The Temple: an Empty Space for God

This third Sunday of Lent brings us to a new location.  On the first Sunday, we visited the desert with Jesus after his Baptism.  Then on the second, we were invited to ascend the mount of Transfiguration and see his shining face.  Now we are drawn into the temple, out of which Jesus drives the sheep, cattle and doves, as well as the moneychangers.

Each of these places is located at some distance from ordinary life, at the edge of the daily routine, apart from the hustle and bustle.  Each of these is a place one goes to meet God.  It is Jesus who leads us to it.
-    The desert lies outside the inhabited areas, outside the city.
-    The mountain stands above the highways and byways, above the city.
-    The temple is within the inhabited place, the marketplace, within the city.

The temple is an interior space.  There are outer courts and inner rooms.  At the center there is the sanctuary, the holy of holies.  Passing inward is a gradual process ritualized by the parting of a veil.  When we enter a temple, a church, a sanctuary, we also enter a place within ourselves.  Why do we build churches with high ceilings, cathedrals which dwarf the human figure?  So that we can feel really small before a really big God?  Rather, so that our inner being can recognize its spaciousness.  We come to know that we are God’s place, the place for the soles of his feet (Cf. Ez 43:7).  As St Paul says: “God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:17).

Jesus’ cleansing of the temple is paired today with the Ten Commandments.  The common element seems to be a time and a place reserved for God alone.  The first commandment pairs recognition of the one God with a rejection of idols, of all that would stand in as a substitute for God in our lives.  The sabbath commandment calls for one day of the week on which no work is done, a holy day, a time set aside to rest with God.  Jesus explains his actions in the temple with the words: “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” (Jn 2:16).  To set aside time and space for God alone presupposes that there are other spaces, other times for other things such as work and commercial activity.  There is nothing wrong with those poor sheep, the cattle, and the doves.  Even the moneychangers and their cash – there is nothing inherently evil here, any more than in working six days a week.  There is no question of rejecting work, or any kind of activity, whether commercial or otherwise, or of suggesting that God is not present to these aspects of human life.  The problem lies in making of our work an idol, of allowing it to take up all the space, of leaving no time to remember that we belong to God, in commercializing our intercourse with God, expecting it to yield a return on investment.  The sabbath: an empty day.  The temple: an empty space.  The season of Lent is another such empty space, ready and waiting for God.

Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former Master of the Dominican Order, once gave a talk to an assembly of Benedictine abbots, in which he described the purpose of monastic life to be exactly this: making space for God.
“I wish to claim that your monasteries disclose God not because of what you do or say, but perhaps because the monastic life has, at its centre, a space, a void in which God may show Himself.  I wish to suggest that the rule of St Benedict offers a sort of hollow centre to your lives, in which God may live and be glimpsed.  The glory of God always shows itself in an empty space.  When the Israelites came out of the desert, God came with them seated in the space between the wings of the cherubim, above the seat of mercy.  The throne of glory was this void.  It was only a small space, a hand’s-breadth.  God does not need much space to show his glory.” (Timothy Radcliffe, I Call You Friends, p. 100)
Fr Radcliffe goes on to say that monks, no matter what work they may undertake, have no other mission than to allow God to disclose himself:
“It is this absence of explicit purpose that discloses God as the secret, hidden purpose of your lives.  God is disclosed as the invisible center of our lives when we do not try to give any other justification for who we are.”  (Ibid. p. 101)

Dom Gerard D’Souza, abbot of Genesee Abbey, expanded upon Fr Radcliffe’s insight in an address given at our last General Chapter.  He spoke of the empty space, the “hollow center” which is evident in the core elements of Cistercian life: liturgy, Lectio Divina and labor.

Liturgy – the song of praise which occupies the center of our days, according to the logic of utility and efficiency, is utterly useless, because nothing tangible is accomplished by it.  This space which we set aside for communication with God forms a hollow center, a place where Christ can enter his temple and abide with his people.  It is not easy to keep this space open, to stay focused, to sing from the heart.  As St Benedict recognized, our minds are not always in tune with our voices.  We can find ourselves filling the space with other things, such as planning, daydreaming, worrying, or complaining inwardly.  Where is Jesus with his whip to hustle out these sheep, cattle, and doves?  Whether we are successful in marshalling our wayward thoughts or not, whether we enjoy singing or not, the essential thing is that we keep this space open and ready for the One who comes to dwell with us.

Lectio – every day we set aside time to spend with the Scriptures, time in which we do nothing else but read, listen, ponder, pray, and rest in God’s Word.  This space reserved for God’s self-disclosure forms a hollow center.  It is not about learning, studying, achieving insight.  We spend a lot of time just waiting on God to speak in our silence.  These days, our culture is consumed by a fascination with information – more and more things to read about and look at, and a longing for distraction – light reading, something to comfort and quell my anxiety.  The search for wisdom requires that we make a choice not to fill up on junk, which will never satisfy us for long, but to leave room for God’s substantial Word.

Labor – our work is done in the context of obedience and poverty; it is a service to the community under the various limitations imposed by our concrete circumstances.  This makes it a hollow center, a space for Christ to enter our lives and manifest himself among us as the poor, obedient, and humble one.  Our way of working should not mirror that of the world, in which work is seen primarily as a source of identity and self-fulfillment, focused on productivity, power and results.  Such an attitude feeds into workaholism, a compulsion to fill the space, the void of meaning left by forgetfulness of our identity in God.

Dom Gerard concludes: “The sustained encounter with the Lord is the heart of and the hidden secret of our joyful perseverance in a life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.”  Our life is a temple, a temple within a marketplace.  Recognizing and preserving the empty space in our lives is what frees us to be who we are: God’s temple, God’s place of rest.  May we spend our Lenten days rejoicing in being the place where God manifests his presence.

Image: Fontenay Abbey, France