Emptiness: The Beauty and Wisdom of Absence

Emptiness is a strange phenomenon that haunts us in many ways. Most of us have felt empty at one time or another though we dont often talk about it. We have a sense that something is missing in life. This absence extends beyond human experience to the physical world. As contemporary science has revealed to us on both a macroscopic and subatomic level curiously the vast majority of the universe is composed mostly of nothing but empty space. Emptiness is abundant and beckons for our attention. Drawing on the Judeo-Christian wisdom of the Bible in conversation with Eastern and Celtic thought David Arthur Auten offers us an eye-opening and profoundly practical examination of the much neglected gift of absence. Nothing ironically turns out to be endlessly fascinating and significant. David Autens book of meditations is a remarkable blend of apophatic theology and spiritual direction. The author explores the religious significance of emptiness in a myriad of forms--as ignorance and empty space in death and boredom as absence and in silence. With luminous prose Auten directs his readers attention to the gift-like quality of emptiness and also to the way in which the cultivation of absence as a genuine presence in our lives constitutes an important spiritual exercise. This book is laced with insight refreshing in its honesty and increasingly relevant in a world of constant busyness and high-information noise. --Michael L. Raposa Lehigh University Drawing on both the mystical apophatic tradition of Christianity and on Eastern traditions Auten invites us to engage with his remarkable set of reflections on how more absence (the contradiction is intentional) and greater emptiness can fill us with greater personal wisdom and self-knowledge. This is not a book to be rushed through but rather savored a little bit at a time in order to allow absence and emptiness to become a meaningful part of our daily lives. --Frank Kirkpatrick Trinity College David Arthur Auten is Senior Pastor at the First Congregational Church of Ramona California. He is a graduate of Yale University ordained in the United Church of Christ and also the author of Eccentricity: A Spirituality of Difference and Embrace: Strangeness Mediocrity and the Living God.