CHAPTER 19

THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST

I

“BEAUTY,” SAYS RILKE in his Duino Elegies, “is only the beginning of a terror we can just scarcely bear.” And perhaps what gives rise to the terror—and drives us to our stammering attempts to describe and shape and assign purpose—is just this: other than beauty itself, the Mystery has no shape; it can only be borne by opening the heart more and more deeply. The heart is its shape.

For all our great structuring and high sense of purpose, Rafe and I both knew that the times most rich, most real between us, were those when the veil of purpose got ripped away to reveal something infinitely more unmanageable and immediate. When we were knocked sideways, detached for a few moments from our usual sense of self, as if the wind were knocked out of us. It happened to us most powerfully that last week of my stay at the Stanley place, when we finally had to abandon a scenario that would have imposed a meaning on the situation but had nothing to do with what we were actually feeling. At times like those—tentative, thrilling, vanishing almost as quickly as they arose into heavier, more familiar ways of being—there was a strange sense that we were being met...that something was drawing near to us, from a more profound order of reality, that somehow knew our hearts well.

In the second of his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot wrote a set of lines that brought Rafe to complete attention:

Old men ought to be explorers.
Here and there does not matter.
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
for a further union, a deeper communion.

What is that other intensity beyond the here and there that no longer matters? When I first met Rafe, and for a while afterward, he was still physically restless. Our early conversations revolved around his wanting me to help him move to a Maine island, a place of even greater remoteness, where he might give himself yet more intensely to the hermit’s path he had chosen. Sometime in our two years together, with the help of T. S. Eliot and Helen Luke, he came to terms with that restlessness, recognizing that his “days of yondering” were over. Instead, and still with that spirit of adventure, he turned himself entirely toward the inner exploring, seeing what that other intensity might be. But you could never count on it to be there. Mostly it was boring and aging, things being harder, colder, tireder; sight dimming and muscles aching. And then occasionally, out of nowhere, something would descend, like an angel of that other intensity.

There was one evening, almost eventless in its own right, that somehow stands out in the constellation of my Rafe memories like a first-order star. It was late October, about six weeks before Rafe’s death, with the first real snowfall of the season. Earlier that week he had brought his tractor and woodcart up the mud-slicked road for a major run-up on getting the winter wood in. We’d spent the afternoon together working in the woods, but I was dragging and a little sick, and although he was not in much better shape himself after an afternoon of chainsawing in the snow, he insisted on bringing me down the hill. He fired up the tractor, dusted the snow off; then, carefully laying an old poncho in the cart for me to sit on, he boosted me in, and we took off down the hill. Somewhere around the first bend, we both became aware of something extraordinary going on, as if this little voyage were suddenly trekking across the face of a far vaster deep.

Twelve hours later, the vividness still only barely receding, I tried to capture some of the feeling of it in my journal:

Cold, snow...seriously winter again...and we are on the tractor, and Rafe is bringing me down the hill.…The little guy in his watch cap, alternately standing up and sitting down on the damp tractor seat. Me in the cart back behind, sitting on top of the snow on a green rain poncho, and the old tractor lurching happily along the well-loved road, soft but not deep in snow: a kind of bizarre flight into Egypt or journey to Bethlehem, it occurred to me.… And from out beneath the tattered, scuddy remnants of the storm, the night star—one...two! Rafe standing up, looking around, watchful, watchman—and Lord, how I never wanted that ride to end! For a timeless moment—like a slice from another order of reality—it glowed with the very fullness of God, the infinite vastness and tenderness to which all things here below obliquely point.

It was nothing new, just a quality of intensity, a deepening to everything. That beauty which is “only the beginning of a terror we could just scarcely bear” hovering near a heart not quite vast enough to contain it, a cosmos not quite real enough to encompass it…yearning, straining at the entrails…

When we reached the bottom of the hill, not much more was spoken between us. Rafe was as blown away as I. He helped me out of the cart and for just a moment we looked at each other—or perhaps more through each other, toward the quivering beauty, yet somehow the poignancy, of that other depth. “It’s close,” he said cryptically. Then, as the familiar world of monastery barnyard gradually returned, we brushed the Scout loose from its dusting of snow and went our own ways into the night.

II

“This is my body, given for you…”

Somehow among my most precious memories of Rafe are the two of us standing in the communion circle at mass. Gathered around the altar, usually side by side, we would eat our bread and pass the cup one to the other. One time as he passed it to me, Rafe leaned close and spoke the words, “May we be to one another as Christ is to us.”

Toward the end of his life, in the years I knew him, Rafe pondered almost continuously about Christ and was spontaneous and completely open in his devotion. It was not something he wore on his sleeve, but if you scratched the surface even the slightest bit, it was right there. One time a woman journalist on retreat at the monastery, either making conversation or seeking out a story, asked him, “So what does Christ mean to you?” Without missing a beat, he responded, “Everything.”

