CHAPTER 9

WRESTLING WITH AN ANGEL

IN GENERAL, THE LAWS GOVERNING spiritual practice are clear and exactly as Rafe taught them: detachment, consent, inner seeing, surrender. He was a tough teacher but a good one, and through that very toughness he taught me things that can be learned in no other way.

But there are times, even in spiritual practice, when you simply have to break the rules.

This is the story of one of those times. I share it with a certain hesitancy, for reasons that will become obvious. Beyond any doubt it was my most painful and disgraceful moment with Rafe, a moment of totally losing it. But in a strange way it was also our most intimate moment and a real turning point in our work together. Through it we both began to understand what it really means to lay down one’s life for the other, and to glimpse the tremendous healing power unleashed in such alchemical love—a power, I have come to believe, that holds the key to the continued work of souls beyond the grave. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is also the story of that one exception I mentioned earlier—the last time in our human walk together that Rafe said “I love you.”

Rafe was, as I said, a kid of the old school. He had been formed in the classic monastic tradition of spiritual warfare, the subduing of the “passions,” as Evagrius called them in the fourth century, which are always disordered and always in mutiny against our true spiritual destiny. Rafe took these lessons deeply to heart. In those long years of struggle against his own mutinous nature, he had learned, like Keats, to stand alone on the shore of the wide world and simply let the ache carry him all the way down, into God—“till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

And I was a kid of the new school. Twenty years younger than Rafe and formed in the psychological climate of our times, I was wary of spiritual practice that buries emotional pain and passion—“the flight into holiness,” as I tagged it. My own instincts were more along the lines of those of Father Thomas Keating, my Centering Prayer teacher at Snowmass—“the way to be rid of emotional pain is to feel it.” Like most of my generation, when fear or sadness arose in me, I thought it natural to expect Rafe to be “supportive”—to stay near, hear me out, and reassure me with his sympathy and maybe a hug. “Don’t you see that by indulging it,” he scoffed, “you only make it worse?” Whenever I started to get into a bad state, he would leave. Only later, when something had shifted in me, would he return, picking up where we had left off as if nothing had happened.

We never resolved this tension. Gradually, by working with him, I came around more and more to his way of looking at things.

But so often I felt a deep sadness in him. His unswerving devotion to next year’s language, and that constant vigilance against being lured into “a home of one’s own making,” sometimes struck me as the desert-spirituality equivalent of “making lemonade out of the lemons life has dealt you.” “I’m gone as of five minutes ago” was one of Rafe’s favorite leave-taking phrases, and there was a profound psychological truth to it. For of course, running with all speed toward the new is also the best possible strategy for outdistancing the flames of destruction licking at your heels. It is as if something in Rafe knew that everything he loved would be taken from him.

When his horse Saddalu had died in a snowfield a few winters earlier, one of the monks went up to the cabin to break the news to him. Knowing how Rafe loved that beautiful white Arabian, his brothers figured he would take the news hard. Instead, in towering aloofness, Rafe sent the monk packing. “What’s to be upset about? Horses die; I die, you die; we’re all going to die.” Three years or more later, recounting the episode to me, his voice still quivered with anger.

I was angry, too. “You just talk that way to protect yourself from hurt,” I snapped. He winced almost as if I’d struck him. “You can think that if you like.” The look in his eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. If “haunting” and “haunted” can exist in the same look, that was perhaps it—a naked, bottomless grief. But one could never get close to Rafe’s grief. I could feel it sometimes, and my heart ached for him. But the anger around it was too explosive. After that Saddalu story, it was a week before he would come near me.

And so when I got back from that trip to Maine, I could tell that Rafe was getting beyond his emotional limits as he shared the story of what had befallen him during my absence. He plunged on with the details of that nightmare ride down the hill, passing out at the wheel of the Scout, hitting a tree, finally fetching up in a barbed-wire fence and staggering down to the monastery. Perhaps we were both in shock. The joy of seeing each other again masked it for a while, but soon we were both backpedaling fast. He beat a hasty retreat, and I lay awake all night replaying the details in growing horror and disbelief.

The next day, we were into our worst ever “get thee a husband” cycle—Rafe in full flight, and me in dazed pursuit. The more I tried to come near him, the more he pushed me away. At last he ordered me up to the cabin, to stay there until things calmed down. He spent the night at the monastery.

I was still sitting there the next morning in his old chair—somewhat calmer, I thought—when I heard the rumble of the Scout in the driveway and, a moment later, the sound of his feet on the landing. I guess he was a little surprised to find me still there, and his mood had by no means softened. He set down the bundle of firewood he was carrying and with a look of icy contempt headed straight back out. I said, “Rafe, please, can we talk?” “There’s nothing to say,” he grunted, and yanked open the door.

That was the moment it happened. Suddenly something inside me snapped. “No!” I screamed, with a force that swept away all inner restraint. I leaped out of the chair, wrenched the door from his hands, and slammed it shut in front of him, pleading, “Rafe, Rafe, please don’t go, don’t go….” I couldn’t believe it, but there it was.

He couldn’t believe it either. He stared at me for an instant in sheer animal terror, then shoved me out of the way and stomped down the landing. I lunged after him and locked onto his legs.

That was the start of it. For the next half hour or so, we wrestled. I am not talking metaphor here. We spilled down the landing and rolled and writhed around the yard, locked in a desperate contest of wills. I clenched his leg, his arm, holding on for dear life. He brought his boot heel down on my jaw and twisted my wrist so hard I thought it would snap. I screamed but didn’t let go. “You’re crazy!” he hollered. “It doesn’t matter,” I hollered back.

