Hollowness: book excerpt BLESSED

"Mourning" means looking at pain, shame, and hollowness. Previous posts address pain and shame. The next section deals with the hollowness within. I am posting:

Book excerpt:

BLESSED

Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness:
The Healing Power of the Beatitudes

Chapter 2

Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5:4

The empty feeling. The certitude that nothing will ever make you whole. The bottomless pit of need. As the saying goes, the morning after the night of laughter is hollow and thin. Addicts are usually seeking to fill the void and they need more and more of their addiction to keep life meaningful. Addictions are not just drugs, alcohol, and eating disorders. Nearly all of us are “addicted” to something. We have things in our lives that we just can’t seemingly live without. It might be as simple as chocolate and, in truth, the craving to fulfill some needs does not negatively impact our lives very much.

Probably the biggest addiction area in our culture is money, and the power and prestige that go with it. Though never proven, the story goes that an elderly lady once asked John D. Rockefeller, one of the early mega millionaires of the late 1800’s early 1900’s, how much was enough. His answer was 25 cents more than I already have. No matter where one is on the social hierarchy, each status level believes they deserve more wealth, power, and prestige than they already have.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 gives insight into this:

“The eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear ever content with hearing.” [NET]

Yes, studies have repeatedly shown that one is normally happier with wealth than living in poverty. But as stated earlier studies have also shown the pocket book [the wallet, the credit card, or wherever your money is stored] is the greatest addiction in the world today. People spend money on things to impress their neighbors. Even the Bible has a verse about this: Ecclesiastes 4:4New International Version (NIV)

4” And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

Those who spend money on things wind up living in a house of toys.

Ecclesiastes 1:2 gives the famous saying, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” [KJ] The word vanity can also be interpreted as useless, meaningless, futile, pointless. A word picture is the idea of fog: this is a cloud that has come all the way down to the ground. Growing up on a farm, at times I could look down toward the river and see a bank of fog that blocked out the trees that ran along the river. From a distance it looked real, that it was really something. But walking up to it, then into it, it proved elusive. I could not reach out and grasp it in my hands. Things in this world do offer some meaningfulness, but it is not permanent. It does not last.

We human beings too often live out a hollowness in our relationships with others. “Two people standing hand in hand with love embedded in their hearts” (“Who Will Answer”) find a hollowness entering into their marriage. They find a disharmony entering in: one bed, two dreams. An emotional distance happens even though they are sleeping just inches apart. Disintegration erupts into the relationship, then eventually death comes into the marriage itself, divorce.

We “play games” in our relationships with each other rather than looking at the real issues underneath. We fail to deal with what is really causing the problem. Instead we play mutual games to avoid facing the real issue. It’s back to the elephants in the room we refuse to talk about. Few people realize that when two people argue over something, too often what they argue about is not what is really causing the argument. The bed sheets of the argument need to be lifted to look at the underlying issues of fear, loss, rejection, feeling used, feeling abused; those emotional pains and shames we are not dealing with. The hollowness.