CHAPTER 16

THE VOW

BUT TO RETURN TO THE HEART of the matter: Boehme specifies quite clearly that in order for the abler soul potentiality to emerge into a fully fledged spiritual union that will “comprehend” the two beloveds in their soulwork beyond the grave, there must be an “earnest promise” sworn. The word Boehme uses for “promised,” verloben, implies even more narrowly that this “earnest promise” is specifically a love vow, a betrothal, and that it must be sworn “in the time of this life.” Did Rafe and I do that?

I believe we did—though just barely. And with this in mind, I want to return now to Rafe’s funeral wake and reconstruct what I believe was going on between us in that luminous night.

I know that what I am about to share may seem crazy. For three years I have not really dared to let myself believe it, but it keeps coming back to me as the simplest and truest explanation and the only one that accounts for all the puzzle pieces. It explains the distinctly nuptial feeling-tone of the night and why my experience of Rafe as a present and intimate partner has intensified over time rather than diminished. It also accounts for that peculiar, persistent sense that we are living one life, and that this life is not simply a re-creation of his life as he taught it to me, but somehow a whole new ball game for both of us. The story may sound crazy, but the pieces fit. So here goes my version.

Rafe, I am convinced, was destined for mastery—one whose soaring life of prayer is carried easily within himself, in the full integration of his human personhood. Such a man is a bodhisattva in the East, one charged with a unique mission of maintaining and nurturing the spiritual life of the planet. He belongs to the “conscious circle of humanity”—the term Rafe himself was most comfortable with and to which he aspired ardently.

Now there are two ways of fulfilling this role as a higher cosmic servant. One is through the most extreme forms of solitary devotion—the hermit cliff-dwellers of India or the Syrian desert, for example, whose whole life is spent “yielded between” heaven and earth (in Helen Luke’s words) in powerful intercessory prayer. The other is through the exercise of conscious mastery in the human plane: as a teacher, a master and guide, a creative genius. These complementary types are classically illustrated in the craggy and mysterious Shams, who touched down on earth only long enough to pass on his divine knowledge to another human being; and his beloved disciple Rumi, who stayed behind to illumine the hearts of so many through his ecstatic outpouring of poetry and dance.

While Rafe always saw himself as belonging to the former category, there were clear signs that he was actually cut far more from the second bolt. There was a natural fineness to his being, no matter how hard he tried to cover it up, and an innately cultured and philosophical turn of mind that, if developed, would have lent amazing scope to the fierceness of his spiritual striving. Not many knew, looking at the rough-hewn little guy who shuffled around in his greasy work jeans fixing old snowmobiles, that there was another side to his heritage as well. The French aristocrat was strong in his blood. His family line had directly descended from a surgeon and general in Napoleon’s army who established himself in Louisiana after the Napoleonic wars, and Rafe’s own branch of the family traces itself through six generations of wealthy and well-respected planters in the bayou country of St. Landry Parish. His great-uncle was midway through his term as governor of Louisiana the year that Rafe was born.

But the other side was true as well. For equally running through that family blood were the demons of alcoholism and depression. Nearly twenty years younger than his brother and sisters, Rafe—then Louis Numa Robin Jr.—spent a lonely and somewhat unsettled childhood, with frequent moves around the state following the boom-and-bust cycles of his father’s livestock-trading business. The uncertain circumstances of his upbringing, and then a family tragedy that shattered his life when he was fifteen, left him wary and adrift. For the next fifteen years he ran wild, hurtling through the navy, a long stint in the merchant marine, commercial flight school, drunken fights, broken romances, and finally a profound religious conversion on his brother’s dairy farm in Mississippi.

“How do you know there’s a God?” the cocky young pilot taunted his brother, Sam.

“Just look around you,” said Sam.

Rafe looked around him—and he never stopped looking.

But even then the old demons remained, making those first tender years of his journey toward God a constant battle of three steps forward and two steps back. At last, terrified of his sexuality, his outbursts of rage, and the alcoholism that ran so strongly in his family, Rafe took himself out of the running—out of the world and into the confinement of a monastery and eventually a hermitage—in order to work on himself before God in the only way he knew how.

