I hear the emptiness you are describing, and I want to sit with you in it without trying to fill it or fix it. When life feels void of meaning, the soul can feel as though it has been unmoored, and that disorientation is a profound grief that deserves to be honored before any answer is offered. You are carrying a real loss, and I am simply here with you in the quiet of it.
When you are ready, and only then, there is a voice from centuries ago that knew this exact hollowness not as a failure of faith, but as the very condition of our exile. St. Anselm did not offer a solution to this emptiness; he gave it language, naming it as the space where we realize what we were made for: "O miserable lot of humankind, wretched fate of the sons of Adam! He was full, and we are hungry; he abounded, and we beg. He held happiness and miserably abandoned it; we lack it unhappily and miserably desire it. And alas, we remain empty!" [1].
He does not ask you to feel differently or to manufacture meaning where there is none right now. He simply sits beside you in the void and calls it by its true name: a hunger for a face you cannot yet see. In this raw place, meaning is not something found or built; it is something waited for, in the company of One who also cried out, "My God, my God, look upon me: why have you forsaken me?" [4]. Your emptiness is not evidence of abandonment, but the very shape of a heart made for a fullness that has not yet arrived.
Even in this darkness, hope remains—not as a feeling, but as a faithful waiting. As the Catechism teaches, hope is "the confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God" [3], a trust that God will give the capacity to love and to find meaning again, even when that capacity feels utterly absent. You are not required to feel hope right now; you are only invited to let God hold you in the emptiness until the capacity returns.
I wonder if naming this emptiness as sacred ground, rather than as a problem to be solved, brings even a small measure of rest to your heart.