Lack & Kenosis: Filling The God-Hole

It's not the parlor game known in bars and restaurants across America as Keno, but there is an arcane Christian notion of the Self-emptying and Self-sacrificing Nature of God known as Kenosis. The theological notion of Kenosis is based upon the sense that the Divine has literally poured itSelf out in the creation and manufacture of these worlds, these beings, these realms and domains. In Hindu cosmology the process is called involution. God is emptied of God. God then becomes deprived of His/Her own Nature. It is felt, tacitly. So God then goes seeking for Him/HerSelf.

Involution is the emptying, the kenotic nightmare. Evolution is the fulfilling, the return of God to God, the redemption of nature unto Nature, the utopic dream.

If there is even a semblance of truth and merit to the initial, and even long-term, Kenotic Nature of the Cosmos, then it would serve to confirm the Buddhist apprehension of the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena. The lack evidenced in the universe--whether real or imagined--is the direct result of the Self-emptying Nature of the Numinous. Our lack is God's lack. Our desire for redemption and fulfillment is the same sense of longing that God can be said to feel in His/Her gestures of being emptied out into the kaleidoscopic display known as the Cosmos: that desire is for a Return... that longing is for one's own Nature.

To get a sense of this: Imagine if you will that you empty yourself of yourself. You don't know where yourself went to. That self is gone... nowhere to be felt or intuited. You are empty of you. But you can't rest in that state. It is the primordial agitation. The activity that is generated is the result of some deep ontological unrest. You literally need to find and discover and locate where you are. You just know that it is somewhere else other than where you are empty of you... hence, it must somewhere out there. So you commence a search and take on innumerable forms seeking to discover yourself, find yourself, be united with yourself. Until one day you are redeemed. You find yourSelf. You find where you are. The Emptiness is penetrated with God-Form. Lingam and Yoni merge. Shiva and Shakti embrace. Finally One is at rest. Content. Fulfilled. At peace.

United with your own Nature, the God-Hole is no more. You have wandered lifetimes in anticipation of this moment. Lifetimes of anticipation! The longing to behold the Original Face of your Lover who is your Self. Awash in tears. You sob. Relief cascades over you, because your greatest fear was that the emptiness would continue unabated; that you would never find yourSelf again; that you would wander in Infinity bereft and broken: a God who can't address His own lack: a Goddess who can't find where She Is.

Oh, but that is no more. The greatest of all fears never materialized. For God is infinite. Her lack isn't.