HOW TO HAUL A BUCKET OF HOLE

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about emptiness.

Sometimes what happened to me recently happens to us all.  Loved ones whom we haven't seen for weeks, months, even years come to call.  That old familiar feeling of family and enjoyment arises as if no time had passed between visits.

That's when family is at its best, when it's welcome and mutual fondness is experienced as naturally as a breath.

Then there is departure.  

Today, I led two cars of family members from our home to the Interstate that stretches that distance that is seven hours away.  I pointed to the turn that would lead them home.  I waved as they exited and watched them wave in my rear view mirror.

I waved and waved until I could no longer see them.

I had been listening to the Beetles when "Eleanor Rigby" began.  I turned the song off and drove quietly.  I longed for all sound to cease so I could silently measure the bucket of hole I felt weighing me down inside my chest.  

You never really know when you will see your family again. Goodbyes are never a lot of fun.  

That feeling of emptiness that follows an unwanted goodbye is akin to the "dark night of the soul" written by church mystics.  I have known such nights.  The sense of God's departure can be lonelier than waking from a dream of solitude within a desolate room of one's own making.

My intellect would never allow me to believe that God abandons any of us for any moment of our lives.  That would be impossible since our very being is grounded in God.  

That hole, the one that seems devoid of God, that feels as vast as God, can be endured just as goodbyes can be endured.   

Love transcends the distance of space when loved ones have gone home.  It reaches across space and time until reunion happens again.

In the same way, faith knows that no void truly exits in God. It is our greatest illusion.  Love transcends that distance by filling it even if our hearts are not feeling it.  

I drove a while, taking a long way home without a hurry, hauling my emptiness out of the city and onto an island.  

Cool air blew into my car window.  Sunshine radiated the morning as if it emanated from the ground as well as the sky.  

A few miles away from home, I clicked on my CD player.  The Beetles sang of forsaken Eleanor Rigby who numbered among all the lonely people in the world and reclusive Father McKenzie who wiped her death from his hands.   

I played it over and over until I arrived home.  Tomorrow, I will not be sad. 

Blessings...