Later I asked him more about that. Knowing how his first conversion experience was a profound realization of God, I wanted to know how and where Jesus had gotten so involved in it. “Oh,” he said, smiling, “I guess you could just say it’s a growing presence.”

I knew a little bit about that myself, how this presence or person named Jesus Christ could gradually get a hold in your life at a level deeper and stronger than any logic, almost like a life growing within your own life, with a will of its own. I first encountered that presence at the age of twenty when I received my first communion totally by accident. No kidding! I had showed up at an Episcopal church one Sunday morning to hear an English boy choir perform, and the next thing I knew I was being ushered into a communion line—about as close to pure heathen as they come: unbaptized, unconfirmed, no preparation, no expectations. I was quietly walking back to my pew thinking, “Well, that’s that,” when suddenly I knew, “Well, that’s that!” Quietly, not like some thunderous charismatic conversion, I simply knew that I had met my match; something utterly real, strangely compelling, strangely familiar, had entered my life that day. For the next few years it was internal warfare. In the face of this beauty I could just scarcely bear, I was truly terrified and fought against it with every outpost of my rational mind—my head jabbering protest while my feet walked me every day to noonday mass at the local parish church, where a wise priest asked no questions and simply gave me the sacrament. It took five years for my head to shut up.

I think of those years nowadays as I continue to take my place in the communion circle. It was the first time in my life I ever knew something from the invincible reality of my heart—knew it against all purposes and plans and scenarios, simply by the incontrovertible fact of its presence. It is exactly the same way I am now learning to know Rafe—beyond all logic and disputation, from that same place of inner knowing; that same undeniable presence. Many times in these past three years I have been particularly thankful for the Eucharist; it is the only comparable reality.

“This is my body, given for you.” I look down at the piece of bread that has been placed in my hands. What is it? Bread? Body? Energy? All of the above? It is a piece of bread. And as I eat it, I sometimes feel it large and vast in me, now more than ever before, as a presence, an energy. “May we be to one another as Christ is to us.” I feel Rafe there in the bread, in the body of Christ. The story of our life is somehow in that life, and the story of our life is that life.

“This is my body, given for you.” And in that body given, I also recognize another body given. In wave upon wave the memories flood over me. The bodies wrestling that day in the yard, shell-shocked but not running. The bodies that held and touched and comforted and stood by each other in anger and despair. And those long, exhausting days of lugging wood, or clambering around in the chilly, cramped pump house down at the Stanley to get the water going again; and the laughter and joy, perched on our barstools, lifting our cups of cappuccino...those bodies. And the bodies that cared for each other in our times of illness; I bringing him water one day when he was out of his head with fever up at the cabin; he sitting up all night to keep the fire going and watch over me when I was struck down with the flu one bitter week in January. And then, as it came down to the end, as he saw his own strength fading and my life impaled on my unwillingness to leave him…“I laid down my life so my strength could be in you.”

“This is my blood, shed for you.” And by God, we did cost each other blood! The tears, the blowups, the giving and yielding, the wearing each other out as we wrestled against each other and against ourselves, learning how “to be to one another as Christ is to us.” What do I know of the love of Christ that was not taught me by Rafe? The laying down, the pouring out, the pattern of His life, which became the pattern of ours. The whole life is somehow there: Rafe’s life, my life, everyone’s life, all pulsating through that small chalice, that tiny piece of bread. Perfectly contained, utterly vast.

“In Christ, body and power are the same thing,” says Boehme,1 and my mind boggles at the mystery lurking in that simple sentence. This bread, which Christ calls His “body,” I experience here as power and energy, a connection to a profound and vivifying presence that fills my life. But just as well, what feels like energy from the vantage point of this life might actually be body from the vantage point of the next: the pure energy of love and compassion and creativity might be the “body” we wear in the next realm, and the body in which the cosmic Christ actually touches and meets us in our present state.

Rafe never said so—maybe because it was for me to find out myself—but I have come to wonder, are not the body of hope and the body of Christ somehow one and the same? This sap flowing through all things, both the vine and the branches, mysteriously and majestically present at the heart of all creation, weaving and binding together time and the timeless, form and tincture, heaven and earth?

In this world we carry it within us: that mysterious life growing within our own life. In the next, it carries us within it, and we ourselves become the mysterious life growing within its life. And so Bede Griffiths can truly say on his deathbed, “Receive the growing Christ.” We die into His body and grow in it, and it grows with us. We consume it, meet in it, speak within it, put it on, become the new that is its pattern and our own, live it, act it, share it...all one… all here. We go to meet it, and it comes to meet us. We grow to our full stature in it because it itself is pure becoming, pure love.

III

“Have you ever heard the stars move?”

I looked at him sharply. In these last weeks of his life Rafe had grown completely fascinated by an account in a Laurens van der Post book of an old tribal chief who could hear the stars move. “Can you do that?” he asked me nearly once a week. I didn’t know. Where does hearing begin? Sometimes, we both agreed, we could almost hear the alpenglow on the Red Ridge deepen to a cry, it cut so piercingly into the still, sharp night....Somewhere, at that root place from which all things emerge, before sound is heard, one hears by that which sound is made from.