It was an act of great spiritual courage. I have never met a man with more courage than Rafe, a man who could get so far on so little, using only the naked intensity of his yearning for God to propel him along the path. And in time, this bore fruit within him, and the supersensual gifts of prayer began to grow. By the time I met him, he had become something of a local legend—at least to those who could see beneath the surface. His long years of working on himself had paid off; he had become a conscious man, balanced and largely in control of himself.

A “pneumatikos” of the old school, formed in the classic desert tradition of spiritual warfare, Rafe had his mobility in spades. But as is so often the case with veterans of this path, his mobility had been bought at the expense of his majesty, that vast and remarkable essence in him that also begged for expression. Those long years of solitary self-renunciation were also a deliberate choice to leave many gifts in himself untapped.

Like so many of his forebears in the mystical life—including his slightly older contemporary Thomas Merton—Rafe had a pronounced penchant for equating true self with pure interiority. All the “characteristics,” as he called them—those distinct, particular features of his essence—belonged to the old man, the one that was falling away, and only by the sheer mortification of his human nature could the new man come to be.

I remember a conversation I once had with him in one of those times of unusual clarity between us. “So, Rafe,” I asked him directly, “what is your aim?”

“Let me preface this,” he began quite formally after a moment or so of reflection, “by saying there is a me with certain characteristics.”

“Frenchman? Temper?” I asked.

“Yes. And as that—the old man—diminishes, something else is able to be present. And so my aim is to hew the line deeper. To go farther and farther into God...to disappear into God.”

This deep bent toward the renunciation of your human essence in order to “disappear into God” is a pervasive tendency of the Christian apophatic life, of which Rafe was a true son. To the extent that it favors the divine striving over the human integration, it is a distortion—at least if Helen Luke’s road map of wholeness is correct. But it is a magnificent distortion, creating in its most determined seekers a fierce, wild rake to the soul, like the spruce trees on a wintry coast bent to the prevailing wind. At whatever the individual cost, the trees point to the stark reality of the wind and in the very solemnity of their pointing take on some of its numinous power. That was the man I saw standing before me in the barnyard that blazing December morning, a circle of light almost palpably enfolding him as he took both my hands and gazed intently into my eyes: proud, defiant, holy, shy, lost—all of the above.

What met Rafe’s own gaze that day in the barnyard was in some ways the perfect mirror. Standing before him in my old ski knickers and baseball cap, I looked to him, as he later confessed, about twenty years old. Like Rafe, life had bent me far downstream of my real compass track. Frightened and rebellious, I hid my womanhood beneath a tomboy exterior and ran from my Ph.D. and mile-long string of admissions cards to the credentialed world to hide out in an island fishing village and then among the monks and ranchers of this mountain valley. On the surface I was wiry and supremely self-reliant; underneath was a tentative and vulnerable woman whose languishing gifts as an artist and teacher were somehow bound up in her deeply buried femininity. That was the one Rafe saw standing before him that day as our eyes searched for the meaning of this strange, providential encounter. Even then I think both of us sensed vaguely that we were about to call the question on each other.

THE WEAVING

And thus, between us began a kind of secret fugue. If its subject was our spiritual high striving and the passing on of the hermit’s path, the countersubject was the almost delicious secret glee we took in recognizing who the other was—the secret artist and aristocrat at the helm. At the Stanley, we made cappuccino and bouillabaisse. He was fascinated by my music and books. Sometimes we spoke French. And he told me tales of his planter ancestors and his childhood in the bayous, and he spent the last of a small inheritance from his sister to buy me a beautiful silk suit. We read The Brothers Karamazov together and cooked jambalaya and raised our mugs to “the deepening celebration.” And each of us could feel something coming alive in us that had so long slept.

And there was the day when he told me, in a moment of heartfelt sincerity, “I want to integrate my past, all of who I am, and give it to you.”

But right there was the problem. For how can you integrate something you are also simultaneously trying to renounce? As long as the fugue remained in secret, the right hand not knowing what the left was doing, all was well between us, but whenever we tried to confront the two opposing scenarios directly, we always came up against the same anguishing stuck point. The old patterning would lift for a while, but then like the fog it would drop down again, that old formation that said so strongly true self can only be pure interiority…pure interiority. Seeing those fresh new blossoms budding on both our branches was wondrous to Rafe, but it was also deeply disorienting, and he could finally react only with ambivalence and dismay. His lifelong pursuit of pure becoming compelled him to cast away all way stations, even those of his own emerging wholeness. He sensed the abler soul growing between us—we both did—but he was terrified of it.