After a while, our combat began to take on a strange, almost surrealistic configuration. We’d wrestle for a while then rest, sitting at opposite ends of the woodpile, eyeing each other warily. Sometimes we’d exchange a few words. “Can this be love?” I remember wailing at one point, and he shook his head sadly. “I’m gone already,” he said. “You try to grab me and you’re only holding on to yourself.”

Then he’d make a move to leave, and the wrestling match would flare up again. But with each new round, it seemed as though the anger had gone more and more out of it and something deeper, almost holy, was fighting through us. The image of childbirth went fleetingly through my mind.

At some point it ended. The fight had zigged and zagged its way to an irrigation ditch a little beyond the driveway, and there, under a serviceberry bush, I finally let go. I couldn’t hold on anymore; the storm in me was spent, and I just lay there and sobbed. Rafe went a little bit away, stood under an aspen tree, spat...then slowly walked back to me.

Silently, not touching, we walked back to the Scout. “Is it okay to go now?” he asked. I nodded. Somehow it was.

“Rafe, will you give me your blessing?” The words suddenly tumbled out of my mouth…why?

“You already have it,” he grunted. Then he drove off down the hill, and I went back inside the cabin.

What had possessed me? I didn’t know. Surely it was all over; Rafe would never return….And yet, why…why, as I sat there with my emotions reeling and my jaw throbbing, why did I feel this strange feeling of hope? Why, strangely, something like...pride? Out of the shame and confusion welled up this gathering sense—how shall I say it?—that for perhaps the first time in my life I had done something right….I sat there with this odd feeling for a long time, until it gradually subsided and I drifted into stillness.

And then, gathered in the mirror of that stillness, there suddenly emerged a face—a face long buried deep in my unconscious. Later, looking back through old journals, I was astonished to discover that I had last seen that face on August 27, 1980—fifteen years earlier to the very day.

The face was my mother’s. She was lying in her bed in a Christian Science nursing home in California, dying of cancer. They called it “a touch of arthritis.” An inpenetrable wall of denial separated us. I saw her eyes, racked with pain, momentarily reaching out to say good-bye…then drawing back and motioning me away. I stood for a moment in her doorway, then turned and walked out, knowing I would never see her again.

The picture shut down again, almost as quickly as it had formed, but I began to understand. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” says the poet Dylan Thomas. “…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” And I had raged—for my mother, for myself, for Rafe, for a lifetime of things slipping away through the door, irretrievable and unacknowledged. “Oh, Rafe, Rafe!” I wailed aloud. Love had torn out of me that morning the grief I had not known was there.

After a long time of tears—how long I don’t know—I heard a rumble in the yard and the squeal of brakes. The Scout was back. Slowly the door pushed open, and there stood Rafe.

He had been crying, too. His eyes were red and tear-streaked, and there were dust smears on his face where he had roughly wiped his cheeks dry. He stood there for a moment, then started awkwardly, “I wanted to make sure I didn’t hurt you.” We looked straight into each other’s eyes, and in the same breath spoke the same word, “Forgive.”

And then we both burst into tears again. He crawled into the chair with me, and holding each other, we sobbed out a lifetime of losses and sorrow. And as the words flowed between us, of memories long buried and remorse never confessed, Rafe and I yielded our grief to one another, like frost emerging from the spring earth.

Afterward, when the tears had run their course, we headed down the hill together in the Scout. He dropped me off at my gate, and we stood there for a moment searching each other’s eyes. I said, “Rafe, you’re the first person I’ve ever loved enough to fight for.”

“I know,” he said almost in a whisper. “And you’re the first person I’ve ever loved enough not to run.”

Who was right and who was wrong? Certainly we broke all the rules, and I cannot imagine that our wrestling match two weeks after Rafe was released from the hospital did much to lengthen his days. It is a guilt I will bear to my own grave. Or perhaps time stopped at the door of our hearts; I do not know; maybe I never will.

But I do know that from that time on, it was as if all resistance between us vanished, and we carried each other’s vulnerability with reverence, like a secret shared in the silence of our hearts. Rafe did not run again. In times when despair and clinging overtook me, he would simply wait by my side, gathered and present, until my turmoil subsided. And as I dared to trust that he was not leaving, I began little by little to release that “winged life” I had been binding to myself so desperately, discovering to my joy that it remained right there by my side. At one point early on in our relationship, Rafe had said, “I want to know what it means to truly love someone.” Toward the end, I think we were both beginning to find out. While the struggles continued, we walked those last three months of our human life together in some sense already one will, simply and daily laying down our lives for one another.

“Wholeness,” says Helen Luke, “is born of the acceptance of the conflict of human and divine in the individual psyche.”1 But I wonder if this acceptance is truly possible without knowing oneself deeply loved by another human being. If the principal office of love in this life is to “unbolt the dark,” as Dylan Thomas has it, and release its prisoners of shame, is this not even more pointedly the divine alchemy of the next, by which our wedding garments in eternity are spun? For as I look back on the time with Rafe, I am struck by the fact that in that pure becoming we both so yearned for, it was not the best stuff in us but the worst that God transformed to make the new person. The very force that Rafe most feared in himself, his “attraction,” emerged in the refiner’s fire of love as true commitment. And the worst in me, my desperate clinging, gradually melded into something I would never have believed myself capable of—true devotion. It is our dross, reclaimed and purified by love (if we trust each other enough to take it that far), that becomes the living core of our “holy particularity,” by which we will always find each other in eternity.