At the end, Rafe listened…a lot…and peered more and more deeply into the heart of things. It was less and less struggle, more and more simply moving toward that space.…We read King Lear together and laughed and danced our way through the beautiful speech in Act 4:

Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds in the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies…
and take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies...

And Rafe, growing suddenly thoughtful, peered intensely through the cabin window at the little wrens in the yard, the sunlight dancing through the aspen leaves…then said slowly and earnestly, “You know, there’s only one Mystery, and that’s the Mystery of Christ…” His words trailed off, back into the silence of whatever had captivated him. More and more in these last weeks as his own vision, his own high purpose and striving, got knocked away from him, he simply opened his eyes and saw. If that first seeing back on his brother’s farm was more an intellectual realization, this new one was definitely Mu!—the Zen cry of enlightenment—a direct vision of the world as the transparent, transfigured body of Christ, dancing and shimmering in love. Each wren. Each leaf. Each of us. Each star.

“You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there,” said Thomas Merton shortly before his own death. “Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.”2

In the very last long conversation we ever had, five days before his death, the subject came around to gratitude. We sat in the shop, drinking coffee, watching the swirling clouds clear to reveal the mountains shimmering in their new winter veils. Rafe paused for a moment to look out upon the whole scene, then continued, “I don’t mean an ‘Oh, lucky me!’ kind of gratitude; it’s something simpler… if you’re quiet enough, as still as that mountain, you can hear in your heart their silent ‘thank you.’ The whole universe, if you listen in your heart—every blade of grass, each bird, each stone—it is all ‘thank you.’ We are born into ‘thank you,’ we die into ‘thank you’… every step of the way is ‘thank you.’”

Rafe may not have heard the stars move. But I believe he was hearing “the love that moves the stars and the sun.”

IV

I remember that picture of him particularly vividly, sitting there in the shop on the old snowmobile carcass, his eyes flashing, almost and already one with that pulsing vibration of gratitude, that Mystery of Christ so mysteriously alive in the universe. More and more it was only music playing as almost before my eyes he slid into that other intensity. I watched him finally able to stare directly into the eyes of the Mystery, to see the tincture without the form, the quality of aliveness without the snakeskin; to dance so fully and vastly with that heart of the music, the sound of the stars he always wanted to hear, that he was, literally, exploded out of form. His human heart burst; he had outgrown it.

I try to keep that picture before me as I walk in this here and now. I try to remember what he saw there at the end or even squint to see it myself. Most of the time it is like squinting at one of those infuriating dot-matrix pictures; the dots remain dots and do not give way before my eyes to reveal the flower hidden in the pattern.

I do not often see the body of Christ hidden in the random dots of the universe. Mostly, this feels like in-between time, a kind of limbo where Rafe is there and I am here, the two of us separated by form. My usual sense of the world is that something is missing, something is not complete, and I find myself yearning for that final consummation, when my flesh, too, has been left behind and we are reunited in our resurrection body or bodies, whatever the subtle form may be. Till then I try to do my work and use my road maps to keep me on course. The high sense of purpose that was so much a part of Rafe’s quest and that he imprinted so firmly on me has its shortcomings: it tends to split the world into higher and lower, into now and later. But it also keeps one moving forward—striving toward that fullness of being that can never be had by striving alone but will not come to pass apart from it. As the old Sufi proverb goes, “Not everyone catches a wild ass, but only a person who is actually running can hope to catch one.”

Only occasionally, outrageously, do I hear the more remarkable music: the quiet reassurance that nothing is missing; there is no place to get to because it is all already here—and indeed, how could the fullness of God be true fullness if it were not present in this very now? No, it is simply my eyes glued in the wrong direction. The Kingdom of Heaven is not higher but aliver; it is right here, just on the other side of that “terror we can just scarcely bear”; the only thing lacking to embrace it is the depth of our hearts. Like that sleigh tractor ride down the hill that night, it hovers just beside us, wanting only to pierce our veils, to carry us deeper into its own mysterious becoming.…

“For you must realize,” says Boehme, “that earth unfolds its properties and powers in union with Heaven aloft above us, and there is one Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all.”3

In those last days of Rafe’s life, and then for us both together at the funeral wake, I believe we touched the hem of this one Heart. When all the scenarios, visions, cosmic purposes, and human posts fade to the stillness of hush, there is only love itself that sounds forth, the music that moves the stars and the sun. Finally you stop running—from or toward—and simply open your heart, and that other intensity swallows you in its embrace. And for the duration of that embrace, whether it lasts a microsecond or the rest of your life, you peer into that depth and see, with the utter certainty of your whole being, that it is the body of Christ—and that in it, all things do hold together.

And so as I walk my way in these “mostly” in-between times, I am mindful of both the promise and the task that lie embedded in those last words Rafe spoke to me:

“You’ll see. Nothing is taken away.”