SUPER SURPRISE HOW CAN THIS BE TIME WARP WHAT THE--? WOW EPISODE 116: HOLES
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
While in the final stage of my training to be a priest, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Fr. Jim Sheehan, a gnarled and bearded gnome of a man who became my spiritual director.
I say he was a gnome. He wasn’t short. Nor did he wear a pointed hat or insist on spending his days standing on lawns. But there was something a little of the uncanny about him. He had somehow at one and the same time both the welcome twinkle in the eye of the best Irish and the unpredictability and dangerousness of something that is absolutely foreign. I could tell this man anything – and would – but I would never be able to fully anticipate how he would respond. He was not someone I would be able to maneuver or fool.
I’d meet Jim for direction in the parlor of his room at the New England Province’s retirement center in the Weston woods about a half hour from Cambridge, Mass., where I lived. He would sit across from me in a La-Z-Boy, twisting his body up like someone with a horribly advanced case of scoliosis, and listen.
People have different ways of sharing their stories. When I am rearing to go I can be quite the fire hose, a long terrible exhalation of feelings and debris.
Most directors just take it, waiting for the flood to pass before venturing out to offer a comment or opinion. Jim, on the other hand, would pretty quickly start breathing aloud, like he was literally fighting to keep his head above the waters that had suddenly filled his room. Like many things Jim did – it had the salutary effect of making me aware of what I was doing, how much I was dumping, and caused me to stop much more quickly. (Jim was also quite good at simply telling me to shut up!)
Jim was my director for the last two years of my studies and then again for eight day retreats for four more years. And we talked about a lot of things; but in a way, we were always dealing with one specific thing, and that is the hole.
Before Jim, I know I had read children’s stories about the hole. Early in my days in the Society I’m pretty sure I’d seen some form of it in books by Thomas Merton. (I’ve never been able to get through “Seven Storey Mountain”, but some of his shorter spiritual essays are fantastically thought provoking.)
But none of it ever really sunk in until Jim.
How did it happen? I think it began with the problem solving. So much of the time, I spend my life trying to solve problems, whether with people or within my own life.
(How deep this instinct goes: one of my most vivid dreams ever was of standing at a subway station with a Rubik’s Cube in hand, desperately trying to solve the puzzle as the train roared into the station. There was no reason I had to finish, no villain with a gun to my head, and yet I knew I HAD TO FINISH before the train came to a halt. That’s me.)
I tend to see a spiritual director as a resource I can turn to for solutions or brainstorming. “You’re a smart guy, so fix me” is not too far off from what I’m expecting.
Jim refused to be that. Instead he would simply highlight the fact that I was problem solving, which forced me to step back and consider myself. What is with this impulse?
Which led to insight: I’m afraid. Afraid I don’t have my act together. Afraid I’m screwing everything up. Afraid I’m not okay.
Now, when you tell a person that you think you might not be okay, let’s be honest, you expect some version of “You’re fine. Don’t worry.”
Once again, Jim resisted those expectations. “Where does that fear come from?” he asked. Not in the psychological way of some sort of childhood experience, but spiritually, what’s that about.
And that’s how I learned that deep inside me, buried beneath the fat and the bone and what little muscle is left after too many bagels with cream cheese and late night donuts there is a hole inside me. An emptiness that I want to fill. And I can spend all my time trying to do just that, to fill it (or, more fun!, escape it). I can problem solve or buy or consume or surf or whatever.
But it’s never enough. It’s never going to be enough. It’s always got more empty than I can fill. I have a hole inside me, and that’s all there is to it.
That sounds awful, doesn’t it? Poor guy – look how broken he is. (Please send your donations to me at “Pop Culture Spirit Wow”; I accept Star Wars figures, writing job offers and comic books.)
But actually, learning about the hole was a huge relief. Because even though I didn’t know what it was there, I’d been putting in so much effort to fill it. And none of it had worked.
