When Heidegger says, ‘that which itself shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the Mystery‘3, he is expressing a truth that all of us know at a deep, soul level. We also know it in our bodies. Perhaps the experience of orgasm is the clearest example of this for most of us. In that very moment of ecstasy, in that tasting, that bliss, that knowing, that briefest communion with that which cannot be named, as we are thrown over the peak of consciousness, at the burning ‘white hot tip of sexuality‘4 as ‘It’ shows itself, it withdraws. We are left astonished, filled and shattered by sex, but still we are left.
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3 F Browning,The culture of desire, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 88.
4 R Burrows, Ascent to love, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1987, p. 115.
What is going on here? Is ‘God’ playing games with us? (And there are names for games like this!) Are we being enticed, teased and abandoned? It is relevant to state that this precise question is also faced in the spiritual life of prayer, as the One who set our hearts on fire seems to abandon us and we are left ‘on the streets’, ‘beaten’, ‘wounded’ and ‘stripped’ like the bride in the Song of Songs.5 This is a serious question, and in our longing we ask it from the depths of our heart.
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5 Song of Songs 5:7.
Could it be that this showing-and-withdrawing actually reveals to us something of the nature of the Mystery itself, something of our own nature, and something of the nature of human transformation? Could it be essential to the spiritual journey? In the Book of Exodus, Moses, after receiving the Law, asks to see God’s face. God tells Moses to hide in the cleft of a rock and as He passes, God will shield him with His hand, so that Moses can look out and see God’s back (Exodus 33:18-23). It would be death to see God face to face – not in the sense of being punished, but because the encounter would be humanly overwhelming, unbearable; it would ‘shatter the container’ of the human.
To encounter the Mystery, the Unnameable One, ‘God’, is to go beyond words, concepts, images and doctrines. It is to stand naked, utterly vulnerable in the embrace of the ineffable essence of That Which Is, encountering It in ourselves, as ourselves, as All. This is that which ‘no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has it entered into the mind of humans to conceive’ (1 Corinthians 2:9). This encounter can only be borne in the briefest of touches; a full revelation of the Mystery is literally unthinkable, impossible for human life as we now live it. Even our fleeting glimpses baffle and stun us.
In the immediate withdrawing of the Mystery, even as it embraces us, as it licks our lips, we see its nature as utterly ‘more’, ultimately ‘beyond’, transcending all, just as in its showing we see its immanence; for it is closer to us than we are to ourselves – intimate and immediate in the depths of our humanness.
In our truly liminal experiences, in the depths of prayer and in the depths of sex, I believe we do indeed encounter this Absolute Mystery, showing and withdrawing, embracing and emptying, and we long for it with all our heart and soul. ‘My body pines for you, like a dry weary land without water’, cries the Psalmist (Psalm 63:1) and the mystic and the lover in us cry out with him. We know the yearning of those who ‘are willing to make shipwrecks of themselves in order to gain the one they love’.6 It is the withdrawing of the Mystery that kindles and re-kindles this longing.7
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6 Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by RS Pine-Coffin, Penguin Classics, Middlesex, 1961, p. 232 (Book X, Chapter 27). 7 This ‘showing and withdrawing’ of the Mystery, the ‘emptying and embracing’ reflect the two great movements of the Christian spiritual life: the Apophatic (negative) Way and the Cataphatic (affirmative) Way.
This, then, is the second gift of the withdrawing: we are seduced onto the spiritual journey, the human journey to maturity, union and transformation.
In every era and in every part of life there is a tendency for us to focus on ‘experiences’, ecstatic ‘thrills’ – the tastes and touches we have been discussing. This tendency is especially marked in sexuality and spirituality, where the tastes are so intoxicating, fleeting and profound. These tastes are essential; they are seeds, glimpses of that fullness to which we are called. However, they are not the Journey itself, not transformation, not mystical union, not enlightenment. They set us on the road – perhaps they are even glimpses of the destination – but we have not yet arrived. Indeed we have hardly set out! If we become addicted to simply seeking more and more ‘experiences’, whether sexual or spiritual, we never will arrive. We all know this tendency in sexuality, but the seduction in spirituality can be more subtle, more compelling and more soul destroying.
So what is happening? Firstly, some element of this ‘addiction’ is probably inevitable in our yearning and longing, for the taste of ecstasy, however it comes, is so delicious, so overwhelming. Of course we seek it again and again!
‘You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet perfume. I tasted you and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and I am inflamed with love of your peace’, says Saint Augustine,8 and in our different ways we know what he means. However, we must allow the withdrawing to take place. It is the withdrawing that will draw us towards the transformation, to the abiding fulfilment of that which we taste so briefly in our ecstasies. How does this happen?
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8 Saint Augustine, op. cit.
To become that which we taste
When we taste the Mystery we long to drink deeply of it, to take it into ourselves, to be possessed by it, to surrender to it, to become it in an abiding way, ‘forever and ever’. To become that which we taste. I think of our images of sexual ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’, not just our desire to ‘do it’ with this or that person, but to ‘drink them in’, ‘gobble them up’, nibble, lick, suck, swallow – all, the ‘eating’ metaphors and delights of sex. This is mirrored very powerfully in the images of spiritual communion, where we eat and drink ‘the body and blood of the Lord’, our very bodies merging and becoming transformed into the One who is the Beloved of our souls.
This is the heart of our yearning: to become that which we taste and hunger for, not briefly, but fully, totally, permanently, being utterly transformed into that which we desire so deeply. Union. Ecstasy. The ‘Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover‘9, the seeker transformed into that which she seeks.
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9 St John of the Cross, The dark night, st. 5, trans. K Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD, ICS Publications, Washington DC, 1973, p. 296.
This truly is to die to ourselves, to lose our life so as to find it (Luke 9:24), to enter into the mystery of death and resurrection. This is what we hunger and thirst for in our bodies, in our sexuality no less than in our spirituality, and this is what we taste in both. All that is deeply and authentically human is a pathway into this transformation, but sexuality and spirituality draw us most profoundly, most ecstatically. I think of Jesus speaking to the woman at the well (John 4:5-42), seducing her onto her spiritual journey with the promise of a spring of living water that would never run dry. We taste this spring and we thirst for the day when rivers of this living water will rise within us flowing out of our ‘belly’ and welling up to eternal life, eternal union, eternal love (John 7:38).10
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