CHAPTER 1

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

When love with one another so
interinanimates two souls,
the abler soul, which thence doth flow
defects of loneliness controls.

JOHN DONNE, The Ecstasy

WHAT THE THEOLOGIAN SHRINKS FROM, the poet grasps intuitively. I write as one of a small band of those who have been invited to search for a beloved in the realm beyond death. It was not a journey I ever expected to make.

My partner in this undertaking I knew for the five years of our human time together as “Rafe”—Brother Raphael Robin, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado. In the last years of his life we formed a close and inscrutable friendship: in part teacher-student, in part kindred spirits, and completely devoted to each other. Accepting the insurmountable constraints upon the full expression of our love, we still—in the words of Dylan Thomas—“sang in our chains like the sea.”

For a good three months before his death on December 11, 1995, Rafe and I both had a strong intuition that it was imminent. Physically, there was nothing obvious to confirm this. Certainly he was aging, a man nearly seventy-one still living a brutally labor-intensive life in his little mountain hermitage above St. Benedict’s Monastery. But it was a graceful aging. He was still wiry and angular and fit to do a day’s work. And yes, he had somewhat high blood pressure, and a serious bout with an infection that past summer had hospitalized him for a week. But he had recovered, and while his energy was somewhat fragile, there were no obvious signs of trouble up ahead—only, as Rafe put it, “a growing inner urgency” to complete what needed to be done.

But Rafe didn’t live out of an ordinary consciousness. His awareness grew out of the mystical prayer that for forty years had been central to his life. From that center, he could sense the completion and yearned for it. And after two years of intense interaction with him, some of that same awareness was rubbing off on me. I fought against the realization with common sense, but knew it anyway in my heart. We both sensed keenly that the purpose of our time left together was, as Rafe put it, to forge a conscious connection that would endure “from here to eternity.”

“Do you suppose that’s what we were called together for?” Rafe pondered one day as we were driving back from a doctor’s appointment in Aspen. Of that much, at least, we were fairly certain: we had to have been called together; there was simply too much synchronicity to explain it away as chance. From halfway across the continent and against incredible odds, our lives seemed to have been drawn together on a slowly converging course. Before I knew him, I’d lived on an island in Maine where I thought I’d be for the rest of my life. Well ensconced in a difficult but stable second marriage, I tended a small Episcopal congregation as their part-time priest, wrote and edited for additional income, and was slowly developing a ministry as a spiritual guide and retreat leader.

Out to Snowmass in December 1990 to attend a training workshop in Centering Prayer, I found myself one morning in rapt conversation with the monastery hermit/plumber who had come by to thaw out the frozen shower drain in the barnroom apartment assigned to me for the week. It was December 10, five years to the day from the last conversation I would ever have with him. We stood there in the monastery barnyard—I remember he had one blue boot on and one orange boot—and for more than an hour we talked, the words flooding forth from some unknown depth in our souls. Of the torrents of words and feeling that passed between us, I can remember only one sentence—when he suddenly took both my hands in his and said, “It’s all so simple, so very simple…” But what remains with me vividly to this day is my recollection of a circle of light that shone out from Rafe and enfolded us both, and the deep sense of comfort and familiarity between us, as if we had somehow always known each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gone on from eternity.

Back home in Maine, the episode quickly faded from my consciousness. But one snowy February morning for no particular reason I can yet come up with, I sat down and wrote a letter to the abbot of St. Benedict’s Monastery asking if there was some way I might return to Snowmass for an extended time of solitude and discernment—say, two or three months. I was astonished when two weeks later he phoned and said yes.

My troubled marriage unraveled quickly. Within a matter of weeks my husband announced that he was in love with another woman and promptly started divorce proceedings. I could have stayed and fought for the house, but what would have been the point? Staking my future on nothing more than a deep inner prompting that the time in Snowmass was an appointment I dared not miss, I packed up my gear and headed west.

I didn’t connect with Raphael right away. After that first conversation, there didn’t seem to be any real urgency to get to know him better. We were already old friends, and there was an easy sense between us that the details of each other’s lives would fill in as they needed to. He’d stop by sometimes with eggs or bread from the monastery, or to work on the old pump that kept the house where I was staying precariously in water. Little by little we discovered that we’d read the same books and wrestled with the same questions. Like myself, he was fascinated by G. I. Gurdjieff, that early twentieth-century spiritual genius who had laid out a path of inner transformation frequently referred to as the “Fourth Way.” Most of Rafe’s library up at the hermitage (in addition to his Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) consisted of books by Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff’s three most prodigious disciples, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and J. G. Bennett. In a self-taught fusion of Fourth Way ideas and Christian apophatic mysticism, his deepest wish was “to have enough being to be nothing.”

