Embracing the Fallow Times

Making space for God to walk in

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

A friend recently gifted me with a volume of letters written my Henri Nouwen, the well-known Dutch Catholic priest and spiritual writer.  They are mostly written to friends and colleagues seeking his counsel; not surprising, given Nouwen’s reputation for wisdom and insight.   The letters are wise and insightful, but what is most striking about them is Nouwen’s vulnerability.  He doesn’t “talk down” to his correspondents.  He “talks up” to them; not from the heights, but from the depths.  He is unafraid to share his own struggles.

In one of his letters, written during a time of spiritual crisis in his own life, Nouwen confessed that he was uncertain about the meaning of his current difficulties.  He writes,

Most of all I think God does not want to give me any chance to rely on my own emotional resources and won’t give me any consolations based on the “old ways.”  Well, no wishes, but much hope, no big plans, but trust, no great desires, but much love, no knowledge of the future, but a lot of empty space for God to walk in!  There is a deep sense of uselessness, but maybe that is the kind of soil God needs to sow his seed!¹

What a beautiful expression of interior emptiness!  It is in the spaciousness of this inner poverty, free from the unrelenting efforts of the ego to fill every nook and cranny of the soul with self, that God’s slow work in us is revealed.  It is when we think we are useless that we become usable for God.  We are no longer trying to control, manage, and accomplish everything.  There is no longer anything to protect or defend.  We have surrendered.  It is then God who does the work through us. 

This is difficult to grasp, because it is so counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.  We think we can only do good work from a position of strength and competence.   We try to defend ourselves against any perception of weakness or fallibility, for fear of what others will think of us.  Vulnerability equals exploit-ability, so we build thicker walls. 

It can sometimes require many years, and an intimate familiarity with failure and loss, to learn that vulnerability also can be the means of permeability, allowing us to become transparent to God’s love.   This is why the Master tells us that we must lose our life in order to gain it.²  It is why St. Paul declared, “When I am weak, then I am strong!”³ 

This is the witness of all the saints and mystics.  Meister Eckhart taught that we attain to God through a process of subtraction.  We have to let go of our attractions and aversions, our projects and projections.  We have to make empty space for God to walk in!  St. John of the Cross writes in The Ascent of Mount Carmel,

To come to enjoy everything seek enjoyment in nothing.
To come to possess everything seek to possess nothing.
To come to be everything seek to be nothing.
To come to know everything seek to know nothing.
To come to what you do not taste go to where you taste nothing.
To come to what you do not know go to where you know nothing.
To come to what you do not own go to where you own nothing.
To become what you are not go to where you are nothing.

If you linger somewhere you will never conquer the whole.
To come wholly to the whole you must leave the whole.
And if you come to where you can grasp the whole, have it without wanting to have it.

For if you want to hold fast to only something of the whole, so you will not have your treasure purely in God.

This is not a counsel of self-hatred or world-renunciation.  It is an invitation to embrace the vulnerability through which the divine mercy overflows the awakened heart.  It is, paradoxically, through this inner emptiness that we are made full: not with our selves, but with God.  We lose our life (ego consciousness) to gain the world (God consciousness). 

What makes reading Nouwen’s letters so consoling is the continual invitation to allow the soul to lie fallow; not to rush to fill every moment of our lives with busyness to mask our fear and uncertainty.  It is OK to be dispossessed of our selves!  In fact, it can be quite a relief!  Nouwen repeatedly recommends a daily hour of silent prayer as a way to embrace our inner emptiness.

This can feel scary, even akin to a kind of death; but it is in this experience of fallowness that we begin to let go of the life we are living so that the Life that wants to live in us can grow.  It is in the dark soil of the soul, hidden and still, bare and exposed, that God is sowing the seeds of love. 

Be patient with the fallow times in your life.  Don’t run away from them.  God is always doing God’s slow work in us.  “Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine! Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever! Amen.”⁴

1. Henri Nouwen, Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life (New York: Convergent Books, 2016), p. 179.

2. Matthew 10:39.

3. 2 Corinthians 12:10.

4. Ephesians 3:20-21.