a world in which emptiness is all that can be.  And even then, fullness and value, must prevail.
     It's difficult to live without transcendence.
    

     Recently, I saw a vehicle I had not seen in a long time:  a Corvair.  For those of you who remember, it was the Corvair which consumer advocate Ralph Nader made famous (or, better put, infamous) with a book (Unsafe at Any Speed) that described in great detail how dangerous it was to drive.  Although the car's makers protested, Nader's arguments won the day, and the Corvair quickly disappeared, never to be seen again except at automobile shows and the occasional sighting on a city street.
     Why mention the Corvair?  The history of consumer products is lengthy and unending.  Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, literally millions of products have come and gone.  Some are still around.  Each was the fruit of human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and invention, and each was designed to meet a particular human need.  The Corvair is just one more.
     Every invention, successful or not, however, becomes part of who we are, part of our cultural DNA, part of what makes us human beings.  We live in the products and workmanship of those who came before us.  Their innovations have become ours, just as ours will become the fodder for the generations that will follow us.  So we walk humbly or, as the prophet Micah put it, circumspectly, acutely aware of the minute size of our moment in history.  We are not the beginning, nor are we the end.  We ride a wave that has been cresting for millennia, and one that will crest long after we are gone.
     But the adventure continues, implicit, inexhaustible, real, a real adventure in a real world.  The Corvair and its many counterparts were of course real, but only because life itself is so, a life that is not a dream, but rather a life dreamed from above.

     Writing in his I and Thou, his remarkable meditation on the human relationship with God, the Jewish writer Martin Buber observes that, in interacting with the divine, it is not so much seeing the divine that is to be sought, for as some students of the Bible know, the prophet Moses remains the only person who, as the text puts it, has seen God face to face.  We might say the same today.  Countless people of a wide range of religious ilk and inclination have claimed to have seen God, in some form, over the centuries and, regrettably, have frequently proceeded to foist untold suffering upon various groups of human beings.  Rare is the person who has claimed to have physically seen God and gone on to reap good for humanity.
     No, Buber says, it is not so much seeing that is important.  It is rather hearing.  Not hearing in a physical sense, or hearing voices in one's head (for even a psychopath may claim to hear voices in his head), but hearing in the sense of holistic encounter, hearing as an event.  The Hebrew word that is translated into the English word "word" is dabar, a word which in fact means "word as event."  That is, to hear, particularly the "voice" of God, is an event.  It is a happening, a moment, an experience that pervades the entirety of one's existence.
     We see, but we may forget or misplace what we see.  But when we encounter, when we step into and engage with every fiber of our being, we rarely forget, for we experience inner transformation and change.  We see God, and we envision:  we strive to change the world; we encounter God, however, and we strive to be like him, to be humble, as Buber presents it, an I before God.
    

     I went camping over the weekend.  I had not stayed outside in a tent since my backpacking trip last summer, so I appreciated the opportunity to get out again.  The autumn colors had must peaked, so the forest looked particularly full of color.  On the other hand, because the colors had already reached their peak, the land was beginning to show signs of its winter decline, the time when every last leaf falls off the trees and every deciduous tree is barren and gone, pale skeletons against the stark and unforgiving brumal landscape.
     Yet skeletons are necessary.  Without a skeleton, we would not be.  We need its structure, need its form.  Even in a creature that does not have a skeleton as we understand it to be, a form exists.  There is a structure, a framework, a place:  a starting point.
     So it goes with existence.  The autumn colors seem so brilliant because they appear after the euphoric green of summer, which in turn surfaces following the nascent exuberance of spring, which in turn comes to us after the barrenness of the winter.  In every instance, however, form and place prevail.  Things appear in context, in a time, in a space which, at one time, began.
     Here and elsewhere, be it material or ethereal, natural or supernatural, nothing happens without something else happening--or simply "being"--first.

     A few weeks ago, my youngest sister turned fifty-five.  It's hard to believe.  I could say that life moves quickly, that we don't always see what is coming, that life is fragile and fleeting, or that we often miss what's right before our eyes.  These are all well worn responses and observations.  And they are largely true.
     What amazes me most about my little sister turning fifty-five, however, is that the life that we have both been given, a life that has traveled many days and miles in us, together and apart, is a life that remains, when all is said and done, a life ever unfinished and undone.  We have lived and loved richly, we have tasted all manner of joy and sweetness.  But we always see more.  We will always experience new things.
     In this is the final wonder:  we will never know the fullness of existence until it ends.  For that's when it will really begin.

     There must be something else [to life], " the late Lord Bertrand Russell once wrote to a lady friend, "though I don't believe there is."  The ambiguity of Russell's ruminations makes one swoon.  On the one hand, he realizes that life is more than what we physically experience, but on the other hand, he will not believe there is.  It is at once the grandest and most tragic of existential bargains.
     Like it or not, although we are thoroughly material beings, we all experience immaterial things.  Lord Russell sensed the vacuity of existence, someone else might find love, someone else might touch joy.  In every case, the person knows she is experiencing this thing, even if she cannot physically see it.  She cannot deny that she encounters it.
     That is the crux of the dilemma.  Ordinarily, something material would have nothing in common with something immaterial; what reason would there be to do so?  But the human being is different.  Though the human is material, she experiences the immaterial; although she is physical, she experiences what is not physical--and knows, in the bottom of her heart, that she is doing so.
     Where do we go from here?  We have two choices.  We can dismiss it, as did Lord Russell; or we can embrace it for the mystery it is, and live accordingly.  We needn't run from the immaterial, nor do we need dispute that we experience it, for we know that we do.  But if we embrace it, we must embrace something else:  the possibility that there is more to reality than just us.
     And that, as philosopher Rudolf Otto noted in his Idea of the Holy, published early in the last century, is perhaps the most frightening (and wondrous) reality of all.  Life is unbearably, and happily, greater than we can imagine.
     There is a God.

     How do we know where we are going, not only physically, but intellectually and spiritually as well?  The writer of Proverbs 16:9 offers an intriguing take on this dilemma.  "The mind of a human plans his way," he opines, "but the Lord guides his steps."
     What does this mean?  We make plans, we dream dreams, we conjure visions of what we want to do.  Then, if all seems good, we proceed.  Frustratingly perhaps for some of us, we do not do so in a vacuum.  If we did, we would only know what we see . . . and we all know that what we see is not all there is to "see."
     Robots we are not, beings we are.