During those last weeks together we were bearing down on that final barrier. But still he hung back, afraid of betraying his post, fearing and distrustful of his characteristics. To the end he insisted that “I love you” is not something human beings can truthfully say; he feared that his growing human love was a “hindrance” (as he called it) to his divine striving. He died with that tension still unresolved between us.

At the moment of his death I believe it resolved.

“A Gambler’s Heart”

In those extraordinary next three days, Rafe did not fully depart from his body. He hovered close, knowing how desperately I yearned for that final encounter in the human flesh and how ready he himself was to give it. I don’t know what usually happens at the moment of death, but I have a strong sense that Rafe held back, declined an immediate immersion in beatific grace, out of concern for me and the unresolved business between us. He took the risk that I would be able to recognize and respond to the strong signal of his will, that I would find my way to his side, and through the mask of death. When we finally came together that night in the chapel, our hearts and souls melted into each other, and in that complete self-giving in love, we entered and passed through the baptism of fire, that supreme alchemy of the Fifth Way path, into the eternal union of our souls.

Sometime during the wee hours of that night, kneeling by his side, I slipped my right hand into his. When I released it, I noticed that the silver ring he’d given me for my birthday the year before was shining a soft, luminous gold. I slipped the ring onto my left finger, where it has stayed to this day. I thought the golden glow was a reflection of the light in the chapel, but it remained even after I left at dawn, and all through the funeral mass later that morning. Only after Rafe’s body had been laid in the grave did it gradually fade.

And so the earnest promise was sealed between us, and in that night, I believe, we both dissolved and were born again as our joint Real I, the abler soul between us. There is no “me” anymore and no “Rafe”—only the open vein of our love, holding us both true to the new path of becoming. The individual poles remain, but the unit of wholeness is the “us.” And the final harvest of the majesty is now in both our hands.

Perhaps you might call it a gamble: that the two of us, working together, can become far more than either one of us could alone. But in my heart, I feel the matter much more simply: that Rafe did what he did simply because he loved me. And because he saw this was my best chance—perhaps my only chance—to fulfill my own destiny. Really, there is no gamble in love because it is all death, all laying down.

Several months after Rafe’s death, in the midst of wrestling over a new job possibility in British Columbia, I was frightened out of sleep by a nightmare that graphically revealed my deepest fears. To get to the place where Rafe and I would be reunited—so the dream went—I had boarded a bus full of people, only to discover after an hour headed in the wrong direction that no driver was on board! Time was running out; I knew the only way to get to my destination was to drive the bus myself, and I knew I had the skills to do it. But I was afraid. I made a few awkward attempts to win permission from the other passengers, but they ignored me, and I lost heart. I got off the bus and was left stranded. It was my lifelong fear of failure again, right there in my face.

Terrified, I fled up to the cabin and was sitting in the old chair, sobbing, when Rafe’s voice came, gentle but firm:

“Open your eyes. Look at me.”

I did. Not that I could see him, I knew, but maybe he could see me—blue eyes gazing back at him in trust and love. I did, and yes, for the first time, directly in front of me, I saw light—not bright and fiery like St. Paul’s fireball, but golden and infinitely gentle, like that night in the monastery chapel. Then ever so softly the speaking continued: “Don’t be afraid. I laid down my life so that my strength would be in you.”

That was all he said. It was enough.

During his life Rafe had a word to describe the quality of our relationship: he called it our “concern” for each other, and he promised that no matter what happened between us, I would always have it. At the time I resisted the word, thinking that it described some vague, generic affection based on worry or duty. Only in the light of his death was I finally able to see that what he had been talking about all along was simply the spontaneous self-giving that comes from a sheer delight in each other’s being, and from the wish at the center of one’s heart that the other be well. Free from the self-righteousness of duty, or even the compulsion of romantic attraction, it simply “leans and harkens” after the other, in John Donne’s words, never forgetting, never failing to consider the other’s good—even from beyond the grave. Some would call it conscious love. It is the pearl of great price I had been seeking all my life, but always in the wrong place. Because I couldn’t command it, I thought it wasn’t love. Only through Rafe did I finally come to realize that’s exactly why it is.