CHAPTER 18

WORKING IN THE WONDERS

ABOUT A MONTH BEFORE HIS DEATH, Rafe came down off the hill one afternoon all excited about a passage he’d been pondering in a book by the theologian Paul Ricoeur. “A wager!” Rafe reported. “Ricoeur says that hermeneutics is always a wager—a wager that if your premise is right, you will live it into action.”

For an old gambler like Rafe, that passage spoke worlds. But in the time since his death, it has also become a cornerstone of my own journey. If what I wager is true—that Rafe and I consciously bound our lives together that night in the chapel; that my visceral sense of a center still holding firm between us is in fact the abler soul at work; and that this larger and more purposeful soul is bending us both to a new course of becoming that neither of us could have chosen on our own—then I will discover if this is so in the attempt to live it out. And that is the road map for this second leg of the journey.

I have already written of Boehme’s suggestion that this journey of love beyond the grave has something to do with “working in the wonders”—continuing to grow the soul by healing the dark parts and bringing to birth the untapped gifts. It is the same motion that Rafe and I had already come to know so well; it is what love does—only now it does it in the body of hope. Here, in the sheltering matrix of that earnest promise jointly vowed, the true reciprocity that is love’s can continue to unfold its wonders. And it is “the wonders thou hast wrought and found out here,” Boehme reminds, that “maketh majesty in the soul.”

With these as my basic orientation points, I am able to make some sense of the terrain now at hand, and to see this in-between time “not as a breach but an expansion,” in John Donne’s words—a time for the growth and deepening of love in wonderful and subtle ways, and hopefully with reverberations beyond just our own story. For if love is stronger than death—the hermeneutical premise that some few beloveds in every generation get elected to live into action in a particularly intense and sacramental way—then the crossing of this apparent desert is in some way also a sacred passage. Once you get used to it, it has its own unexpected beauty.

THE COMFORT OF PURPOSE

From the start it seemed that Rafe and I were headed for this passage. Ours was not a love in ordinary time and space. We were given a little human time to play in, and a miraculous sense of being called and held together as we lived out that first leg of the journey. The Stanley held, the water held, funds held, and despite the hesitations and backtrackings, we held. But that sense of imminent parting was also there, underlying everything we said or did. It is as if the gift of love deeper and more transforming than I would ever have believed possible in human flesh came with the built-in condition that the flesh would all too soon be left behind.

The simplest way of looking at our relationship, which people often suggest to me, is that I was sent into Rafe’s life to help him complete what was necessary before he died. To a certain extent this is true: during our time together he broke through a lot of old conditioning and discovered an unknown side of himself in his gifts of nurturance and commitment. But I am not so sure this was completion, but more a foretaste of the majesty in him waiting to become fully expressive. During our time together we opened a lot more questions than we resolved, and if toward the end Rafe began to spread his wings, it was most likely because they were meant to fly!

If Rafe didn’t die complete, as I suspect, but rather with the seed of continuance planted in him, one explanation may have to do with his full emergence into conscious mastery, into the conscious circle of humanity he so admired and aspired to. Because Rafe’s vast spirit and enormous gifts were intended to come to fruition in a destiny of cosmic servanthood, the means were provided for the soulmaking to go on even after his body had ceased to be. That was the purpose for which I was led to Colorado, and the reason our love was appointed as the otherwise strangely incongruous final chapter to Rafe’s life of solitary striving.

Working together in an abler soul means that you have to get used to thinking in terms of the whole organism, not the individual parts, and of pulling together toward a common good. If those glimpses of the Rafe I saw in the last weeks of his life—self-confident, creative, full of savoir faire—were any indication of things to come, then Rafe was clearly headed toward “the consolidation and integration of powers,”1 and that is our highest common good.

