In the Void, Our Life

In the last two posts, we looked at the implications of the impact of God’s leaning into our voids, in the person of Jesus Christ, transforms what should be the end of all things into the beginning of new things, into Events. This is so because of God’s nature, which is love in itself.

With reference to Byung Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros, we looked at how philosophically, true love demands a kenotic giving of oneself to true otherness. These are words that echo the theological motif of love as willing the good of the other, even to the point of the void of death.

What this means is that we cannot simply ignore the voids in our lives, and simply focus on the fullness of life that only God can give. This amounts to a wilful blindness for the reality of these voids in our lives, and also a wilful blindness to what God is capable of doing by leaning into those voids, and the transformations that come from it.

You can find artistic expressions of just what this willingness to intentionally face the void looks like, particularly in film and movies such as Meloncholia, mentioned in the first post of this series.

As an aside, I found really instructive a point made by my friend Stina Constantine in her podcast Living Fullness. In an episode on the virtue of temperance, Constantine mentioned the contemporary propensity in some cultures to drink to the point of passing out. This phenomenon can be looked at psychoanalytically, in which such patterns of drinking constitute a “death drive” wherein the enjoyment of something consists precisely in the deprivation of the capacity to enjoy by deliberately losing consciousness. Constantine’s instructive point was that temperance, precisely because it manifests itself in a pattern of self-regulation, actually increases our capacity for enjoyment, precisely by maintaining our capacity to experience that enjoyment. The point I wanted to draw out here is that, in their own small way, patterns of regulation introduce into our daily experience a void, a certain lack of all out aesthetic enjoyment since, paradoxically, all out enjoyment leads to the nullifying of that very enjoyment. Equally paradoxically, it is precisely in the gap of enjoyment (which regulation introduces), that enables a fuller engagement and thus a fuller enjoyment of that little facet of life. This is a quotidian yet powerful example of just how a gap can become an affirmative source of life.

I found another both musical and the cinematic explorations of this coupling of the void and new life in two distinct pieces. The first was listening to the words of Miami Nights 1984’s Only When Its Dark, and the second was watching what might be the most haunting movies I have ever seen, which is Lost in Translation both of these were presented simultaneously to beautiful effect in the video below:

The song’s refrain “only when it’s dark do you come alive”, it the sheer simplicity of its words, makes that link between the void of darkness and life all the clearer.

Those familiar with Lost in Translation, meanwhile, would be familiar with the driver of this romantic comedy, the fact that both protagonists are married to other people and, more importantly, know that that sheer fact means that the connection between them cannot go in a romantic trajectory. This void of romance, however, becomes the occasion for the very thing that is sought in romance, which both protagonists give and receive to each other in spadefuls: intimacy, understanding, direction and insight…in other words, nothing short of the what is sought for in every life.

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