Love is Stronger than Death

A MAN WITHOUT A BODY is infinitely more alive than a man with a body.”

So my friend Murat Yagan told me, when I visited him in his spiritual community in British Columbia. Murat, eighty years old himself and well accustomed to intercommunion with the spiritual realm, spoke with the absolute matter-of-fact veracity that left me double-taking.

It is hard to believe. Partially, I believe, because of that extreme credibility barrier posed by death itself Inevitably, death comes as the end of a gradual or swift physical decline; it is the waning of energies, the passing into physical decrepitude. And then there is only the body itself, vacant and lifeless, an apparent caricature of all that the person was. When I first encountered Rafe at the funeral wake, there was that inevitable initial “frisson”: the one who only a few days before had been so alive, blue eyes flashing, was now locked up tightly in the mask of death, gray and unmoving. Only when I became still enough to catch his presence at a more subtle level was I able to move through that mask to the remarkable reunion that lay beyond it.

And so I have learned it is true in Rafe’s case—“a man without a body is infinitely more alive than one with a body.” Not only that, but it is his aliveness, large enough for both of us, that principally spurs and sustains my own quest.

The fifth-century desert father and spiritual master John Cassian wrote at length about the soul beyond death. It is an interesting passage (the bulk of his First Conference), and worth quoting at length, since it constitutes the most powerful statement I have found within Christian tradition of the position that after death the soul does not merely “rest in the hope of rising again” (the usual teaching), but lives far more intensely and responsively. Cassian begins his teaching by reflecting on the parable (in Luke 16) of the rich man clothed in purple and the poor man Lazarus, who both die and awake to find that the circumstances have been reversed; the rich man is in Hades, while Lazarus is in paradise. It is not this reversal that interests Cassian, however, but a more subtle point:

The gospel parable of the poor man Lazarus and of the rich man clothed in purple show us that souls separated from the body are neither inactive nor bereft of feeling. The one man wins as his blessed abode the peace that exists in the bosom of Abraham; the other is subjected to the unbearable scorchings of eternal fire. And if we wish to ponder what was said to the thief, namely, “Today you shall be with me in paradise,” what other obvious meaning is there to this if not that souls continue to have their former sense of awareness and, further, that their lot is in keeping with their merits and with what they have done? The Lord would never have made this promise to the thief if he knew that the soul, once separated from the body, must lose all feeling and be turned into nothing. For it was the soul and not the body which would go with Christ to paradise….

All of this clearly shows that not only are the souls of the dead not deprived of their intellectual faculties but that they also are not lacking in feelings such as hope and sadness, joy and fear. They already have a foretaste of what is in store for them after the general judgment. Nor does it happen, as some unbelievers would hold, that upon leaving this world they are turned to nothing. Actually, they live more intensely and they concentrate more on the praises of God….

[If we are truly made in the image and likeness of God, then] it must surely follow, it must certainly happen that when the mind has shed the inhibiting grossness of the flesh it recovers in improved form its intellectual capacities, that it gathers, not loses, these in a purer and more penetrating condition.1

“Actually, they live more intensely...” As Cassian pictures it, the soul beyond death is not devoid of responsiveness—“hope and sadness, joy and fear”—but these feelings are heightened and clarified in the mirror of truth held out by death itself.

My own first experience of having been set down on very different relational ground came not long after the funeral, up at Rafe’s cabin. I was still numb with grief, and my impulse was to remember Rafe, to keep him alive by a redoubled effort to live what he had lived, to take upon myself his hermit striving. “It’s a work,” he had always said of the hermit life, “but someone’s got to do it.” It now seemed inevitable that that someone was me, and I had come up to the cabin to give myself as deeply as I could to this new post.

Instead, to my astonishment, at the end of an intense morning of prayer, I found myself writing in my journal, the pen literally streaming out in front of me:

Right here at the end, out of my tears, you [Rafe] handed me an astonishing gift, as you always do. You speak in my heart and say—

“Don’t strain so. Don’t cling. Don’t use your energies to force the connection. I will not forget you. Let me hold you in my heart; that is the office more proper to one gone beyond the body. Relax and trust me, and let yourself be loved.

“You may not have to do the post. For I did it for both of us. What was done was done for both of us.

“Rather, the gift I would make to you—giving and receiving one—is that you simply live your life with all the joy, fullness, healing, and abundance that is my gift to you in love. Don’t copy me, don’t cling to me, don’t carry my oar anywhere and plant it. But find and plant your own oar, knowing that of all things that is the wildest, the freest, and will give me great joy.

“You will see that it exists. Always. Unrescindable. Not going away.

“Take up your life and live it. And I will be there in the midst of it. There in your heart.

“Live your life as the gift it is.”

