CHAPTER 7

THE SOUTH LESSON

“Everything That Can Be Had in a Hug
Is Right Here”

THE THIRD CORNER OF THE TRIANGLE in which our learning unfolded was at Rafe’s shop. He had a fifteen-by-thirty-foot workshop attached to the back of the monastery woodshed, its battered garage door opening out into a shopyard well littered with snowmobile carcasses, tractor parts, and miscellaneous two-cycle engines in extremis. This corner of Rafe’s universe was really base camp to support the runs up the hill in winter, the mile-and-a-half snowtrail up to the cabin.

A good deal of the interaction between us—the bulk of it, actually—was simply putting in time together at the shop. We worked along, mostly scavenging old snowmobile parts from the hulks in the yard to assemble one or two machines that would make it through the winter. Rafe would toss a few clumps of wood into the old coalstove, and when it got warm enough to work, we’d set to it. After a while, I could begin to anticipate what he’d need next: hand him tools or spark plugs, or fit my hands into places his were too large to reach. Long habituated to working alone, he suffered my presence more than welcomed it. But when I made motions to leave, he’d start a conversation. “Your hands cold?” he’d ask. “Let’s warm them on the stove.” Moving over to the stove, we’d huddle in its warmth, talking about this or that. In those moments the gems would usually come, those famous Raphael one-liners such as “I want to have enough being to be nothing.”

The south: point of warmth, of assistance from above. The winter sun midway in its course, melting the icicles of the night, filling the earth with heat, from a fire far beyond the earth’s magnitude. To receive this fire without being destroyed, to be nourished and incandescent with a love scarcely endurable in human flesh, the bush that burns but is not consumed.…

I was a kid of the new school. I thought hugs were good, that there wasn’t much that couldn’t be fixed by someone holding you close.

Rafe was a kid of the old school. Raised in the monastic practices of a generation ago, and to the very end of his days unreconciled with his sexuality, he had spent a lifetime taming his passions, which he regarded as alien forces driving him away from his yearning for complete absorption in God. Sometimes we did hug, and the space between us grew vast and luminous. At other times he was rough and removed, springing back like a wild animal from a trap. “Just pandering to weakness, pandering to weakness,” he’d mutter.

That always threw us into a bad cycle. He’d mock my clutching and clinging and declaim, “Get thee a husband!” I’d castigate his “flight into holiness” and taunt, “If you’re such a great hermit, why don’t you just stay up there awhile?” In two years we’d been around that circle many times.

And that’s how it started to go again, that Ash Wednesday morning at the shop. We were by the stove after a good piece of work on a clutch assembly, but internally things had been going downhill. All through that morning I could feel him gradually slipping away into that “high lonesome” in himself, moody and withdrawn, the place where I could never find him. And as my own sense of fearfulness and rejection grew, I watched it trigger that same dumb move I always made in these circumstances. A whiny little voice deep from childhood began to speak: “Rafe, can we have a hug?”

He started to draw back, as he always did at these times. Then, suddenly, something different happened. I caught it the instant it started. Those blue eyes, rather than turning angry and aloof, became intense and focused right on me as he said, “You’ll see; everything that can be had in a hug is right here.”

“Don’t give me that Platonic stuff—” I began, then stopped dead in my tracks. The last thought I can remember thinking is “Dear God, he’s right!” The most intense feeling of union, as powerful as any physical hug that had ever arched between us—far more so, in fact—was all right there. For a split second I felt it, knew it: this was the energy of pure intention, beyond form, inside form, at the heart of it. Aimed directly at me.

A split second—and then my mind shut down altogether. I couldn’t finish that thought, couldn’t even reconstruct the start of it. Several hours later, trying to replay what had happened, my mind could still only creep to the precipice of it before falling off into nothing. Maurice Nicoll would surely have said that the inrush of energy into my higher emotional center had completely overwhelmed the lower centers. My usual mind was carried away in the floods, like the pump house at the Stanley. The last fact I could hold on to was that the inner essence of the outer hug was there, perfect and in its entirety, the naked thing itself. Rafe wasn’t withdrawing, wasn’t fleeing into holiness. He was simply sharing with me the full brunt of what he knew: that the outer, physical form somehow slowed down or thickened something that could be communicated instantaneously, as raw intention. That first time, the intensity of it overwhelmed my system. It would be a while before a body of hope could take shape in me able to contain and receive energy in that form.

I have continually resisted the temptation to mythologize Rafe. Partly because he insisted on it. He considered himself—and was—very much a man: not an angel despite the name they had given him at the monastery, nor a shaman clad in jeans and work-shirt, but a flesh-and-blood, fragile human being, struggling against his considerable inner passions and addictions. And yet, it still is true that during those long years of work on himself, he had developed certain powers that were beyond the ordinary, that one might indeed call shamanic. I remember him telling me quite clearly one day up at the cabin, “Ten years ago I would have married you. But I didn’t know then what I know now.”

