The Freedom of Empty Hands

The heart longs for a peace that nothing in this world can satisfy—an abyss that You alone can fill with Your love.

I desire nothing that can be taken from me, and I fear nothing that can be lost. With empty hands I stand before You.

Let me cling to nothing as my own, knowing that all things pass into dust. Let me never imagine that even the good within me has its beginning in me. Whatever is true, whatever is beautiful, whatever has endured the fire, has come from Your mercy.

Strip me, then, of every illusion of possession: of the need to secure my life, to defend it, to explain it, even to understand where You are leading me.

Only let me see.

Free me from everything that clouds the eye of the heart. Free me from fear disguised as prudence, from desire disguised as necessity, from the anxious need to make a way where You have not yet opened one.

If there is an abyss within me that nothing created can fill, let me cease trying to fill it.

Let it remain an abyss.

Let it become prayer.

Let it become hunger.

Let it become the place where I discover that You were never absent.

I have nothing to bring You that I have not first received from Your hand. I have nothing to offer except the poverty of my being and the consent of my heart.

And perhaps this is the freedom for which the heart has always longed:

to possess nothing,

to defend nothing,

to become nothing before the world,

and to discover that in losing everything that passes away, nothing has been lost.

For You remain.

And if You remain, then the empty hands are full.