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Everything that we do in the world is bordered by nothingness. This nothingness is one of the ways that death appears to us. Nothingness is one of the faces of death. The life of the soul is about the transfiguration of nothingness. In a certain sense, nothing new can emerge if there is not a space for it. That empty space is the space that we called nothingness. R. D. Laing, the wonderful Scottish psychiatrist, used to say, “There is nothing to be afraid of.” This means not only that there is no need to be afraid of anything, but also that there is nothing there to be afraid of, namely, that the nothingness is everywhere, all around us. Because we shrink from this terrain, emptiness and nothingness are undervalued. From a spiritual perspective, they can be recognized as modes of presence of the eternal. The eternal comes to us mainly in terms of nothingness and emptiness. Where there is no space, the eternal cannot awaken. Where there is no space, the soul cannot awaken. This is summed up beautifully in a wonderful poem by the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:

PRESENTS

I give you an emptiness,

I give you a plenitude,

unwrap them carefully.

—one’s as fragile as the other—

and when you thank me

I’ll pretend not to notice the doubt in your voice

when you say they’re just what you wanted.

Put them on the table by your bed.

When you wake in the morning

they’ll have gone through the door of sleep

into your head. Wherever you go

they’ll go with you and

wherever you are you’ll wonder,

smiling about the fullness

you can’t add to and the emptiness

that you can fill.

This beautiful poem suggests the dual rhythm of emptiness and plenitude at the heart of the life of the soul. Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch.

Death is not the end; it is a rebirth. Our presence in the world is so poignant. The little band of brightness that we call our life is poised between the darkness of two unknowns. There is the darkness of the unknown at our origin. We suddenly emerged from this unknown, and the band of brightness called life began. Then there is the darkness at the end when we disappear again back into the unknown. Samuel Beckett is a wonderful writer who has meditated deeply on the mystery of death. His little play Breath is only a few minutes long. First, there is the birth cry, then a little breathing, and finally, the sigh of death. This drama synopsizes what happens in our lives. All of Beckett’s works, especially Waiting for Godot, are about death. In other words, because death exists, time is radically relativized. All we do here is invent games to pass the time.

WAITING AND ABSENCE

A friend of mine was telling me a story about a neighbor. The children from the local school were going into town to see Waiting for Godot. This man took a ride on their bus. He intended to meet some of his drinking colleagues in town. He traveled in with the schoolchildren to the theater and went immediately to the two or three pubs where he thought his friends would be; but they were not there. Since he had no money, he ended up having to watch Waiting for Godot. He was describing the experience to my friend: “It was the strangest play I ever saw in my life; seemingly the fellow who was to play the main part never turned up, and the actors were forced to improvise all night.”

I thought that was a good analysis of Waiting for Godot. I think it was the kind of review with which Samuel Beckett himself would have been very pleased. In a certain sense, we are always waiting for the great moment of gathering or belonging, and it always evades us. We are haunted with a deep sense of absence. There is something missing from our lives. We always expect it to be filled by a definite person, object, or project. We are desperate to fill this emptiness, but the soul tells us, if we listen to it, that this absence can never be filled.