What Rafe had learned in those years is, I believe, something of the ancient and mostly vanished science of the transformation of sexual energy.

He never spoke much about the precipitating circumstances. Occasionally pieces of the story would come out, like slivers of glass from an old wound. Alone, still agonizing over the debacle of whatever had happened shortly after his arrival in Colorado—“an attraction,” he snapped, “it just sort of ended”…face-to-face with his blind, passionate nature, choosing to cut it off cold—“like an alcoholic can’t take that first drink”—at whatever frightful cost to his psyche and that of the one he left behind, he stumbled on toward an unknown God who demanded all.

Out of those years of intense wrestling with his passions, there gradually crystallized in him a certain ability to “put” his soul wherever he wanted it—to travel beyond his physical body through the force of conscious will. Essentially, as I see it, he learned how to tap into the enormous generative force of his unexpressed sexual energy, and through it, to concentrate the whole of himself in his heart and catapult it outward in an intense psychic dose. For, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing describes it, “The heart is as truly there where its love is as it is in the physical body to which it gives life.” Rafe gradually discovered the secret of how he could be in close touch with those whom he had loved…and from there, with the whole communion of saints.

“When you’re a true hermit,” he once told me, “you’re never alone.”

Others have shared stories confirming Rafe’s abilities to communicate himself through concentrated psychic energy. One woman, herself a remarkably gifted spiritual visionary, recounted to a mutual friend that she had come to St. Benedict’s Monastery to write her book because she “was given to know” inwardly there was a hermit there who would be crucial to its unfolding. In my own case as well, I am convinced that this was the dominant factor in the move from Maine: in some way or another Rafe called me here, to the work we had to do together. From what he sometimes told me of his night prayer, there were “enchanting” travels in many dimensions, soaring through the footfalls of space-time like the solitary red-tailed hawk always somehow circling just above his head, or the Catskill eagle in Moby-Dick, that place where Rafe had read the ink off the page.

For better or worse, we never became really good at the practice together. The temptation of the actual physical person was too strong, and the hugs debate went on to the end. And for him, I sometimes think, it was as if we were meeting in the middle, he a wanderer returning from that lonely mountain. For the undeniable psychic skills he had acquired were still not the whole of him; they had been purchased at horrendous cost to that part in him that had to learn to nurture and be nurtured, to love himself in loving another well, at close hand. As Bennett says, while spiritual practice can bring about “immortality within certain limits,” without that full experience of mutual becoming in love “we remain incomplete beings.” At least, I pray this was the redeeming virtue in Rafe’s and my time together, as we continued to touch and not touch, to sink into the magnetism of pure homecoming, and to struggle against it with all the power of our aspiring.

But we did learn, and gain; and more and more toward the end, that old debate would break forth into a new place, where we would stand apart and pure luminous words and feeling could and did pass back and forth between us. My brother caught it once, as we were doing nothing in the shop one day, just standing by a ladder, talking about this and that. “It was like the two of you were perfectly in sync,” he said, “and the whole shopyard was bathed in love.” And indeed, in those last weeks of his life, it seemed sometimes that we were talking and receiving miles above our heads, as if, like St. Peter walking on the water, Rafe was drawing me, helping me be lifted up to some sphere where the high-water mark of love never recedes and is always present; where things are known, and ever retrievable, by their pure essences falling directly into the illumined heart. It was that foretaste which made possible our powerful communion the night of the funeral wake.

But perhaps the real foretaste happened earlier, during that trip back to Maine. Unbeknownst to me, Rafe was in the hospital during much of that time, the first three days in intensive care. He asked for no visitors and sent no word. I knew nothing about it. All I knew was that from the start, a trip I thought would be difficult seemed magically supported, one thing leading easily to another. One afternoon, on a beach on Eagle Island, two thousand miles away, I stood facing west and, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, felt my life fill up with hope and strength and joy, a mysterious well-being emanating directly, it seemed, from the heart of the cosmos.

Back in Colorado, back in the shop, after my return, we were working on the snowmobiles, Rafe still moving slowly, tired, distracted. The usual, the flight into holiness, and I started predictably to get clingy. “Rafe, did you miss me when I was gone?” “Nah,” he grunted, and glanced at me briefly with a look of complete condescension. No, on second glance I could see it was more a look of deep disappointment, as when a gift one has given at great cost is received lightly, casually tossed aside. He shook his head and muttered as he returned to his work, “You still don’t understand, do you?”