And so what makes most sense in terms of the overall goal is not to repeat the part he has already done, but to stay right there on the breaking edge of what was becoming: emergence into wholeness through the reconciliation of pure interiority with the conscious exercise of our gifts. And the best place to continue that dialogue, I realize, is not in the hermitage, but at the junction of the hermitage and the world. Through the development of my own gifts as a teacher and writer I sense I can best work for both of us to bring to fruition some of those seeds that were planted between us during our human walk together. Further, since the material I bring into my life is also material I bring into his, positioning myself in this way provides him with a continuing stream of new impressions and a chance for him to exercise his own emerging gifts in these areas through his involvement in my creative process.

From my own perspective, this feels sometimes like a deliberate decision in favor of a certain imbalance in my spiritual development. If I were on my own, I would do it much the way he did, through a deeper immersion in solitude. But I have to trust that I am not on my own, and that whatever personal loss of depth I feel through an excessive trucking in those noisier energies of creativity is somehow being met and recalibrated in the deeper waters of his silence.

“For it is a young tree grown out of the old root which shall discover what the old tree hath been in its wonders,” says Boehme.² This beautiful quote, in which the original German for “discover,” verklarte, also means “transfigures” or “glorifies,” very much describes the process at this stage of the journey. The sense of a common “root and sap between us” in the abler soul reassures me that the courage to bring forth my own gifts is also a bringing forth of his, and a growth of the tree for both of us. Not that I am completing what he left undone, but something far more organic: we are completing it together. As I am growing down here, spreading roots in the good soil of the here-below, Rafe is stretching his leaves and branches far skyward in the kingdom above. The two motions are the same.

THE BUSHWHACK OF BECOMING

But the truth of the matter may be much, much simpler…

In a small, out-of-the-way church in Campbell River, British Columbia, I came upon a quote pasted on a secretary’s bulletin board entitled “Weaver’s Prayer.” “Dear Lord,” it said, “My life looks like a mess of tangled knots and loose threads. But that’s because I only see the underside.”

It was a good reminder to me that the shape of our journey looks very different when seen from the topside, by God. Down here on the underside it looks like a candle and a wick. From above, it is pure flame. We struggle with the means and ends. God sees the quality of the aliveness.

This is talking tincture. From this viewpoint, the gifts themselves fall away to reveal the pure act of giving, and the journey toward completion is only the ever deepening act of becoming. And far more than those road maps of higher purpose, I find it is this dimension when I can genuinely open to it that gives the continued element of adventure and surprise to our walk together. It is where the growing edge really lies, I think—for both of us.

“You do not have to come all the way to me, because I am also coming to you.” And I am struck sometimes by the obvious, simple truth of that. If it is love that calls forth essence, then the most helpful thing I can do for Rafe is to simply make space to let him love me. If in that night in the chapel he became at last a husband, then the best contribution I can make to him is to let him be a husband—in the literal Old English meaning of the term, “one who tends and nurtures.”

“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....”

After nearly two years of hemming and hawing, I finally took the plunge and moved to British Columbia. When all had been pondered through, there was simply a gathering, incontrovertible sense that this is what Rafe wanted. Why, I didn’t know and still don’t exactly. He had his own lifelong dream of getting there, but I think it was more a sense he caught, when I got back from that one teaching trip in spring 1995, “It was good for you!” A beautiful little hermitage came together, in a warm, gentle climate, surrounded by caring friends and a healthy balance of teaching and solitude. In accepting this gift, I sense I am also giving him the space to continue to nurture and love me as he was coming to do so well at the Stanley place. He sees what I need and gives from his heart. I respond with gratitude and relax my wary self-reliance. And so we tame each other.

As in the O. Henry story, it eventually becomes a chicken-and-egg kind of proposition. I want it because I think it helps him; he wants it because he thinks it helps me. After a while who gives what or why doesn’t matter anymore; only the giving itself matters.

It is not without its comical moments and its real give-and-take. To leave Colorado was scary; there, every inch of the ground reverberated with the history of our human walk together. Alone, one day in late December, I was attempting to wrestle a dining room table out to the car to transport it down to the storage unit I’d rented. It was simply too heavy to move. I couldn’t budge it; the person who had promised to show up to help hadn’t. Tears of frustration rose in me: all the sense of aloneness and homelessness and fury. Finally I sat down and said, “Rafe, if you want me to go to British Columbia, you’re going to have to help me yourself.” Then I got up and moved the table into the car. It wasn’t a great superwoman triumph, an adrenaline rush. Mostly it was suddenly seeing new angles—a way to slide it across the snow on a rug, inch-by-inch it into position, and then, just at the end, a little burst of strength to lift it up onto the tailgate.

