The Empty Place

 I meet a lot of young people who say they don’t believe in the religion in which they grew up.  In part, their young faith was more a belief in what their parents or teachers said.  They believed the “Authority.”  In time, with some independence, they stop going to services, or meetings.  Then they stop believing all that was said about the Power, the Divine, yet they might continue to believe in the value of the ethics.  Love, equality, kindness, compassion and openness for instance.  The problem lies in the emptiness of the heart.  It cannot be filled with substitutes for the Power, the Light in the Darkness, if you will.  It is what I see as a ‘Dry life.”  They abstain from something their heart craves. Subsequently, they find it hard to live the principles they believe in.   It is like the alcoholic, the addictive person, who believes in the principles of recovery, the ethics, but still craves or hungers for something.  They stopped going to meetings, to being of service, to reading the recovery scriptures.  Been there.  Done that.