It was an astonishing moment, out of nowhere, but utterly clear and resonant with its own vibrancy. I have had recurrent reminders of that message—that afternoon on the beach in British Columbia was another of them, and there have been many others as well. Once early on, as I was struggling to sort out in my mind the confusing and sketchy details of his life, I suddenly heard him say, “Quit it! It’s useless to rummage about in my life. Who I was in life was incomplete. Instead, accept who I am now—what I am growing into.”

And what is that? Toward the end of his life, Rafe copied out several lines from a poem by D. H. Lawrence:

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life is only the
leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion
   and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet
   new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new
   blossoms of me—

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his new oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.²

That was Rafe in a nutshell. The Rafe before death who was, particularly in those last weeks, after our wrestling match, beginning to blossom before my eyes: loving and nurturing, at ease with himself, utterly radiant in his gratitude for life, his joy in God. Dancing along with the unknown God, marveling at the “new, strange blossoms of himself,” the emergence of human love: that one, Rafe says, is the one to encounter, receive, in the walk beyond death. Could it be, I wondered, that Rafe had to die out of his hermit post to accept what he truly was, the “pure becoming” in love? Like the blade of grain fully ripe, he cracked the husk.

THE MOMENT OF DEATH

Confirmation of this growing inkling came to me from an unexpected quarter. I was up at the cabin one afternoon sorting through Rafe’s books when there, poking out from the shelves, was a copy of Ladislaus Boros’s The Mystery of Death. I pulled it out with a start, recognizing a long-forgotten friend. I recalled having devoured it some twenty years earlier, soaking up whole paragraphs by memory, which came back to me in force as I flipped through the pages once again—but I’d never realized till that moment that Rafe knew the book, too! It was another of those unspoken connecting links between us. Reading it again, eight months after his death, was not only a profound déjà vu but also a substantial help in putting chapter and verse to my growing sense that death had released Rafe into such a new ballpark of freedom and wholeness that the old Rafe was, in some ways, virtually immaterial.

I have already drawn extensively on Boros in my earlier discussion of second body, but would like to return once again to this brilliant but curiously little known work—which was written, I gather, virtually straight through in a white heat of illumination and bears the earmarks of such works of revealed truth in the boldness of its leaps and the strange authority of its presentation. In his fascinating hypothesis of death as “a convergence upon a moment of final decision” (made not by God but by ourselves), Boros claims that death gives us the opportunity to make our first completely free and personal act; far from bringing annihilation, it is the moment more than any other for the awakening of consciousness and freedom.

The moment has been in preparation from a long way off. As the body ages, our physical vitality inevitably declines, but our inner life is all the while growing proportionately wide and vast; and the opportunity is there—if, as we saw in the last chapter, we have the courage to accept it—to learn to configure ourselves with an increasing independence from our physical corporeity. At last, in death, the physical body drops away altogether, and in this moment the soul in total “ontological exposure”3—cut loose for the first time from its physical matrix—comes fully into sight of itself. It is a moment of sudden total awakening to ourselves. “Everything we have ever guessed at, sensed, and loved,” Boros claims, in a single moment is before us, as we are totally present to ourself, to the world, and to Christ.⁴ We are who we are in bare essence, but that which we are, we are, fully and completely self-expressive. And in this instant of awakening, says Boros, we make our “first completely personal act”—the decision for or against God, which is really none other than the decision to accept or reject the divine love flooding over and through us.

“Don’t you see how changeable I am?” Rafe had fretted that brutally honest night between us at the cabin. Boros takes Rafe’s anguished self-observation to its implicit conclusion when he claims that the major impediment to attaining unity of being here in life is the body itself—this “temple of myself” that can only do, experience, and express one thing at a time, and that sees everything as an extension of itself, and hence of its own self-interest. “Existence is inseparable from its embodiment”⁵; that is the problem—particularly when one is trying to give oneself fully in love. The limitation of corporeity itself is what creates the inevitable, variegated dimensions of our selfhood, like cut glass. We can only be one facet at a time, one slice of ourselves, one expression. Many different personalities clamor within us, and while our inner work can bring about a certain progress toward mastering one’s household, it would appear that this kaleidoscope of moods, poses, and self-images, each one with its own assertive energy, is the lump sum of who we humanly are. Toward the end, like a dying fire, different embers of Rafe would flare up, flicker brilliantly: the impassioned beloved, the striving hermit, the struggling old man…flicker and then die. And yet the essential self remains always in some sense hidden—“with Christ in God,” the monks like to say. Planetary existence does not seem to yield the vastness of conditions to fully bear and manifest who we are. It bursts forth for a glimpse only in those transfigured moments when we are shined through...or wept through.

At the moment of death, it would seem that who we are—the full moon behind the sliver, the underlying unity of our being, which we have longed for and somehow known all along was there—is now able to step forth and express itself. Says Boros: “The personal element in all its fullness—in other words, the inner man—can only emerge in death, when the energies of the outer man disappear.” ⁶ What is finally revealed behind these outer energies may be tiny indeed; only a dot. But it is our coherent organizing principle, for within it is contained our complete authenticity, the unity of our being. And it is that dot which now passes over—or glows fully—in death, bearing, like the bush that burns but is not consumed, the core disposition of the soul.

