CHAPTER 4

THE COMPASS ROSE

Lovers—were not the other present, always
spoiling the view!—draw near to it and wonder…
Behind the other, as though through oversight,
the thing’s revealed…But no one gets beyond
the other, and so world returns once more.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies

NOT FOR RAFE, THOUGH. With an utter, passionate commitment to “the thing revealed,” which for him was the Mystery of Christ, he was determined that the two of us would draw near to it together and wonder, and not spoil each other’s view. From early on in our time together he became convinced that the purpose of our human love was to form a conscious connection that would survive his physical death, and to that end he bent his efforts. The four lessons he taught me, which he himself lived well, have in the months since his death become the lifelines by which I thread my way on this Orpheus journey.

I fell into the habit of seeing them as a compass rose, a lesson from each of the four quarters: east, north, south, west. This is, of course, not the way he taught them. Lessons with Rafe were always catch-as-catch-can events, an insight snatched here or there while tinkering with an old snowmobile or feeding a woodstove. But if the format was casual, the content was not. The teachings are uncompromisingly difficult spiritual truths, and on at least two occasions were accompanied by an energy transmission that in traditional terms might be called baraka or “infused grace.” I say this not to mythologize Rafe, but simply to speak the obvious: that after years of living in intimate proximity to spiritual fire, as Rafe surely had, he had become a bush that burns but is not consumed. Herein, I believe, lies the integrity of the path, and the hope of those who truly embrace it.