Love is Stronger than Death

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, HOWEVER, that nuptial ambience was challenged. Still half-molten with Rafe’s presence from our night in the chapel, I was met at the funeral liturgy the next morning with the usual assurances comprising the Christian understanding of death: that Rafe had completed his work, had found what he was striving for, and was now at rest. Free of worldly cares and attachments—the requiem text proclaims—“the souls of the just” find their “repose” in a “place of great refreshment,” where in imperturbable bliss they await the final judgment and the resurrection of their bodies. It was supposed to be comforting, but the raw edge of my heart kept asking, “How do they know?”

In those first weeks after his death, I found myself caught in a crossfire between Rafe asking me to hold on—as best as I could make out—and virtually everyone else telling me to let go. The sense of Rafe’s presence continued to gather force, but whenever I attempted to verbalize the experience to a few trusted friends, even in an indirect way, or suggest that there might be a path still to be traveled together, I was met with responses ranging from wry sympathy to shocked rejoinders. Rafe’s work was done, I was reminded; he had been called to higher things. My refusal to release him could only be interpreted as clinging. Not only would it hurt me; it might very well hurt Rafe.

This was pretty frightening. I soon realized that the only category my mentors along the spiritual path could use to compute what I was saying was that of “ghost”—those unfortunate souls who because of the unusual and generally tragic circumstances of their lives fail to make a clean break and hang around to cause trouble. I knew Rafe wasn’t a ghost, but the thought that I might be exerting an unintentional psychic drag on him that could hinder his progress in the next realm was a concern I needed to take seriously, and I knew that the safest course was to do my best to release him. My friends were encouraging. For a little while, they reassured me, my love for Rafe would remain jagged and particular. But gradually, in time, Rafe would disappear into God, and my own tightly focused love would follow him there—and find its true home.

Those were the marching orders. And for a while I tried hard to walk down that path.

Marking the way along this journey of release are several wise and loving guidebooks, including the contemporary Jesuit John S. Dunne’s haunting The Reasons of the Heart. Woven through his philosophical reflections is a poignant story, clearly personally lived, of falling in love and letting that person go. The death he feels is real, and his words ring with an authentic compassion that makes this book perhaps the most eloquent statement of a scenario that might be called “Christian mystical bereavement”: falling through the lost beloved… into one’s true self.

Yet at the same time these words speak through a filter—the filter of celibate, monastic spirituality, of which Dunne is a true son. His starting assumption:

If I set my heart upon another person, then I cannot live without that person. My heart becomes divided. On the other hand, if I give my life to the journey with God, then my heart becomes whole and I can be whole in a relationship with another…

defines the inevitable outcome of this journey:

When I give my heart to my life [with God], I become capable of letting go of the other person in hope.… What happens is that I enter into a new relationship with the person I have found and lost in which my heart is no longer divided.1

It makes perfect and hopeful sense—provided one accepts that the intimate journey with God and the intimate journey with a human beloved cannot occupy the same space, and that love divides the heart. These statements, I now believe, can emerge only out of a celibate, monastic milieu. They result in an essentially tragic view of human love, in which renunciation, rather than complete self-outpouring, is the price one pays for wholeness.

Yet that is the filter through which our Christian spiritual tradition is channeled, and it is so deeply engrained that to stand against it felt like making myself a rock in a flowing streambed. “Let go!” the wisdom of tradition screamed. “Let Rafe go, let it all go; fall through the center of your nothingness into God; discover in place of Rafe… your own true self.”

But every time I tried, there at the bottom of my falling was Rafe himself. He did not seem to be asking me to let go, or to let him go; in fact, when I came anywhere near trying to renounce the whole thing as absurd and getting on with my life, I would be almost literally buoyed up by the lightness of his presence within me and a strong sense of ongoing partnership. Far from a tragic view of love, this seemed to be much more a comedy, in the classic sense of lightness and harmony and a joyous ending brought about through mutual understanding. And this, of course, is what Dante also called his walk with a beloved beyond the grave, a “divine comedy.”

Slowly but steadily the conviction grew in me that Rafe and I were indeed living one life. And this life is not simply a re-creation of his life, the master’s wisdom passed on to the student, but brand-new territory, in which our untapped gifts and our commitment to each other’s continued becoming plunge us both deeper and deeper into the Mystery of Christ—a new creation that remains open-ended for both of us.

So what to do next? Was I crazy? Did he really know something when he said this would be from here to eternity, or was I simply clutching at straws? How do you tell the difference between “the invincible certainty of your heart” and neurotic self-delusion?

In frustration, I finally turned to my own resources and set it up as a kind of Pascalian wager with myself:

If Rafe is calling me to continuing partnership, and I say yes—then the world is ours.

If Rafe is not calling me, and I say yes anyway—then I will have wasted my life in a concocted fantasy.

If Rafe is not calling me, and I say no—then cynicism wins another small victory.

If Rafe is calling me to continuing partnership, and I say no—then I will have missed the greatest opportunity of my life.

Laid out in this fashion, my course of action became obvious. The only thing I had to lose by following my instincts was the twenty or so remaining years of my life, and what did that matter, really? This seemed a gamble too compelling to pass up. Despite the majority opinion in favor of renunciation and release, the internal odds seemed strongly in favor of continuing.

This is the decision that slowly took shape in me during those dark days of the winter of 1996 in the cabin buried deep in snow, as I sorted through Rafe’s stuff and the shattered remnants of my own life. Why not choose the road not taken, walk it as far as possible, and see if there is a path that emerges out of the promise “Love is stronger than death”? Plus, of course, the presence of Rafe periodically rattling through my life like a freight train left me little choice in the matter. My Greek Orthodox friends assured me this was normal for the first forty days as the soul slowly makes its way to higher realms. But when forty days had come and gone and the communication between us became, if anything, more rather than less intense, I went back to the drawing board, starting with the books in Rafe’s and my libraries, to see if I could find anything to help me make sense of what I was actually experiencing.

Bit by bit I discovered a tradition in Christianity whose heart has always been in erotic love and that can proclaim with invincible certainty that the beloved never disappears because the two are two halves of one soul. Some say, as mounting evidence emerges, that the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene was itself a type of this eternal true love²—a conclusion that seems to me obvious to anyone reading the Easter-morning dialogue between them in the Gospel of John who has himself or herself ever known a human beloved. As the Church consolidated around male, celibate models of purity, this tradition went underground, but surfaced in veiled form in art, in medieval courtly love, and in the teachings of the hermetic and esoteric tradition.³ When you fit these pieces together with the erotic love mysticism of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and others (theologically acceptable because the beloved is Christ), a map begins to emerge of the terrain: a picture of how erotic love, the ground of all desiring and the fountainhead of all creativity, is the original and most authentic expression of who God really is.

Could Rafe and I have been called to that path? Is that why my best efforts to fall through him into God kept coming to naught—because we were supposed to walk this path together? I still am not able to claim it with certainty. But now I am at least able to claim it as an authentic possibility, a premise that will be validated or invalidated in the attempt to live it into action.