++
A couple years ago Louis C.K. did a bit on Conan about why he won’t let his kids have cell phones. “I think these things are toxic,” he said, “especially for kids.” It’s a fascinating analysis, in part about how phones keep kids from learning empathy, and in part about what he calls “the forever empty” that we all have within us and try like hell to run from.
“Underneath everything in your life there’s that thing, that ‘forever empty’ – you know what I’m talking about?” he asks Conan. Conan stares at the camera, his eyes dead: “Yes.”
CK goes on: “That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away and you’re not watching it, you’re in a car and you start going ‘Oh no, here it comes, that I am alone, like it starts to visit on you, like this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just be being in it.” (Believe it or not this really does come off as incredibly funny in the studio – I very much recommend watching the link rather than reading this. One note, of course – this is Louis C.K., so expect some adult content.)
“So we’re driving and we go [moans]. That’s why we text and drive. ...People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a sec. Because it’s so hard.”
He goes on to tell a story about being alone in his car and having a Bruce Springsteen song trigger one of those crazy intense existential “Here is my hole and Jesus is it awful” sadness moments within him and trying to just accept it rather than start texting people to avoid it. It’s hilarious and amazing and stop reading this and go watch it.
Here’s his insight: Because we don’t want that experience of emptiness, we push it away with all kinds of nonsense. But the end result is we never get to the good stuff. When you let the hole have its place in your existence rather than trying to stuff it away somewhere where it just grows bigger and scarier (Note to Self: monsters always grow stronger in the darkness), you find out not only is it not so bad but your true life with it is actually kind of great.
Louis C.K. is a lot more articulate about this than me. Seriously, as far as I’m concerned he’s the best priest not wearing a collar. He gives the kinds of homilies I wish I was able to give. Give yourself five minutes and listen to him.
(Then watch all his other clips. I’m not going anywhere, and he really is the best kind of rabbit hole.)
(Why are you still not watching it?)
++
Though usually I don’t recognize it, in my brief time in Hollywood “poor responses to the hole” is the one thing that comes up again and again. All of us out here – almost all of us, anyway – are terribly insecure about whether we belong or are good enough or whether anything good will ever happen, all of which is fundamentally just other names for the hole, the “Jack” to its “John”.
Out of those fears we say and do terrible things. That’s what sin is, if you appreciate that language; sin is what we do when we’re trying to avoid the truth of ourselves – the imperfections, the limitations, the humanity, the hole. It’s not really that we’re trying to make ourselves into God, though sometimes it can be framed like that, but that down deep we know all too well that we are not God or even much of a human being for that matter and it so freaks us out that we are willing to do the moral equivalent of running through a plate glass window because our hair is on fire to make that feeling stop.
(Does that analogy work? I don’t know... But there is definitely something to the fact that the solutions we choose actually have ZERO to do with the problem at hand. It’s really just a function of panic rather than looking for a viable solution.)
Bottom line – we don’t like to feel uncomfortable. And realizing there are unfillable holes inside us is the definition of severe discomfort. (As well as box office horror movie magic!) Sin is what we do to try and stop that.
++
A couple months ago I accidentally misnumbered an issue of this newsletter, which meant that there never was an issue #116. Ever since I’ve been trying to figure out something fun to drop in, like maybe updates from old stories or material that originally got edited out. But none of it seemed that interesting.
Then today I was reading this article by Andrew Sullivan about how he walked away from everything online for a couple months and went on a silent retreat to try and regain some sense of perspective and peace in his life, and it got me thinking about Jim Sheehan and the holes.
And (lastly, I promise) silence.
One of the things you do in the Jesuits is a thirty day silent retreat. It’s not entirely silent – you get to speak to a spiritual director once a day about your prayer. And if you need to say “excuse me” or “bless you”, fine. But the idea is basically to keep quiet, slow down and try to be present to the moment, so God can find you.
The idea of that much silence and isolation can sound daunting from the outside, but it’s actually not as awful as it might sound. Once you’re in it for a little while, it’s actually kind of wonderful not to have to deal with all the stimulus and demands of life. And the prayer meditations, which are little exercises in imagining yourself in different parts of the stories of Jesus (and other biblical figures), can be really unexpected and moving. I swear, both times I’ve done this retreat, at the end of thirty days I was disappointed to have to finish and deal with the real world again. (Emails. Ugh. Definitely invented by the devil.)
