Love is Stronger than Death

“Trust the Invincibility of Your Own Heart”

EARLY ON IN OUR TIME TOGETHER Rafe used to say “I love you” quite easily and often. But toward the end of that last summer, the “I love you” ’s began to thin out considerably and finally ceased altogether. With one exception, he never again said them in his physical life. When I asked him if he loved me, he’d say, “No.” He insisted that nothing was diminished. The words, he said, “were all just attraction.” “So what?” I said. “What harm can it do?”

But Rafe had no desire to be casual about this. Somehow, sometime, during one of those nights of mystical traveling, he had been given to know the difference between the love he aspired to and this “attraction” stuff, and to understand how far anything human fell short of the mark. After that, the most he would say was, “I wouldn’t honor you to call the feeling I have for you ‘love.’”

Toward the end, this unresolved tension settled into a deep sadness inside me. I knew that time was running out. I saw Rafe slowly fading, slipping away. More and more confined to the monastery, he’d come up to the cabin when he could manage it, where the usual operations he’d done for so many years—the logging and chainsawing—left him breathless and exhausted. I split and bagged wood for him when I could, so at least there would be usable firewood when he got there. With every new snowfall, a deeper foreboding rose inside me. Soon, too soon, he would be gone, and I’d never even really know where we had stood.

Some partings are heralded, the symbolism so haunting it is impossible to ignore. The day I left on that trip back to Maine, I walked up to the cabin early in the morning to say good-bye. It was the end of July, the summer golden and full in those brief mountain weeks between the last frost of spring and the first frost of fall. Rafe was sitting out on his deck, sipping coffee in the quiet cool of early morning. Oddly, I noticed, he was all in white—white jeans, white jacket, white curly hair, and a three-day stubble of white beard; only his black boots and the blue of the flame in his eyes broke the picture. He was in a gentle space, and we fell into a quiet musing about how the little wildflowers around his cabin had already gone by while the ones in the high mountain meadows were only now emerging from the snowfields. “The life force in them is so strong,” he marveled. “They know to work faster because the time is short.”

“Do you suppose it’s also like that at the higher altitudes of spiritual life?” I pondered, and he leaped to that one. “I certainly feel a growing urgency in myself toward the completion,” he said with a force that still reverberated in me hours and miles to the east.

As if on course, fall advanced that year with murderous precision, ahead of itself even for this Colorado mountain valley. There was significant snowfall in September, and a major storm on Columbus Day briefly filled the valley with heavy, sodden snow and issued its solemn portent of winter. Rafe had made it up to the cabin that weekend, and to accompany him in some time of hermit’s solitude, I’d also taken off to a friend’s cabin high in the mountains, well above the snow line. That Sunday afternoon I sat by a frozen mountain lake already in shadow as the sun dropped behind the ridge, and I painfully came to terms with the reality that could no longer be evaded.

Rafe was dying, I realized. Neither of us knew exactly why, but it was clear that life was slowly draining from him. It was also clear that the space between us was widening. And against this backdrop I had to face that the suspension of the “I love you”’s meant exactly what I had most feared. It was Rafe’s way of asking for his freedom back, for a release from our relationship. Was I holding him against his will? Was it time for me to go away? Suddenly the answers seemed obvious, and my own clinging pathetically clear. There was only one thing to do, for his sake and for my own: settle once and for all where we stood with each other, and then—as now seemed overwhelmingly evident—bid him farewell, break camp, and return to Maine.

Slowly, one boot in front of the other, I trudged down the mountain.

He was sitting in his old overstuffed chair by a crackling evening fire, disgruntled to be interrupted, but I pushed on anyway. “Rafe,” I said, “I need to know where we stand. If you still love me—if you still want me here—I need you to tell me. Otherwise I think it’s time to quit.”

“What does your heart tell you?”

“My heart tells me you love me. But your words tell me you don’t.”

He looked straight at me, and all of a sudden everything that was spent in him seemed to grow powerfully concentrated. When he spoke, his voice, which usually these days was somewhat wheezy, was sharp and ringingly clear:

“Your heart must be invincible. You must trust the invincibility of your own heart.”

The sly fox! No, of course he was not going to tell me, take away from me precisely the work I had to learn to do. What did my heart tell me? I closed my eyes and saw the cappuccino celebrations, those toasts as we lifted our mugs and gazed deep into each other’s eyes—“Here’s looking at you, kid!” I saw the groceries delivered, the hot and cold running water, the clothes I was wearing, head-to-toe gifts from him…the time, the kindness, always and everywhere the quality of his attention—even now, both of us, every muscle poised and straining to see what the other would do next.

At this point Rafe was fully engaged, too. He jumped up out of the chair and stood by the fireplace, his hands outstretched and trembling. “Look at me, look at me!” he said. “You must see how changeable I am; you must see that. One moment it wants this, the next it wants that. One minute I grab you, one minute I push you away; one minute I hurt you, the next I steal your heart. You must see there is no root in me. How can I say ‘I love you’ when there is no ‘I’ who can love? You must see that; you must.”

I did. Finally. Lifted my head far enough above my own event horizon to look at him standing there, backlit by the fire, the little sentry at his hermit’s post, and to realize that he had spoken his own deepest truth. In his words were contained a lifetime of striving, more than four decades of intense spiritual work on himself, pushing on beyond the usual watering places toward that new man in Christ that ached to gather itself out of his human fragility and changeability. Once, in a moment of intense tenderness, he had told me, “I want to integrate my past, all of who I am, and give it to you.” And still, in my own blind neediness, I could only hear the cessation of “I love you”’s as rejection. Now, I finally saw, it spoke to the sheer heroism of his striving.

“Besides,” he said as the mood between us softened, “you know that neither one of us is going to quit.”

Not words. That would have been a cheap fix. Rafe knew that if I was to survive in the next phase up ahead, I would have to learn to recognize, trust, and navigate by faculties much more subtle than attraction and reassuring words. I needed to move toward a new kind of perceptivity and learn to recognize things directly by their inmost spiritual essence, not their outward forms. But this new kind of perception—“a direct contact with the electromagnetic field of love,” as the modern Sufi master Kabir Helminski puts it—is possible only for the heart, not the intellect. Unless I could learn to trust this, I would be cut off from the outset.

The journey is toward the west: into the setting sun, the end of all conventional ways of seeing. In the months ahead, I would be called upon to stake my sanity on things people would say are mad: that a body, lying in wake, could draw me close through a pure gesture of spirit; that I could—then and subsequently—tell with certitude that a departed soul had drawn near simply by the unmistakable quality of his attention; that with his will and heart he continues to shape my life, as I continue to shape his. A vast, invisible universe was opening up for both of us, there to be explored, shared, savored in “next year’s language.” All this learning lay ahead. But to set out on this voyage, the only possible hope was to know, and trust, that part in me that knew what it knew and could act out of it. Beginning now.

I got up and moved to the window, and Rafe moved to me, and together we looked out at the barest sliver of a moon, cresting over the scudding clouds. “Look,” said Rafe, “can you see the full-of-the-moon outlined behind the crescent? That’s us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Shhh....You’ll see.”

We laughed together and could both feel the joy returning as we feasted on each other’s rising hope. Then I stepped out into the night, and he moved silently back to his chair to resume his lone watch. Just as I was pulling the door shut, I could hear him say, almost in a whisper, “You’ll see...”