Emptiness

Lafayette Cemetery #1
New Orleans LA

But at daybreak on the first day of the week they took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb; but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were puzzling over this, behold, two men in dazzling garments appeared to them. They were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground. They said to them, “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised. Remember what he said to you while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and rise on the third day.” And they remembered his words.

–Luke 24:1-8

With all due respect to a certain member of the Koenig clan, this image has been persistently arising as I meditate upon the above Gospel passage during this first week of the Easter season. Encountering this empty tomb, and others like it, during a week in New Orleans last June was somewhat unnerving, yet also an unexpected exercise in resurrection faith. If I do believe in eternal life and something quite distinct from, yet somehow continuous with, the mysterious blend of body and spirit in this earthly life, then this scene shouldn't be entirely macabre. If anything, I should have identified with the puzzlement of the women referenced in Luke's account of Easter morning... they find something quite unexpected, yet recall that they had been told about this ahead of time.

My desk, sans laptop

The same sense of surprising emptiness struck me as my gaze paused upon my desk while I was back home for my lunch break, stopping in my room to brush my teeth before returning to work. Although I try to keep my desk at home relatively organized, it tends to get covered by a variety of articles– a sacramentary (for purposes of study and prayer), my running log, a few mementos, a picture of my goddaughter– in the long intervals between dusting its surface. The empty area typically occupied by my laptop– on my desk at work at the time– suddenly seemed as shockingly gaping as an empty tomb, a space from which something was missing, although in another (reasonably) expected place.

Our society doesn't seem to like emptiness. We fill our roads with vehicles (and expand them to accommodate more traffic), we fill communication devices with text and images, we fill time (often scheduling it accordingly) with activity in a way that seems to value busyness over rest. An empty shelf in the fridge or the pantry, an empty space on a desk, an empty wall in a room or an office– these all seem to suggest something not just missing, but lacking, a void to be filled. There's that old adage about nature abhoring a vacuum, and plenty of examples from the natural world to prove it true.

Flowering crabapple
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester MA

Yet everyone acquainted with Mr. and/or Mrs. Koenig, and with Jesus, would surely agree that filling the void of their respective tombs is not the ideal situation. Rather, it's the emptiness of these spaces that speak of the power, influence, and presence of those who no longer inhabit them. He is not here, the angels say to the women entering Jesus' tomb. What the emptiness yields is of unspeakable value, stirs joy that cannot be fully expressed in words and gestures alone, and accomplishes wondrous deeds. To a much smaller extent, the ideas that find expression in what I compose from that space on my desk– be those writings electronic or in the flow of ink– have some potential to enrich the lives of those who consider them. The emptiness need not be filled... for it has the paradoxical potential to fill those who find nothing there.