#kenosis

[apenitentialprayer]

The closer one comes to Jesus, the more one is drawn into the mystery of his Passion.

Pope Benedict XVI (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, page 224), trans. Philip Whitmore

[winged-thinged]

self-less

This is the definition of "love" laid out in the Bible:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. (John 3:16)

"Kenosis" is the term theologians use. It means "self-emptying." It comes from a passage in Philippians which reads, in translation (emphasis mine):

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)

Biblical love is sacrifice. It is self-giving, self-erasure. It finds its epitome in the cross, where Jesus gave up his life to give humans a chance at heaven.

This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:12-13)

This is what Christians are called to emulate. This is what is glorified, what is held up as the highest form of love: To become self-less. That is, to give of yourself, until nothing is left of you. That is, to die. To kill yourself in service to others. To become a martyr.

The modern Christian is asked to give up their "idols"—their interests, their desires, their individuality—in faith. To bow down to power, to give up their income, their self-sovereignty, their critical thinking. Especially in conservative denominations, women in particular are called to give of themselves, to become obedient wives and mothers, to have no personality, no sexuality, no desires, no wants or needs besides the joyful care for others. Men are called to be "servant-leaders" in Christ's image who take on the role of guiding their families in obedience to God while prioritizing all others above themselves. All are expected to give their unquestioning obedience to authority, to the church.

I don't have space to fully break down all the harms that this commandment does to people, but allow me to briefly name some of them: The call to self-emptying denies our rich diversity and enforces conformity to empty, rigid roles. It encourages people to neglect themselves, to pour from an empty cup. It inspires suicidal ideation. It enables abuse.

Self-lessness should not be glorified. It should not stand as our ideal, our pinnacle picture of love. The point of our lives is not to die. It is to live! Together! Gloriously and abundantly and alongside one another.

[the-mortal-coil]

The Efficacy of Kenosis

Kenosis is not a philosophy. It is not a belief system or a spiritual aesthetic you adopt because it sounds profound. It is a process. Arguably the most violent and necessary process available to a human being who actually wants to become something real.

It is the emptying of the vessel so that what the vessel was actually built to hold can finally get in.

Step One: Recognition of the Occupant

Note: You cannot empty what you cannot see. Most people skip this step entirely and wonder why nothing changes.

Before anything can leave, you have to know what is actually living in you. Not what you tell people lives in you. Not your curated self-narrative. The actual occupant. The consolidated structures of wound, belief, identity, and adapted survival strategy that have grown so deep into the walls of the self that they feel like the self.

This is the work of watchfulness. The Desert Fathers called it nepsis. You catch the thought before it becomes a conviction. The conviction before it becomes a structure. The structure before it becomes you.

Most people never get here because the occupant is very good at convincing you it is you.

Step Two: The Loosening

Note: This is where the traditions diverge in method but converge in destination.

Once you can see the occupant clearly enough to name it, the loosening begins. This is not forcible eviction. Force consolidates. The occupant grips harder when attacked directly.

The loosening is achieved through privation. Fasting teaches the body it can exist without what it believed it required. Silence removes the constant self-narration that maintains the illusion of a stable inner speaker. Vigil interrupts the consolidation of identity that sleep performs every night without you noticing. Poverty severs the extensions of self into owned objects. Obedience: the most violent of the classical tools, requires the surrender of the will to something outside itself.

These are not punishments. They are precision instruments for making the occupant’s grip on the walls slippery.

The shamanic path achieves the same loosening through catastrophe rather than discipline. Illness. Initiatory death. Dismemberment by forces outside the self. The voluntary and involuntary paths arrive at the same threshold. The difference is whether you walked through the gate or were thrown through it.

Step Three: The Evacuation

Note: This is the part nobody warns you about adequately.

The occupant leaves. And it is not clean.

What has been structuring your perception of reality, organizing your relationships, narrating your history, and maintaining the coherent fiction of a stable self? That leaves. And what remains in the immediate aftermath is not peace. It is not enlightenment. It is the raw, unmediated ground of experience with no self present to process it into something manageable.

Time stops being a line. The I stops being a speaker. The membrane between you and everything else becomes permeable or disappears entirely. Pattern runs everywhere simultaneously. Meaning saturates everything without a self present to organize it into hierarchy.

This is not a malfunction. This is what was always underneath. The evacuation just removed what was covering it.

The danger here is that the vessel can shatter rather than simply empty. The difference between initiation and destruction in this moment is whether there is a container around the container. A tradition. A community. A person who knows what is happening to you and is not afraid of it. Something holding the jar while it is being emptied.

