But I would like to continue with this business of emptiness and Advent, and to suggest a couple of cultural facts. There is a book published a few months ago called "The Argumentative Society" or "The Argumentative Culture". It’s an Interesting book. I just got the thing and haven’t started it but I’ve heard the thesis: that basically that’s the way we human beings are dealing with each other today on a very large scale. For years, we’ve been called a litigious society and the lawyers among us know that to sue is the immediate response to any type of mishap. I just got involved in some domestic stuff in the past couple of weeks and listened to him and her talk. I’m amazed at the sense of competition between the two people. Everything becomes an issue for one-upping the other. What I’m proposing is that this is a kind of reasonable description of the way we are today. Are we different now? Are we more litigious? Are we more argumentative today than people have been in the past? Well, I think it is true to say that because we are more individualistic I think we probably are more litigious because so much of the social cement, of all sorts, that holds us human beings together, in one way or another, however tenuously or artificially, has broken down. I mean it’s a regular complaint around here at the College that we never get together anymore. When I came here we used to have faculty volleyball games once a week. You can’t get faculty out to meetings. Now you can’t get students out to meetings. Everybody is busily engaged in their own little process. This is further exemplification of this sense of isolation from each other and the isolation expressed above all, in our being contentious. What I’d like to propose is that this is a form of emptiness; that this is expressive or symptomatic rather of a form of emptiness that is well worth examining.

Many of the prayers in the weekdays of Advent begin with this line: "Lord we are nothing without you". That is an extraordinary line. It sounds like hyperbole – pious excess.. Well, that is literally the case. We are nothing without You. But I don’t think that is our self-consciousness by any way. It certainly is not mine. I’m rushing to the trough and sharpening my elbows, to mix my metaphors, as quickly and as ardently as anyone among us. And the question is why? What underlies this profound suspicion that we have of each other? What lies at the root of this contentiousness or litigiousness or argumentativeness? We are afraid that if somebody has more than we do, they are going to get a leg up on us and then we are going to be in trouble. More brains, more money, more power of one form or another. All that bespeaks of course a radically solitary or solipsistic notion of oneself: I am all by myself and I have to look out for number one because nobody else will. Notice this notion juxtaposed with the first line of this prayer: "Lord we are nothing without you". So, the emptiness again is this highly ambiguous and multi-valent metaphor that I’m empty. And, from a religious point of view, I don’t believe I am nothing without God. I have to get in there and fight for my place in the sun -- a bigger place than anybody else’s if I can manage. But the real emptiness ought to be the sense that this is not my self-consciousness. And to be content with that kind of emptiness. You see, if I were content with that kind of emptiness then all this litigiousness , this contentiousness, this fear that somebody’s going to get ahead of me in one way or another would dissipate. But the sense of competition can happen in any way – my neighbor’s lawn is greener than mine -- it runs from the most trivial to the most profound sense that if I don’t fight for myself I’m going to get stomped, I’m going to get suffocated, I’m going to get eclipsed absolutely. Very interesting to listen to especially in intimate relationships. It happens over the whole scale. The judiciary hearing in the House of Representatives is more evidence. I believe, of the same thing. The self-righteousness of some of those gentlemen oozes out of the TV screen. And what is that all about? The fear that they are nobody, but that they can always appeal to our founding fathers, the constitution, some abstraction that is going to fill them up and give them a club with which to batter somebody else. It’s an extraordinary spectacle. I recommend it to you. If you have a sort of masochistic streak it is worth an hour or so or your time. But watch them. And look at the expressions on their faces and all this puffery about their heavy hearts and knotted stomachs. There is glee and vindictiveness of a very high and terrifying order at the highest level of government of the most powerful country of the world. Before this we ask again: What is going on? Where is emptiness? What is emptiness? A sense of ourselves ultimately. Our sense that if we don’t construct ourselves altogether there is not going to be anything there and the suspicion is that we know that we cannot do it. Which adds layer and layer of disguise, camouflage, self-deception and evasion.