As we start this journey of Lent, I want to reflect on one of the liturgical season’s fundamental principles: emptiness, time away, space, the desert. A couple of months ago, I remarked on how after the baptism of our Lord, he is led by the Spirit—the dove, it seems—into the desert. This is, of course, not the start of Ordinary Time after the Feast of the Baptism in the Jordan, but the start of Lent.

In popular Christian imagination, the desert is a place of solitude and emptiness. Whether and to what degree that is actually so in the Gospel text is another matter. Regardless, Lent serves in part as a symbol of emptying. Yet it is emptying for another purpose. We fast in order to give to the needy. We set aside more time of silent prayer to let God fill it. There is a value of empty space. It is a kind of productivity which obsession with productivity knows nothing of.

One of my favourite indications on this topic comes from Jacques Maritain. He writes:

Ancient Chinese wisdom knew the value of empty spaces in music and design as well as in the art of living. Above all, there are different levels of efficacy… The fact is that whatever is meant only for efficacy, a limitless efficacy, is precisely what is least really efficacious (because nature and life are a hidden order, not a mere unleashing of force), whereas what seems least efficacious (if it belongs to an order superior to that of activities bound to matter) is what most possesses genuine efficacy.[1]

After my recent post on the deconstruction of an insufficiently Christianized ordo amoris in an East Asian context, I should probably take something very positive from those cultures in which I once lived and journeyed. There is a good bit of wisdom to acknowledge here, and I find it very accessible.

For one thing, we could pull out a copy of the Dàodéjīng (道德经, also called the Tao Teh Ching or the Laozi) and find the principle of useful emptiness stated numerous times. Perhaps the most succinct and explanatory is this:

Thirty spokes are joined in the hub of a wheel.
But only by relying on what is not there, do we have the use of the carriage.
By adding and removing clay we form a vessel.
But only by relying on what is not there, do we have the use of the vessel.
By carving out doors and windows we make a room.
But only by relying on what is not there, do we have use of the room. (ch. 11)[2]

This text states very clearly that it is the air, the empty space, which allows the wheel to move. Likewise, it is the hollowing out of clay that lets us make pottery, and it is by leaving doorways and window-spaces that a box becomes a room. Without the empty space, the thing is useless.

The usefulness of that which is not there is not limited to wheels, vessels, doors, and windows. As an example, take the painting pictured below. It is a palm painting purchased from a local artist’s shop at Yù Garden in Shanghai; it depicts Mount Tài.

This artwork just does not work without empty space. The mist or cloudscape that it evokes makes the whole piece work. Without it, we would hardly have a valid artform, let along an effective execution.

The effective value of empty space is so quintessentially Chinese that entire volumes would be needed to adequately address it. In many other schools of Chinese painting, too, the sky and the water often appear as blank space (unless these bodies be agitated). In a related art, jade is sculpted by removing, never adding. Then there are all the classical gardens of the Yángzĩ Jiāng Delta, where doors and windows become picture frames. Calligraphy, bonsai (pénzāi) cultivation, and the imperial gardens use in their own way the principle of emptiness.

The usefulness of the useless, the value of empty space, is also a feature of nature itself. One can think of the effect that the gradual erosion of silt and sand has had on the serene boulderscape of somewhere like Hampi or of any of the world’s great canyons.

But as my starting quotation from Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain shows, this isn’t just a matter of a particular culture. Christianity knows some version of this truth, too. What, after all, is ascesis? What is the meaning of the active nights of John of the Cross? What—indeed—is Lent?

But if we frame things this way, we remember the duality or tension inherent in all empty space, natural and supernatural.

First of all, blank space is quite simply good-in-itself and necessary. A palm painting that was completely filled in would be hideous. A clay vessel without an empty centre would be devoid of utility. And Christian prayer without silence and contemplation would be mere performance, if not frenetic nonsense. It would not be a beautiful life.

Yet there is a converse, too. Empty space is geared towards another purpose. The purpose of prayer is love, and the purpose of love is always good works. “The most beautiful thoughts are nothing without good works,” as Thérèse would say (Ms C, 19v).[3] This is a frequent teaching of the mystic saints.

So we have this duality and double necessity of empty space. It is the natural law. But it is also the law of the supernatural organism that we are individually and together. And there is hardly a better time to recall this—not just to think beautifully about it but to put it into practice—than at the beginning of Lent.

[1] Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (London: Chapman, 1968), 92; Œuvres complètes, vol. XII (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1992), 790.

[2] Trans. Philip J. Ivanhoe, The Daodejing of Laozi (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003).

[3] All references to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux using the system in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cerf / Desclée de Brouwer, 2023), with translations my own.