We humans construct systems. We are driven to do it. This is what we must do, and it is what we ought to do.

But we must do more. Though we are called to construct systems, we are called to more than mere construction.

We are called to ensoul our systems with meaning, and to saturate them with personal purpose.

This task of ensouling systems with meaning and purpose is the essential task of design.

Design’s ensouling task drives us beyond conceptual limits, into inconceivable being. This inconceivable being is real, but cannot be grasped by the comprehending fingers of an objective mind. This being is incomprehensible because it comprehends us. We enter it by recognizing our being within it, our belonging to it.

From the vantage of conceptual limitation, inconceivable being appears impossible, valuelessness, irrelevant, nonsensical, nonexistent, null deadness.

But it is precisely from this nothingness that transformative insights irrupt, ex nihilo — always ex nihilo.

When we work together, as designers, in the best designerly faith, to overcome the limits of our personal finitude and the omniscience this finitude projects around us — that naive conviction that we already know what is worth knowing — we receive gifts of insight, of new givenness from nowhere, from nothingness itself.

We undergo this for the sake of our collaborator. For the sake of shared understanding and mutual assent with our collaborator we sacrifice our old, narrow omniscience for something new, wider, higher, greater, better, more accommodating.

Design cannot do its system-ensouling work without designers ready to answer the call to transcend conceptual and logical limits for the sake of another. This is the higher eros. Loveless design is not design.

After we receive such gifts ex nihilo, nothing is ever the same again.

We can no longer mistake nothingness for lifeless, meaningless nonexistence.

Nothingness is revealed, ex nihilo, to be the inner surface of inexhaustibly pregnant possibility.

And nihilism, once self-evident, is revealed, also ex nihilo, to be an unnecessary evil, and a naivety to which we are no longer subject.

When nihilism is exnihilated, we are exnihilists.

For too long we have separated body and soul, system and purpose. Souls live in and through bodies and systems. Bodies and systems are empty and purposeless without the purposeful habitation of souls. Soulless systems and debased bodies are ravenous things; they consume and annihilate meaning instead of producing and sustaining it. The seventh day is meant to sanctify the other six, not flee them. Our places of worship are not sacred asylums and holy quarantines. Heaven is not distanced above earth, it embraces it, involves it, enriches it. The world below is starved, parched and dark under heavy thunderheads who refuse to rain.

Thank God for nihilitude. Nihilitude darkly, gently protects our finitude from reabsorption into the Infinite, to whom each of us and all of us belong.

Thank God for nothing. For it is through nothing that we are given the gift of everything, and every thing each everything contains.

This is the kind of thing I normally veil with password protection. But no protection is protective enough for an unwanted being. Whoever is provoked to unkindness by this kind of thing won’t be stopped by flimsy veils, skin, walls, steel plating, missile defenses or arguments.