Why you don’t need to “fill up your cup”

Has anyone ever told you to “fill up your cup”? Or that “you can’t pour from an empty cup?” As an attendee of multiple women’s retreats and bible studies over the last 30 years, this was a common phrase. (sidenote: I wonder how often this was part of the mens’ discussions?) I’m sure I’m guilty of having said things like this myself, too. The understanding was that we needed to constantly be filling ourselves up – with scripture, with prayer, with worship music. We needed to fill our hearts and minds with Bible verses and godly words. The hope, of course, was that, we would be able to draw on this well of goodness throughout the rest of the day. It was the basis of the “Quiet Time” that so many of us grew up with.

Raise your hand if you ever felt guilty for not having a “consistent” quiet time.

As I’ve been exploring new ideas in faith this past year, I’m falling more and more in love with the idea of just letting everything go. Today, something snuck into my mind, and I’m gonna put it out here. I may be totally taking a verse out of context, but hooray! I don’t care anymore because I’m not deifying scripture. So, take these thoughts with a grain of salt. (That’s actually a really great approach to all things in life!)

I was thinking about how Jesus prayed, “Take this cup from me” in the garden, the night that he was betrayed by Judas. I have always interpreted that to mean that he didn’t want to die. That he was asking for God to step in and take the burden of the cross away from him. I’ve written from that perspective, talked about it in those terms, etc. BUT, let’s pretend that his saying “take this cup from me” actually meant, “take this cup from me because I don’t need it anymore.” Like, what if the “cup” was his human self, his ego-mind, the self that he had allowed because that’s just part of being human… and he was saying, “all these thoughts, judgments, desires, ideas I have, let me just get rid of them, let them go. All these human-oriented things that I’ve been relying on, I don’t need them anymore.”

When he is at the last supper, and he says, “this is my body broken for you,” maybe the message is that we can break. Our whole faith world, everything that we know and believe to be true, can fall apart, be ripped apart, shredded, beaten to a pulp, destroyed – and, yet, we will rise. When he says, “this is my blood, poured out for you”, maybe the message is that we can empty, too. All those things that we rely on to give us life, to sustain us, can be totally removed, poured out and, yet, we will survive.

Could it be that this “cup” we keep filling up isn’t actually needed?

Jesus’ body was wrecked, his literal life-blood released from his body… and yet he survived. He went through a hellacious experience, where everything we consider to be critical and necessary for life was destroyed in him, and still, he lived on.

Deconstructing your beliefs or leaving your faith or kicking religion to the curb, however you want to say, may not be a physical death, but it sure as heck feels like one. Ostracized from your church and the friend community you’ve belonged to for years, letting go of “magical” thinking, accepting the reality of your present situation, not knowing what music to listen to anymore or what kind of books to read… not knowing where to find new friends, how to teach your kids about God, how to find comfort during a difficult time… feeling lost and lonely and pissed off and bitter and sad and missing your old life while also being angry that you lived in it for so long… I mean, that sounds and feels an awful like trauma and grief to me!

But, the lesson we learn from this deconstruction experience is the very thing the cross represented: We can break and we will rise again. We can empty ourselves of all these ideas and judgments and principles and beliefs that sustained us and we will survive. What if your deconstruction, your walking away, your total emptying of your ego-self is exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “do this in remembrance of me?” What if leaving behind your faith is the purest form of following in Jesus’s footsteps?

When I say “pour out” or “empty yourself,” I am NOT talking about depleting yourself in service to others. Emptying yourself is not about giving away your energy, it’s about refusing to cling to anything. Emptying yourself in this way actually gives you MORE energy (after a while, It can be really hard at first.) THIS is the whole point of meditation and contemplative prayer – learning not to cling; Learning to let our thoughts go by without grabbing onto them; Recognizing that our thoughts are kind of like those sushi bars where the plates go by on a little conveyor belt. You watch them pass and it’s like, no no no no no, YES! I’ll take that one! Then you sit there and chew on it and allow it to fill you up. We do that all the time. Every moment we have options as to what to think, what to believe, whether to judge something as right/wrong, good/bad. And sometimes without us realizing it (not gonna lie, my conveyor belt sometimes gets a little haywire), the thoughts whiz by and we grab hold of one and bite into it like it’s salvation.

We treat our beliefs like our life depends on them.

But, maybe Jesus was trying to show us that our life doesn’t depend on…well… anything that we think it does.

What I’m finding these days is that I function MUCH better when my “cup” is totally empty. When I refuse to cling to an idea or belief or judgment as though my life depends on it. When I stay open and centered in that emptiness, I feel so much peace and I am so much more able to live my life because I am not trying to make my life into something that the cup applies to. Does that make sense?

When we are filling ourselves up, we are constantly trying to adjust our output to the situation that comes up. Our response is limited to whatever we’ve put in the cup. But if you stay open and empty, you can respond to the situation as it is. Kind of like… if you are given a problem to solve and then handed a bag of tools, there is a 99.9% chance you will assume the tools you were given are relevant to the solution. You will spend all your time and energy trying to use those tools to solve the problem. BUT, if you are given a problem to solve and nothing else, you will be open and willing to consider a thousand ways of dealing with the issue.

I’ve seen people ask, “but how do you let go?” At first, it can be challenging, and the thing is that it’s kind of hard to tell someone else how to do it. But, I’ll share some thoughts in future posts and give you some ideas to try. In the meantime, I invite you to sit with these ideas and see what comes up. The FIRST step in letting go is identifying what exactly you’re holding onto.

Are you holding onto the belief that the Bible is 100% true? That it’s the literal “voice of God”? Are you holding onto a literal understanding of Jesus’ resurrection? Are you holding onto certain ideas of the sacraments? One way to get into this more is to ask what have I said (or others) that offends you? Makes you cringe? Makes you think, “uh NO! That is NOT right!”

Start there: identify what you’re holding onto.

Take some time to figure out what it is that you are filling your cup up with.