And the shadow work continues, too—strange, but true: that sharing and exposing of the pain, the vulnerable moments. Rafe has held me as I cried in despair and frustration, but I have done the same for him, too. Of the many stories on this front, some too private to tell, the following one can serve the purpose.

I knew for a long time that there was something unresolved around that first hermitage experience of Rafe’s in Waunita Hot Springs...something he’d wanted to process with me, but we never quite got to it in life. One morning about a year and a half after his death, I was seized with a strong sense of the time’s being right to make a pilgrimage over there. I imagined it was a fool’s errand. Waunita Hot Springs doesn’t even exist on the new Colorado road maps. All I had to go on was an old photo of Rafe by a rock outcrop and a vague recollection he had told me it was twenty-seven miles to Gunnison.

As if by magic the way opened up. Eighteen miles east of Gunnison, a road sign pointed left to Waunita Hot Springs Ranch. And precisely nine miles down that road, I looked off a little to the northwest and there was the rock outcrop, looking on the surface like any of a hundred other outcrops, but from the inside literally beckoning in its intensity. I parked the car and headed toward it; fifty feet or so into the sagebrush, an overgrown and washed-out trail opened almost at my feet. Step-by-step I found my way into a well-hidden little gulch and onto the porch stoop of a tiny cabin. The door was unlocked. I walked in and found Rafe’s navy pea coat still in the closet, and on the dresser a stack of unopened mail from twenty-four years before.

I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I sat down on a folding metal chair, and about a half hour dropped clean out of my life. When I came to again, it was late afternoon, the sun already dropping behind the ridge. From the tears in my eyes, I knew I had been crying. And I do remember some of it: Rafe saying, “Take hold,” and somehow feeling something of the terrible loneliness he’d felt in this place, that “ache all the way to the end of the universe,” and his bitter sense of failure at having finally run from it. Without knowing exactly what I’d shared, I knew I’d been let in on a slice of that terrible sadness he carried within him, and that in my willingness to carry it with him, something had lightened. It was a mysterious moment between us, and I walked out of that gulch with my heart aching and wide open. In times since then, walking blind in Louisiana and Mississippi, I have been led infallibly to the places of his deepest pain. And standing on the ruins, my heart cries out to him.

PURE FLAME

And so it is possible to keep the dance going between us, I discover—to continue on in the mutual becoming of love with a spirit of adventure and with raw, open hearts. The abler soul is not some abstract, esoteric concept. It is as real as two candles touching their flames together, melding the substances of their life through their common willingness to burn as one flame.

And slowly I come to discover that this one flame does have its own tincture, its own distinct quality of aliveness a little different from either Rafe or me alone.

Gentleness, joy, confidence, quietness: these would be some of the words I would put to these distinctly new flavors of ourself. The Sufis call it “finding your true name.” And staying true to that true name—not the comings and goings themselves but a quality of being alive—is the one trustworthy way of staying on the path that love carves for us. Like sailing in the fog, you steer by scent and smell, knowing that they invariably point the way to the invisible harbor you seek.

For my part of the bargain, the requirement is to “stay in the way of the change,” as Rafe liked to say toward the end, not bewailing last year’s language, but reaching out to these new and more subtle signs of presence with faith and hope—and yes, obedience, the traditional wifely vow.3 For it is only by my willingness to obey where I do not yet fully see that I can be led into the unknown territory that is love living itself into action. Beyond the grave there is only conscious love; only conscious faith, only conscious hope. It is the realm of eternal verities. But if I can allow myself to be led, I know I will be brought to my heart’s true home, and even more, to the invincible certainty that this impossible wager is true: love is stronger than death and we will find our lives by laying them down.