The God of Empty Spaces
July 11, 2025
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Something’s missing, but you can’t say what?
I’ve made a career choosing and placing words into arrangements certain people have found pleasing. So it’s only natural I view my life as a series of words—a story. But my eyes are opening to the spaces between the words.
It’s not because I’m a writer that I see life as a story. It’s true for each for us. We’re all authors.
Among the words that tell our lives are marriage, kids, work, travel, church, flirting, and so forth.
The longer we live, the more experiences we have, the depth of our relationships—the greater the number of words available to describe ourselves.
In typography, printers have for centuries relied on precise measurements of the spaces that are the tools with which they work—hair space, thin space, leading, word space, picas and points and kerning. In my early days as a newspaper make-up editor, I kept a “pica stick” in my pocket to gauge the accuracy of our efforts.
Now, though, as I grow older, isolation and quietude is revealing my life not only in words, but words separated by empty spaces of silence and stillness—the emptiness of time passing.
Pam Bruno, who attended my day-long program on poetry writing at Mercy by the Sea Conference Center in October, described her “God of empty spaces” in her poem:
The silent spaces in my day
Are more powerful than my words
Living in the stillness
Between two notes
I hear the voice of God
The spaces between the words of my days have always been there, I guess, but I notice them now.
The striking thing is that each empty space is lengthening. They are unwelcome for they carry a sad listlessness.
Remember Wendy Beckett, the famous “Art Nun” from the 2001 PBS documentary series? She once described prayer to the abbess of a women’s monastery like this:
“He [God] wants to possess me. And when I let Him, it is prayer. Always His love drives Him to possess. And when we have time, He enters . . .”
It’s the scariest definition of prayer ever. Scariest because of the qualifier: “. . . when we have time.”
Her words made me realize I’m aware of God only when I choose to have time for him. Mine is the God of empty spaces.
This spring The Penwood Review
published this poem, which Sister Wendy’s words inspired me to write:
REVELATION 3:20
His hair drips
with the dew of morning
as he taps.
He’s lusted all night, my swain,
beckoned me unbeknownst
as I slept.
Any lover seeking consummation knocks
roughly, boned knuckles on renitent oak.
But not mine.
This suitor won’t wake me.
He wants me already woke, waiting.
Or he moves on.
As he desires. Only then
beg him enter. Only then endure
his awful love.
We can, however, fill our empty spaces—pausing to listen to rain, for example, relishing a perfect cup of tea, or enjoying conversation with a friend. All these are manifestations of the Divine.
It’s the last example that’s key, I think: conversation with a friend. Engagement calls for community—family, friends, people of like mind.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Sister Wendy again, who spent most of her life in utter isolation as a hermit, venturing out only to record her BBC art programs.
She writes: “All persons are made for community. It's not the prerogative of the religious life.”