The Mystery that shows Itself must withdraw. It must seduce us. It must play a game of ‘now, and not yet’ with us, enticing us, leading us on and on, inflaming our longing at deeper and deeper levels. It must also teach us that the taste of this ‘living water’ is not enough, and allow us to find both bliss and bitterness in the tasting (especially when we become ‘hooked’). It must teach us to follow the withdrawing, to let go and go deeper, learning the lessons of how to become, in the abiding, ordinary, everyday reality of our lives, that which we taste and thirst for. Nothing less will satisfy our hunger, fulfil our longing, and transform our humanity into the divinity we seek.
How does this look in practice, in people’s actual lives? Firstly, it is important to say that there are as many answers to this question as there are people to ask it. The human journey of transformation, while it has universal qualities, is profoundly personal and particular and will look very different in individual lives as each of us experiences growth and purification in ways we least expect, but most need.11 Those of us marginalised by mainstream society, both secular and religious, because of our sexuality need to remember this, as does anyone who seeks to guide us. The ways we experience and embody our deepest longings often look very different from the ways sanctioned by a heterosexist culture, and likewise our path of transformation will look very different.
11 R Burrows, op. cit., pp. 108-109. Burrows shows how the ‘Dark Night’ can look very different according to people’s different needs and personalities.
In us the free, uncontrolled Spirit of God offers a gift to humanity, freeing others to embrace this journey so particular, so universal. We must dare to be different; we must risk becoming our true selves.
The heart of our longing
What then are the universal qualities of the transforming journey? They are many and there are many books written about them in all religions. However, the ‘bottom line’, I believe, is the fact that, in the end, we are all longing for the same thing. In our spiritual practices, in our sexual desire, in the lives and relationships we build, when all the fetishes, dreams and different ‘shapes’ our longing has taken over the years – when all these have run their course, worn out or faded away – we will find that we are all longing for communion with the Other, and self-transcendence in and through that communion. Communion and transcendence. Intimacy and ecstasy.
From the first orgasm, and in every orgasm since, I have sought that ecstatic moment, and its allure colours so much of my life still. Seeking out its possibility, feeling its approach, surrendering to it and allowing the rigid sense of self to melt deliciously as it rises within me, letting myself be caught up in the juicy passion that draws me toward it. There is an aloneness in this, as I close my eyes, go deeply into my experience of pleasure and let the ecstatic flow become all that I am. There is a deep solitude in the drinking of this water.
However, I also long to share this ecstatic vulnerability with another person, and that which I seek to drink in ecstasy, I am drawn to in and through other persons. Put simply, I long to have sex with another person, however intense solitary sexual pleasure may be. At a conference on AIDS I once tried to persuade a Church group that we needed to reassess the potential goodness and grace in all kinds of sexual relating, including ‘recreational sex’. An agitated woman finally snapped at me, ‘Well why can’t you just masturbate?’ I snapped back, ‘I do, don’t you?’ My real answer, however, would be that it simply is not the same. There is another whole dimension of life – and of ecstasy itself – present in my relating with another, or other persons, whether it is in a casual encounter or in a lifelong relationship. This other 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