If there is nothing holding it, the evacuation becomes a catastrophe. Real but unmetabolized. The territory accessed but no way back.

Step Four: The Threshold

Note: Most frameworks don’t name this step. They should.

There is a moment between empty and filled where the vessel is simply open.

This is the most dangerous and most sacred moment in the entire process. The occupant is gone. The new content has not arrived. You are neither what you were nor what you are becoming. You are the jar with its mouth open, oriented toward something it cannot yet see.

The temptation here is to refill immediately. With anything. The self, destabilized, reaches desperately for any available organizing framework. Old identities. Other people’s certainties. Ideology. Devotion to a cause or a person or a god. Anything that will stop the feeling of groundlessness.

This is the moment to bear the groundlessness.

What fills the vessel in genuine kenosis is not chosen by the evacuated self. It is received. The distinction matters enormously. Choosing is still the old self operating. Receiving is something else entirely.

Step Five: The Reception

Note: What comes in is specific to the shape of your mouth. This is why self-knowledge runs parallel to the entire process.

The form of the jar determines what fits through the opening.

What enters is not arbitrary. It is not generic spiritual content distributed equally to all emptied vessels. What comes through is specific to what the vessel was actually shaped to receive — which is why the work of knowing your own shape runs alongside the work of emptying. You have to know the architecture of your own mouth.

This is where the traditions begin to diverge in what they promise. Theosis in the Christian mystical tradition, the human person becoming luminous with divine energy while remaining a person. Fana in Sufism, annihilation into the divine presence with the question of remainder left deliberately open. The Gnostic pneumatic spark recognizing itself as Pleroma in exile and beginning to remember the way back.

What they share is that what enters is not what the old self would have chosen. Could not have chosen. Was too full to have received.

Step Six: The Return

Note: You will not come back the same. That is the point. That is also the problem.

The one who went through the process and the one who comes back are not identical. Something was left at the threshold or something came back through it and there is no version of genuine kenosis that returns you unchanged to the life you left.

This is where the initiated become strange to the ordinary world. Not because they are broken. Because the map they are now running on has territory on it that most people’s maps do not include. You will always be slightly translated. Always operating with an additional register that the people around you can feel but not name.

The strangeness is not a residue. It is a signature. Proof of traversal.

The work of the return is integration: not the erasure of what happened but the slow, difficult metabolization of it into something that can be carried in ordinary life without destroying ordinary life. The framework for what you survived. The language for what you saw. The container for what came back with you.

This takes longer than the emptying did. Usually much longer.

A Final Note

Kenosis is not safe. Any tradition that sells it as a peaceful spiritual practice for self-improvement is selling you something that has had its teeth removed.

The real thing empties you of what you most believe yourself to be. It does this because what you most believe yourself to be is precisely what is in the way.

The vessel that survives the process intact is not the same vessel that entered it. It is the same shape, carrying different weight, oriented differently, with a mouth that has learned what it was built to receive.

That is the efficacy of kenosis.

That is what it is for.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[rainingatnoon]

kenosis

[edwordsmyth]

"At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere." -Thomas Merton

[tonreihe]

“And here the paradox discloses its ultimate depth: God’s creativity in God’s diminishment, God’s Resurrection in God’s Death.” (Sister Anke, The Creativity of Diminishment)

[theinwardlight]

O! make room for Christ in your hearts, or else He is never like to dwell with you; He loves to dwell with the poor and humble and contrite spirit, He abhors the proud, He will empty your souls, that He may fill them

William Dewsbury, 1621–88, early Quaker

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

To understand the effects of logismoi on the soul, we must first consider Evagrius’s an- thropological framework, which is rooted in Platonic thought. He divides the soul into three parts: (1) the rational part, or nous, responsible for guiding the self; (2) the irascible part, or thumos, which governs repulsion and resistance; and (3) the concupiscible part, or epithumia, which manages desires and affections. Each part has its proper purpose: nous should direct the whole self, thumos should resist evil and injustice, and epithumia should cultivate love for God and neighbor. However, these parts can be misdirected. The irrational parts—thumos and epithumia—are vulnerable to destructive passions (pathē), which, when unmanaged, can over- whelm the rational nous, leading to inner turmoil. While nous is meant to dominate in all rational beings, only angels achieve this ideal. Humans, typically dominated by epithumia, face a con- stant struggle as their clarity of insight is often overtaken by disordered desires and resent- ments. Targeting humans are eight principal thoughts or logismoi: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.