CHAPTER 6

THE NORTH LESSON

“The absence of God is the Presence of God”

 

 

 

 

NORTH IS THE POINT OF CLARITY, of clear light. Some would call it cold. Artists like it because it shows things as they truly are.

Occasionally in those talks with Rafe I said something right, and this was one of those times. We were having cappuccino at the Stanley, looking out across the mile or so of valley toward the chimney of his little cabin up the hill. I was telling him about my recent small victory in the ongoing struggle not to come up for a visit when he was in solitude. Early in our time together he had welcomed these visits and spent a lot of time patiently teaching me the cabin drill. But after that stay in the hospital, a new factor had entered the equation, and my presence at the cabin was increasingly an intrusion. As I struggled to honor the widening space inside him, this time the strength was there. “I figured,” I said, “that if I could love you across the space of a mile, I can love you across the space of eternity.”

He broke into a huge smile. “Now you’re getting somewhere!” he exclaimed. And then, as if in appreciation, he shared with me a story from his own formative years. About 1971, he told me, he’d left the monastery in Georgia to head west in search of a deeper solitude. A friend of the monastery had offered a rustic camp in a remote corner of southern Colorado, and there, uprooted from everything familiar and totally on his own, Rafe began his hermit life. It was an exhilarating time for him in its newfound freedom, but the strain of loneliness and disorientation—not to mention the sheer physical brutality of the site—gradually took its toll. Late one afternoon he was out in a thickly tangled, rock-strewn field, trying to move a large boulder to clear a site for his cabin. He strained and strained with pickax and crowbar, but the boulder wouldn’t give.

“And suddenly I burst into tears,” he said. “I was so tired; it all just felt so lonely, so totally useless. I sat there on that rock and said to myself, ‘Listen, God didn’t ask you to come here, you came here yourself.’

“I’d never felt that way before. It was an ache all the way to the end of the universe. I realized this must be my ‘bare self.”’

Over those next long months, Rafe said, he gradually became accustomed to it. That ache all the way to the end of the universe was how things would be, how they had to be. “God can only work in us through our bare self,” he averred. “At that place, if a person is really willing to wait there, God says, Aha! Now we can get down to work. At last there is something to work with.’”

Later, in an astonishing observation, Rafe added, “We only think it’s bare because the light is so intense that it blinds us.”

Again and again Rafe taught me to work this way, not flinching from those moments of utter unremitting emptiness. “You have to endure the tedium until something gradually emerges in it,” he told me, the lesson of those long, empty winters up at the cabin. In it, not from it, he insisted. It is not the incubator of the new; it is the new itself, in the beginning of its own true dimensionality, stark and pitilessly embracing.

Sometimes, he said, he’d cry out with terror. With the ache and futility of it. With a life wasted, a God far away. “That’s the beginning of it. That’s when you’re getting somewhere. If you can only just stay present in that bare self, you’ll begin to discover how the absence of God is the presence of God.”

We are human. We want to jerk away from that moment. Fill it with distraction and activity, with our own meaning. In my case, run up the hill to Rafe’s cabin, fill it with a person, sitting in his chair in his lonely winter watch—a person, my heart told me, who would too soon be gone. Fill it with a conversation, a cappuccino, the energy flowing between us, the joy of times shared, the glow of human love. But to live in that world, to warm oneself only by its fire, means to be stranded in unbridgeable, wrenching loss when that fire flickers out. To find the eternal communion, one must not be afraid to venture into that dark, black sea of what seems inexpressible absence. More painfully, one must choose to venture out while the fire is still burning on the shore. For only what is truly begun here can continue in eternity.

Dwell in it...endure the tedium until something gradually emerges in it. Often now, I lie in my bed and simply ache. But I try to remember that this ache is what is given to me in this moment to express the presence itself; to paraphrase Rilke, it is the beginning of a love I can just scarcely bear in human form. In the cosmic sphere everything is a two-way street. By that very ache I know I am still connected in love; it is the bridge on which I cross. I remember Rafe saying, “It seems bare only because it’s so full of light.”

“If I can love you across the space of a mile, I can love you across the space of eternity.” And it proves so, slowly but truly. Many years ago in Maine, I learned this same lesson sailing my boat at night. At first it seems like blinding darkness…nothing, nothing out there. But gradually, if one doesn’t panic and reach for a flashlight, the darkness lightens and assumes shape. By its strangely companionable light I continue on.