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 years pass, however, these will have a different, deepening texture, perhaps quieter, perhaps more free, sometimes more searing and overwhelming. Gradually the intimacy and the ecstasy will become one. Gradually, too, we will begin to sense a quiet, abiding embrace in the foundation of our soul.
Spiritual maturity
In the maturity of the spiritual life, the sexual life, the human life, there is a peace, a surrender, and a still, abiding passion that runs gentle and deep. The fireworks are few; they accompanied the momentary collapse of the structures of self that allowed earlier tastes of the Mystery. Now these structures are simpler, softer, more saturated with the presence of the Divine. One thinks of the classic image of the old couple (at least as often gay or lesbian as straight) whose intimacy flows quietly, needing few words or thrilling experiences. They abide in and with one another, loved and known, knowing and loving.
One thinks too, of the wise old Indian Teacher to whom Ram Dass offered LSD in order to see what would happen. The teacher took it, smiled, and just went on sitting, meditating in unitive peace. He was already there.13
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13 In the 1960s Ram Dass, with Timothy Leary, was one of the early experimenters with LSD. Disillusioned with the transitory nature of the experience it offered, he travelled to India in search of more abiding transformation. See Ram Dass, Be here now, Hanuman Foundation, New Mexico, 1971
Old age, of course, is not essential in spiritual growth.14 Randy Shilts, in his book, And the Band Played On, tells the story of Gary Walsh, a gay man in San Francisco who went through the different phases of ‘AIDS is a spiritual gift’ and ‘AIDS is an ugly curse’ to finally reach a simple, deep tranquillity before he died. On the day he died a friend told him of the effect he was having on others, that people were coming away from conversations with him ‘like pilgrims leaving a holy shrine’.
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14 That remarkable contemplative, St. Therese of Lisieux, who died of Tuberculosis in 1897 at the age of 24, is proof enough of this.
Gary smiled his mischievous grin and interrupted her. ‘I got it, I finally got it’, he said. ‘I am love and light and I transform people by just being who I am.’ Gary recited the words carefully, like a schoolchild who had struggled hard to master a difficult lesson.15
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15 R. Shilts, And the band played on, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1987, p. 425.
Many of us have seen such simple, human holiness first-hand in our friends and lovers. Many of us are growing towards it right now.
This holy, human maturity is based on our readiness to respond to the deepest challenges of learning, trusting, surrendering, loving, becoming open always to the embrace, but also to the painful emptying, to the showing and the withdrawing, allowing the shapes of longing to fail and fall away, leaving only ‘love-longing’.16 Becoming that which we taste.
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16 Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Paulist Press, New York, 1978, p. 318.>
Conclusion
We must pay close attention, then, to our liminal experiences, our sexual desire, our orgasms, our loving communion, our spiritual life, our times of wonder and awe, our tastes of quiet, holy presence. We must pay attention to our Christmas mornings.
Equally, we must be open to our emptying and to the ‘school of love‘17 that is everyday life.
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17 A Jones, Soulmaking, SCM Press, London, 1985, p. 1. This is an ancient term referring to the discipline of monastic life.
Most of all, we must listen to our longing, not simply our desire for this or that person, but to the longing that rises from the centre of our hearts and that leads us on and on through the years, into and beyond our loves, as familiar and profound as breathing. In the embracing and the emptying this centre will become our place of stillness and truth. In the moment of death, it is through this centre that our longing will pass, opening us to the ‘first Alleluia! of my eternity‘18 and to the eternal dance of desire with the Absolute Mystery of Love in whom we will be transformed from Glory to Glory!19
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18 From the saying of Pedro Arrupe SJ regarding death. Quoted by John J. McNeil