Love is Stronger than Death

“LOVE AND DEATH HAVE A COMMON ROOT,” says Ladislaus Boros. “The best love-stories end in death, and this is no accident. Love is, of course, and remains the triumph over death, but that is not because it abolishes death but because it is itself death. Only in death is the total surrender that is love’s possible, for only in death can we be exposed completely and without reserve. That is why lovers go so simply and unconcernedly to their death, for they are not entering a strange country; they are going into the inner chamber of love.”1

Strange, unsettling words….And yet I cannot say they are not true. While it is certainly possible that a couple on a genuine Fifth Way path might live to a ripe old age together, the whole aspect of brevity seems to be built in, like those little wildflowers Rafe and I spoke of that work faster at the higher altitudes. Love and death are inextricably linked, because it is the very office of this kind of love to demonstrate that love is stronger than death, to melt the mask of death in the waters of pure self-giving.

In retrospect, I can name quite clearly the moment when Rafe and I crossed the point of no return. We both knew at the time that something was happening, but we didn’t know what.

It came one particular week toward the end of May 1995, as my time at the Stanley place drew to a close. I had not been able to turn up a single affordable rental in the area, and meanwhile an interesting job prospect was shaping up in British Columbia. It looked like the handwriting was on the wall for Rafe’s and my time together.

We worked hard all that week to adjust ourselves to the new reality. After a last moving farewell over a cup of cappuccino, we tried to help each other withdraw emotionally, resume those old teacher/student roles long left behind. He said it was time for the little bird to fly out of the nest. I thanked him for all he had taught me and promised to stay in touch. He said he would pray for me. We both looked down at the floor a lot. And perhaps at that point we could still, just barely, have pulled apart—I on to new adventures, always carrying a piece of him in my heart; Rafe back to the cabin to process and integrate the rich new pieces of himself that our time together had yielded.

But it didn’t work out that way. Down to the wire before leaving for British Columbia, I spent a final night in solitude at his cabin. There in the wee hours of the darkness I awoke in the middle of a vivid, captivating dream that my old childhood home was burning down, the old brick-and-gingerbread Victorian that my mother had named the Valentine House. But strangely enough, it was a slow fire, green and gold—not red and angry—and its progress was also somehow a new beginning, like the green buds just emerging on the hillsides above the monastery.

I didn’t know exactly what I’d seen and heard in this excruciatingly Jungian dream, but moment by moment its import grew more certain. “No!” I wrote in my journal as first light gathered in the sky, “I do not in my heart of hearts believe that Rafe’s and my earthly time has run its course.” I walked down from the cabin, bumped into a ranching neighbor with a spare bedroom to rent, and within an hour had a place to stay.

Rafe was waiting for me back at the Stanley place when I got there. I don’t know exactly what went on for him that night—he never directly said—but the green and gold fire was burning in his eyes. We fell into each other’s arms and hugged for a long, long time. When we finally found words again, the first ones he spoke were, “I tried to protect myself by giving it a shape, but it has no shape. All I can do is open my heart more and more deeply.”

Did we know we were both opening our hearts to death? Yes and no. Would it have made any difference? I have replayed that moment over and over in my mind and still could not choose otherwise. “At least we both want the same thing,” Rafe had said during that conversation. And though I ache for what it cost, I realize we could not and would not have found what we did in those months remaining to us with any less willingness, with a scrap of self-preservation or common sense. “The total surrender that is love’s” is what we both wanted, and we knew our hearts were set on it wherever it led.

It was in one sense completely pointless, like that wonderful O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi,” in which the two destitute lovers, to give each other a Christmas present, each surrender their most precious possession: she cuts and sells her beautiful long hair to buy him a chain for his gold watch; meanwhile he has sold his gold watch to buy her combs for her beautiful hair. So it is in true love: a pointless sacrifice. Unless the love itself is the point.

That love at this depth so often leads to death is a risk that must be accepted at the outset. I do not think this is because God punishes those who truly love, but because of the intensity of the fusion—and because, if Boros is right, death itself now appears in a new light, as the place where that “total surrender that is love’s” can completely and unreservedly express itself. Once that surrender has been fully made, death has served its purpose and drops away to reveal the fullness of love.