Gradually over the next two years, as I shuttled back and forth between Maine and Colorado, our lives became more intertwined. One dismally dark Maine winter day he phoned me up out of the blue to see if there was an uninhabited offshore island he might come live on—“to join you more deeply in what your life has been,” he said. And one golden Colorado morning that next summer, in the back of the monastery chapel right after mass, he again took both my hands in his and searched my eyes with a look so full of solemn portent that I knew he’d be by later on and the love so long smoldering between us would burst into flame.

Wherever Rafe’s intuition was leading him, we both realized that our human journey together would be brief. I closed out the remnants of my life in Maine and headed back as quickly as possible to join him full-time in the last remarkable chapter of his human walk. From June 1994, when I finally arrived full-time, until his death eighteen months later, we gave ourselves fully to “the experiment,” as Rafe liked to call our relationship.

Particularly in those final three months of his life, when we both knew with gathering inner certainty that the scepter of death hung over us, we worked hard to set in place a new mode of communication that might guide us in the next phase of the journey. I will speak of it in much more detail later, but in essence this had to do with a radical emotional reprogramming so that I would be prepared to receive and reciprocate his presence, not at the level of memory or sentimentality, but as a raw infusion of spiritual love and energy into my own vital body—“the body of hope” as he would shortly name it.

“‘For certain very high cosmic purposes it is essential that man acquire a soul. The normal way of doing it is through the union of the sexes.’ What do you suppose he means by that?” Rafe was fond of quoting from J. G. Bennett’s little book, Sex, which had become his unofficial guidebook to these uncharted new waters. We both knew it wasn’t physical union that Bennett had in mind, but something deeper: a union of hearts that would endure beyond the grave and allow us to grow toward that one complete soul we already sensed ourselves to be. But to get up to speed for this soulwork beyond the grave required a twin drill on my part—one that Rafe had already come upon on his own in his twenty years or so of solitude up at the cabin: the adamant rejection of “last year’s language” (any kind of comfortable habit, clinging, or stopping at a lesser goal), along with a stubborn trust in something leading inward. “Your heart must be invincible,” he told me, his eyes flashing meteor-blue. “You must trust the invincibility of your own heart.”

Were we ready for the moment when it came? Who knows? After a weekend of solitude in his little cabin and a glorious last day down at the monastery in which his words to everyone were “I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful,” he was preparing to head back up to the hermitage when he was felled by a cardiac arrest. His heart burst; it was sudden, swift, and virtually painless. Time: 11:26 P.M. At home, asleep, I came bolt awake.

THE WAKE

Rafe was buried according to Trappist funeral custom—simple, stark, and haunting. He was delivered home from the undertaker’s on a plain pine board to lie in the monastery chapel throughout the night, the paschal candle burning at his head until the requiem mass the following morning.

At first I had not planned to attend the wake or the funeral. Since Rafe was now in cosmic space, why celebrate a departed body? But something dragged me there anyway, just as the bells began to toll, and I took my place at the end of the procession receiving his body in the church. Just down from a day of solitude at the hermitage, I had my duffel bag still with me containing a heavy sweater and a pair of bootliners. It was a good thing. I would need them.

After the brief service and a few moments of silent meditation, I joined the groundswell of monks and friends filing past Rafe to pay their final respects. As I stood before him, suddenly I knew I was not leaving. It was as if a slight motion of will, not quite a physical breath, jumped from Rafe to me, and neither of us was going anywhere. One of the monks seemed to catch it, too; he reappeared shortly with a piece of cake and cup of tea on a dinner tray—“He told me to get it for you,” the monk said. I ate my cake and downed my tea, the last bit of warmth I would have on that bitterly cold December night that changed my life forever.

I do not know how to explain this, and I do not want to exaggerate. I stayed there the entire night, mostly kneeling by Rafe’s side, my hand slipped into his, in the flickering light of the Advent wreath at his feet and the paschal candle at his head. The last monk keeping watch quit at 11 P.M., and from there till vigils at three-thirty the next morning, there was nothing but love, a gratitude conveyed entirely through the skin—body to body, will to will. For that night I knew no sleepiness, no regret; it was the most profoundly luminous experience I have ever had. All was forgiven, understood, poured out; that which in life had been hidden in the changeability of bodies and emotions became steady and consistent. There was a distinct nuptial feeling to it: a sense that our life together was not ending; it was only now truly beginning. And somewhere in those cold, dark hours, a voice that was distinctly Rafe’s came to me saying, “I will meet you…in the body of hope.”

At about 4 A.M., after the service of vigils was over, I adjourned to the church reception room where another of the monks brought me, and himself, a cup of tea before the hour-long monastic meditation began at four-thirty. Not trusting myself, I kept the conversation pretty much to small talk, and the whole encounter seemed low-key. Only several weeks later did he tell me, “I loved being with you for that time. You’d been awake all night—you’d been with Raphael all night—and your whole being was just oozing love. It was pouring out of you.”