The first time I did the retreat was in 1992 in the midst of a St. Paul winter so frigid my nostrils froze together each time I inhaled. (Not an exaggeration.) I had entered the Jesuits four months before, and had spent the autumn with the ten other men in my class getting to know each other and learning about life in the Society.
The second time I did the retreat was 16 years later – I can barely believe I’ve been a Jesuit that long, but there you go – and instead of icy Minnesota it was autumn in the middle of Australia at a retreat house on the property of a Jesuit vineyard. (Sevenhill Winery is actually the only Jesuit-run winery in the world, and the wine is beautiful. And yes, insert “Jesuits have tough lives” joke here.)
Just like the first time, I was with ten other Jesuits, but now they were from all over the world rather than mostly the Midwest of the U.S.
Having been through the retreat before, I knew what to expect. I was still nervous – you put yourself in the hands of God and you never know what’s going to happen. He’s crazy that way. But I was also excited.
Until, that is, we got to day five, day six, day seven of the retreat and nothing had happened. I mean, Nothing. Each day, four times a day, I had sat down to pray, taken some deep breaths, read the scripture that I was being invited to consider, read it again, closed my eyes... and nothing happened. Black, utter emptiness.
I had a great director, Adrian Lyons, a tall man who clearly had been an athlete in his youth whose capacity to listen was profound (and a little bit scary – it’s never more scary than when someone takes your words seriously). As the days stretched on he had no more idea what to do about what was happening than I did. And trust me, I went through every option I could imagine – I confessed stuff from my past that didn’t seem relevant but who knows, maybe it was blocking things; I wracked my brain looking for any sign of resistance on my part; I tried to pray more or harder (whatever that means). Nothing worked. In fact, the more I did the worse it all got.
So, after about a week, Adrian told me to do less. Sit for ten minutes at a time here and there throughout the day. And otherwise, just do whatever seemed right. Walk. Read. Listen to music. Go slow, of course, and be quiet, but just wait.
It sounded like I had been demoted from “Jesuit” to “slow kid who we don’t know what to do with.” I left the conversation devastated. Also, irrationally terrified – Can you fail the long retreat? I wondered. Would I be forced to do this again? Or told that I couldn’t continue as a Jesuit?
(One of my greatest gifts as a person seems to be my capacity for enormously poor mental leaps when in the grips of fear. Once during terrible flooding in Chicago I was so worried about being late to work at the pipe fitting company where my dad was the superintendent that I actually drove the company pick-up truck into a deep ditch behind the business, thinking I would be able to drive up the other side. When I walked in and told people where the truck was they looked at me with the bemusement of humans looking at an animal in the zoo and wondering why it would ever think what it’s doing right now is a good idea.)
So it was a pretty dark moment for me. But then, once I gave myself to Adrian suggested and let up on the pressure, I found myself suddenly start to relish the silence. If nothing else happened, I found myself realizing, I will have had thirty days of peace and quiet. Who gets that?
And then, with a little more time, it wasn’t just the silence I found myself enjoying but the emptiness. The absence. In fact I got to a place where I no longer really wanted anything to happen. Somehow the waiting for God had become itself an experience of God, a sort of companionship in absence that I didn’t want to end. ++ As one of the main characters says to God at the end of the new Scorsese movie “Silence”, “It was in the silence that I heard your voice.”
It's living with the gaps, allowing for the unanswerable, accepting the unfillable holes that seems to be the path to some kind of peace.
Or so God seems to keep trying to teach me. For the moment, I seem to remain pretty content with all new versions of trying to finish a Rubik's Cube, running into plate glass windows and driving other people's pick up trucks into a ditch.
(I mean, let's be honest, I did just write a piece about holes you can't fill in order to fill a hole I left. Could I be more conflicted?)

I’ll be back Friday with something (FINALLY) about Rogue One.