dimension is communion, intimacy.
As one matures, this desire for communion deepens and the ecstatic moment itself begins to seem somewhat incomplete, even empty, without this growing, broadening communion with another, with the other in others, in all the dimensions of one’s life and personality. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that without the allure and ecstatic possibility of self-transcendence in and through our relating, communion itself can all too easily become complacent and tasteless. (And we go out looking!)
So, we long for communion and transcendence. We long for them, and sometimes experience them as separate and sometimes as intimately interwoven. At depth, however, they are two faces of the same Mystery: Love. It is clear that those we call ‘lovers’ seek the truth of this. We see it, too, quite graphically in the almost universal desire to ‘climax together’ with the person we are having sex with. We also see it in the Christian spiritual teaching that the saintly hermit and the saintly activist are both, at depth, ecstatically transcending self and Michael Bernard simultaneously in communion with God and with all beings. Solitude and union; communion and transcendence; intimacy and ecstasy: Love.
This longing for communion and transcendence is the essence of spirituality; it is what I seek when I pray, what I try to live out in service, what I call true holiness when it matures in a human person. This is the same mystery that I long for in sex, in the daily reality of my life, in my choices, relationships and dreams. It is not esoteric and exotic, but ordinary and human, like true spirituality. It is this ordinariness, this humanness, this embodiedness that opens onto divinity. We will find it at home, in our cells, in our sweat.
This opening onto divinity is the truth of all that is genuinely human, and it cannot be restricted by the dictates of Church and society. Often, indeed, it will happen most profoundly in people and in situations outside the approved norms where people are on the edge, seeking to follow their hearts, having only their thirst for their guide. Saints, lovers and mystics have never been fit for polite society. They drink from the same well, perhaps in different ways and at different depths, but it is the same thirst and the same water. Little wonder, then, that their passionate language of love so often sounds the same!
However, mystics and lovers also know, if they are honest, that the Mystery which shows itself in intimacy and ecstasy also withdraws. We have looked at one dimension of this withdrawing. Is there another?
The Mystery that must withdraw
We long for communion and self-transcendence. In our sex and in our prayer we taste this. Sometimes this ecstatic, intimate experience is especially deep and comes through a particular person or in a particular context. We feel profound allure. Here is the chance to drink deeply and abidingly of this water, to be possessed by and to possess the Mystery, to be transformed, becoming what I taste, having ‘all my dreams come true’. And we make life choices on the basis of this liminal experience of allurement and possibility. We form relationships, join communities, serve the poor, get married, learn tantric sex, choose celibacy, take up a spiritual practice, move to the beach. All of these are ‘shapes’ our longing takes at certain moments, and sometimes throughout many years, and we embrace them hoping to drink deeply and become what we taste in and through this person, this practice, this path. We celebrate and send out invitations!
Sooner or later, however, the camellias turn brown, the honeymoon ends, and we ask, ‘Who is this at the breakfast table? My God what have I done?’ Sooner or later the Mystery withdraws. What now?
The first thing to say, again, is that the Mystery must withdraw. However holy or sexy this person, practice or path may be, the Divine Mystery lies both in and beyond them.
We cannot fulfil one another’s deepest longings. In this sense I am not ‘God’. I am not the Beloved of another’s soul for I, too, am seeking that Beloved. When I ‘fall in love’, part of what is happening is that I am projecting my own longing for union with the Mystery onto another person. The poet Rilke says that lovers are close to the Mystery, ‘it opens up to them behind each other’. However, they are ‘blocking each other’s view’, and ‘neither one can get past’.12 Someday we obscurely realise this and we say things like ‘you’re not the man I married!’, and in a certain sense that’s right.
12 RM Rilke, Duino elegies, eighth elegy, trans. D Young, Norton and Co., New York, 1978, p. 73.
However, this realisation, this withdrawing of the Mystery teaches us to do what we can do: nurture, support, love and encourage one another on our own spiritual journey, recognising, too, that in our love-making we do indeed encounter the depths of one another – those depths that go beyond the individual and into Absolute Communion. And then we can, perhaps, join hands and go forward side-by-side rather than face-to-face.
Even in this, however, we must face the fact that this person or these people who we love will one day die, and yet our longing will go on and on beyond them and into death itself.
This is also true of spiritual paths, practices and teachings. They are all fingers pointing to the moon, as Zen has it. Even Jesus said that he was ‘the Gate’ (John 10:9) and ‘the Way’ (John 14:6). The finger, the gate and the way are not the destination! We must follow the direction of the finger, go through the gate, walk the way, trusting more and more and leaving behind all that is familiar, magical and safe. We must embrace the Mystery.
The shapes of my longing, the shapes the Mystery seems to take in my life must play their part, but they must also fail. A gracious ‘letting go’ is what we are called to, but this process is usually deeply painful, even shattering, and can feel soul-destroying. All that we cling to, all of our old ambitions, values and loves will be stripped away, sometimes gradually, sometimes violently. There is nowhere to hide, except in illusion. If we can be open enough, if we can wait, if we can slowly accept the gift of trust in the midst of darkness and desolation we will come to sense, in our loneliness and emptiness, a deeper, silent, ‘dark’ embrace of the Mystery. In the emptying is the embrace.
This can only happen in the depths of my true self, and there is profound solitude in this. The person or path ‘out there’ may have helped me ‘come home’ to my deep self, but as I do I must release them in order to be free to enter the silence of this dark embrace.
Furthermore, it is in the ending of the honeymoon phase of relationships, of love-making, of spiritual life, of sex itself that we glimpse what it might actually mean to become that which we taste. It is communion and self-transcendence that we seek. Sooner or later we must learn what it means to live this out everyday, in the ordinary, mundane, unexciting, ‘non-liminal’ reality of life. We must learn what it means to transcend self again and again, not just in ecstasy, but in taking out the garbage, in the boredom and interior anguish of prayer, in the stink of the poor, or of a dying lover, whom we once embraced so passionately because they seemed to us like heaven itself. We must learn the endless concern, generosity, sensitivity and forgiveness that living a life of communion with the Other demands. This is practical, down to earth, simple and incredibly demanding. This is the other side of losing one’s life so as to save it, of death and resurrection, of becoming a lover. A transformed human being lives a real life of days, hours and minutes, of cleaning, cooking and recreation, of listening, speaking, laughing and crying.
There is a Buddhist saying, ‘After enlightenment: the laundry!’ One might just as truly add, ‘before, during and on the way to enlightenment: the laundry!’ We are not playing games here; we are not seeking just liminal thrills, for all their beauty and power. The Mystery must withdraw into the ordinariness of everyday, for that is the place of learning and of transformation.
In the midst of this hard work of becoming, however, there will still be tastes and glimpses of that which we seek. These refresh us, renew us and encourage us, and they are vital. As the