Jacob Boehme, you recall, also describes this moment of death in terms of fire and light. After earlier stating that “God wills and works in...the resigned will, by which the soul is made holy and comes to divine rest,” Boehme goes on to envision the moment of death for such a soul as pure incandescent light: “When the body breaks up, the soul is pressed through with divine love and is illuminated with God’s light as fire glows through iron by which it loses its darkness.”⁷ Death becomes the template for the soul: the moment in which the soul’s true form is eternally revealed in the light of divine love.

Whatever this form may be—and I will have more to say on the matter in chapter 14—the moment of our death releases us, finally, to the full depths of our human love. As Boros says: “Our first possibility of acting out our love fully is given us in the moment of death when our whole existence is exposed and surrendered. This ontological exposure (death) gives us the space we need for a decision of self-surrender (love).”⁸ With nothing any more to hold back or protect, love, the life of our soul, is free to pour out in full measure. For me, that was the extraordinary grace of our encounter that night of Rafe’s funeral wake. For the first time, he was completely, consistently open to the force of his own love. And that has continued to be the chief measure of our new way of being together.

I cannot say that I buy Boros’s entire argument. His stipulation that the moment of death is a final decision beyond which no alteration is possible is obviously incompatible with my own experience of mutual growth beyond death, and I believe it rests on a common theological misassumption (that growth is a function of time) that I will speak to in the next chapter. But on the whole, I have been enormously helped by his reminder that death is a sacred passage that brings about a qualitative and quantum change in being. Even for those spiritual adepts who have mastered the art of dying before you die, death is still its own unique gate; personhood on the other side of it will be different. It is not simply a matter of the body dropping off when it is no longer needed to sustain personal identity; the passage through death itself somehow mysteriously bestows that crucial final element of personal identity that can be acquired in no other way. I believe Christ’s own death on the cross teaches this; it is a core and profound wisdom of the Christian path.

And so Rafe and I are in different places, and something definitively sacred has happened to him, which for me still lies ahead. I find this thought strangely comforting in those moments when, moved by self-pity, I want him back again in his body. The one who he is now, who is “infinitely more alive than he was in his body,” is the fruit of that passage through death, and in my heart of hearts I would not have it any other way. What he could not do fully in life, he can do fully now, and that is part of the ongoing becoming between us that gives this time now its particular grace and freshness. And for myself, too, I trust and hope in that moment of my own passage, when, like Rafe, I will fall through the sliver into the full-of-the-moon.

At any rate, for me here on the human side of things, my most difficult challenge by far has been to let Rafe grow: to let him be fully expressive of who he is now rather than clinging to who he was; to “receive the growing Raphael,” to paraphrase the contemporary mystic Bede Griffiths’s final words.

It is difficult because I realize it flirts dangerously with the realm of pure subjectivity. At least this side the divide of Rafe’s passing, I am accompanied by a small band of folks—some of the monks, a few of the ranchers—who knew with something approaching intimacy who Rafe was, what he stood for, what values animated his core. They knew him as a cowboy, a private, rough-hewn man, passionate about his solitude and about nature. To say that death has brought to light a different side of him—more urbane, more confident, artistic, and deeply nurturing—is to describe a Rafe that no one would recognize, and for which there is virtually no external confirmation. Even if I were to describe some of the last conversations we had—about Gregorian chant, objective art, Chartres cathedral; if I were to remark how under that exterior he was actually a very good poet and a fair composer—most would be hard put to believe it. And death has only intensified the movement in this direction.

Curiously, a scrap of empirical confirmation fell into my lap the summer after Rafe’s death when a young woman, a composition student at the Aspen Music School, wound up camping out for a few weeks up at the cabin. She knew nothing of who Rafe was—not even his name; she just went about her thing, highly sensitively, living in the cabin and composing her music. Later that summer she even premiered a piece called “From a Monk’s Cabin.” When I talked to her about Rafe sometime afterward, she said, “I felt my composing was assisted. I felt that I was living in the presence of an artist, a man of great creativity.” I found this fascinating, in that she is the first one I know to have met only the Rafe beyond death, with no prior reference points in the old Rafe.

My sense is that through love of the growing Rafe, I also am called to become an unknown person: a person who, like him, is somehow still unfolding along the trajectory of the time we spent together; to become the person I would have become if he were still here, if our life had had human duration—for he is, and it does. The fused whole greater than the sum of the parts—“the abler soul which thence doth flow,” grasped by him in death and glimpsed by me when I surrender into his love—must henceforth be the pattern that orders both of our becomings. This is both the great challenge and the great grace of work together beyond the grave.