by Rose Mary Dougherty

"If You Have Nothing"
by Jessica Powers

The gesture of a gift is adequate.
If you have nothing: laurel leaf or bay,
no flower, no seed, no apple gathered late,
do not in desperation lay
the beauty of your tears upon the clay.
No gift is proper to a Deity;
no fruit is worthy for such power to bless.
If you have nothing, gather back your sigh,
and with your hands held high, your heart held high,
lift up your emptiness!

From Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers,
edited by Regina Siegfried and Robert Morneau.
Copyright (c) 1989 Carmelite Monastery of Pewaukee, WI.
Published by Sheed & Ward, PO Box 419492,
Kansas City, MO 64141.

We had been talking together for nearly an hour, this woman and I. Several times she had asked the same question: "Rose Mary, what do you think? Is this dry restlessness coming from God?" Each time I answered her question with other questions: "What do you think?" "Why is it so important for you to know this?" "Are you able to be with God in this?" "What have you said to God about it?" Consistently her responses revealed her primary concern — her love of God and her desire to do the loving thing. She was afraid that her restlessness had something to do with her lack of love. If God wanted the restlessness, she wanted it, also. She felt, however, that it was interfering with her prayer and her attentiveness to others. She just wasn't feeling very loving at all. When after nearly an hour I offered no direct answer to her question, she blurted out her frustration: "You used to tell me, Rose Mary! You used to be able to tell me whether something was of God!"

Her words struck a sensitive nerve in me. I heard them as an accusation that I was withholding some hidden knowledge, without which my usefulness as a spiritual director was questionable. Yet I couldn't dispute the words themselves. Frequently during our ten years of meeting she had sought a sense of rightness in her choices or some hint of God's hand in whatever was going on in her. She especially sought the latter when she considered what was going on to be of negative consequences. And I had often responded to such a need for knowing. This time, however, I had no answer, only grasping prayer: "God, give me something for this person, some clarity or at least something that sounds like wisdom." But God left me to my own resources. After a long silence I managed to be truthful: "I just don't know anymore. The more I listen to myself and others, the less certain I am of what God wants in a given situation. Sometimes I don't have a clue about what's really going on in me or where it is coming from. All I know is that I have come to trust God more in my unknowing than I did in my knowing. I am not really comfortable in this place, but it is the only place I can be. I would prefer to have some answers for you and for me."

Afterward I looked at my discomfort. I realized that it was really only a habitual reaction to my inability to meet the needs of others, but it was no longer authentic. Even my prayer for wise-sounding words seemed more a command performance for my ego than deeply felt. In the deepest part of me there was a peace. Yet I felt the pain of that very good person who wanted certainty. From the many years of praying with her and listening to her, I trusted that her wanting came from a place of love, that she wanted only to be a responsible lover. Her love had no margin of error. It had no rest until it knew right doing. Rightness was more than a gesture of love for her; it was the measure of love.

There was a time when knowing what God wanted, responding rightly to love was important to me, also. It was as though I could confirm my loving by my knowing. If I had the "right " loving response, then I would be loving. The converse seemed equally true: "If I am truly loving, then I will have the right loving response — to prayer, to life, to friends, to God." When others asked what God might want in a given situation, I was more than eager to help them find an answer. I tried to ask the right questions, to examine thoroughly every possibility of what God might want. Often, though, we lost sight of love. Hence there was little room for trust in our driven search. Trust finds nurture in the ground of vulnerability, and vulnerability is born of unknowing. The passion for knowing had eroded trust and eclipsed the love. Something in me had been shifting, however. Trust was deepening, and love was slowly beginning to show itself again. The conversation with this woman had helped me recognize the change, but I had yet to claim it.

Three months later, just two weeks after Shalem's Winter Retreat, I found myself in a similar conversation, this time with myself. The retreat for me was mostly a time of being held in love, just as I was. Despite (or because of) that, the week was a mixture of peace and uneasiness for me. Sometimes I rested in the love; at other times I tried to run. But love held its ground. Its communication was simple, direct, and constant: "You are mine and I love you — now and always. Live in my love — now and always."

Despite my protestations, I trusted that love more than I trusted anything else and wanted to live in that love. Two weeks later, when afterglow was fading and my heart grew restless in its emptiness, the questioning began: "What was the meaning of the experience? How should I respond? How can I be restless in the face of such great love? Am I running from the love? What does God want of me now? What is the right thing to do?" The questions kept coming until somewhere in the midst of them I remembered what I had learned three months ago.

In the remembering I became one with the woman who had taught me. I felt God's sadness for her and for me. God knew so well the tender core of our hearts, knew the loving, and must have ached with the pain of pouring love into hearts so entombed in their need to prove love that they couldn't receive love. God must have ached to see us caught in false images of what it means to be loving people, always looking for the proper gift of love, seldom risking love because we might love wrongly. God's only recourse was to divest our minds of images, to complicate the knowing and subvert right loving responses, to ravage our hearts with love. There is nothing left then but to trust and, as Julian of Norwich has said, "to act as though one believes in the goodness of God."

To act as though one believes in the goodness of God is to relinquish one's need for the security of rightness. It is to trust the power of God's transforming love for ourselves and others, even through our mistaken attempts at love. It is to seek the good from the deepest place of love and to trust God in the seeking, in its outcome. It is to stand in the emptiness of unknowing, having no measure of love, no adequate gift of our love. Only love's gesture remains.

Rose Mary worked on Shalem's staff for over 20 years and is now Shalem's Senior Fellow for Spiritual Guidance.