The Height and Depth of Human Loving
Once again and to my great embarrassment Peter had arranged for me to stay in the local presbytery, as the parish priest was away on holiday.
‘It’s just like old times,’ I said to Peter, as I remembered the long conversations we’d had at Northbay.
‘Yes, it hardly seems four years since our first meeting,’ said Peter. His chair creaked as his enormous frame crashed into its solar plexus.
Then it came – that unforgettable and unique smile that transformed an already handsome face into something quite otherworldly. I’d seen it so often before but it still captivated me, even more than the most unforgettable sunset I’d ever seen. It would make you believe in angels, if you’d never believed in them before. I mean middle-aged angels, of course, for Peter had already scaled the heights of his youth and was more than halfway down the other side. Something David had said in his sermon enabled even my soggy little computer to work out that Peter must be almost forty-five, though he didn’t look it. It was a surprise to me to see him looking so well and hardly affected by his mother’s death. True, he looked tired, but that was only to be expected – he’d had a lot to do since coming home. Maybe death doesn’t affect you the same way when you’ve faith as strong as Peter’s, I thought. After all, his mother had just arrived at the very place to which he himself was traveling with all the speed he could muster.
It took only two months to prove me wrong, two months before the terrible sense of loss that his present busyness kept at bay burst into his conscious mind to break him up and bring him down into a deep depression. I’d still so much to learn. I still believed that true sanctity produced disembodied spirits: men and women who had so freed themselves from the world of matter and form, of flesh and blood, that they could remain aloof from and untouched by the world to which the rest of us belong, as they await their final consummation in the land of the ‘Blessed Spirits’. Peter was to prove me wrong, not just by what he was to say to me, but by what he was to be to me, and what I was to see he was to others, who clearly saw in him a genuine embodiment of the Man he had committed himself to follow. True sanctity sensitizes the body and the soul in such a way that a person is fully open to receive the Spirit of God, who bonds them together into a harmonious wholeness that makes them more human than they ever were before. No one is more human than the saint, who is able to feel more fully for others than any other who has not felt the touch of the abiding Presence within him.
‘Sorry to drag you away from your family at such a time as this,’ I said.
‘No need to apologize at all,’ said Peter. ‘Frankly, I do need a break from the tensions of the last few days. I’ve been with my poor dad almost night and day for the past week. He’s in a terrible state, though he’s trying not to show it. But it’s all beginning to get to me.’
‘Well, Peter, I don’t know where to begin.’
‘I know you don’t,’ said Peter, smiling, ‘but I think I do. Your letters made everything clear to me, so I’ll begin for you! To put it simply, you are at the beginning of what people used to call “the mystic way”, though you probably think that I’m deceived. What I want to do for you, before going any further, is to try and put everything into perspective. By “everything”, I mean the prayer journey to which you have undoubtedly committed yourself. If someone asks directions for a long and hazardous journey, it’s a good idea to begin by mapping out the way ahead in its entirety so that they can see at a glance the route they are to follow, before you begin to draw their attention to particular problems that you anticipate they will have to encounter upon their way. The difference in your case is that the journey that you have embarked upon is not to some place, but to some Person. It has begun, not because you have decided to make the journey, but because Someone has offered you an invitation to which you are responding. I’ll explain more precisely how that invitation is received shortly, but for the moment let’s concentrate on the nature of the prayer journey.
‘The Old Testament, the New Testament, as well as the Fathers of the Church, all insist that the only way this journey can be understood properly is by paralleling it to the journey made by two lovers who commit themselves to one another for life. Now the incredible thing is that although I’ve known this for many years, and have used this analogy often enough in helping other people along the way, I’ve only just come to understand it properly myself during the past week. But let me explain what I mean!
‘Every morning before the funeral, my father woke me up with a cup of tea, sat on my bed, and began to tell me a story that I’d never heard before. It was a love story; it was the story of my father’s love for my mother and her love for him, a story that spanned over fifty years. I found the whole story fascinating, not just because it was the tale of my own origins, but because it gave me a new and deeper insight into the spiritual journey; an insight that I had never understood so clearly before.
‘My father couldn’t remember how it all began; all he could remember was that they used to love playing together in primary school. The first time any words of affection had been passed between them was in the context of playing “happy families”, in and around the garden shed. But these words soon took on a more significant meaning when they were first used outside play, on the way to and from school. This was the first phase of a love that was to develop into something far deeper later.
‘The point I want to draw to your attention for the analogy is that, although seeds were sown that were reaped later, their love was hardly more than rudimentary. It was juvenile love. They certainly expressed their feelings for one another, but – and this is the point I want to make – there was no conformity between the words they used and the way they felt. No doubt there was some feeling there, but there was no conformity between the rather lavish language of love that they’d picked up from their parents or their older brothers or sisters, and the way they felt about each other inside. Circumstances similar to those that separated them at the end of their primary schooling drew them together again seven years later. Their relationship resumed, but this time the love that grew between them was quite different.
‘The language once used in their childhood innocence was used again, but this time with a heartfelt meaning that had never been felt by those children long ago who’d played happy families in the garden shed. Now for the first time, my father said, he experienced the true feelings that were meant to accompany the words used in his childhood innocence, feelings that became so strong, and on occasions so otherworldly, that no words he’d ever read, no phrases ever used before, could describe the inexpressible feelings he had for his beloved Agnes. The union of minds and hearts was deepened by a union of bodies as they came closer and closer to one another in the early years of married love, when potent and powerful passions thrust them forward together upon a journey that would finally lead to the most perfect union of personalities possible here on earth. They were exciting and exhilarating, those days of adolescent love that bonded them ever more fully together before and after their wedding day.
‘There were times, even then, when the most pure and passionate love-making would lead them both onwards to savor in silence what each had received from the other – in moments when they seemed to have passed beyond the world of flesh and blood to reach out to touch eternity. This is what I will call “adolescent” love for the sake of the analogy.
‘Something happened, when everything was going so well, that my father has never been able to understand; something that changed their relationship. At the time, he was sure that it was for the worse, but later he came to see it was for the better, though it meant a lot of pain and suffering at the time. All my father could say was that the feelings, the emotions and passions that had been so powerful gradually began to wane. It seemed to happen to my mother first, though later my father began to notice it happening to him. He said on reflection that it was as if they had been led on through and beyond each other to an experience that made them feel dissatisfied with even the most magical moments of married love, because some other love seemed to beckon. It’s a theme you find in many great novelists, like D.H. Lawrence, for instance, whose characters are always glimpsing the numinous through the other and hungering for a love that their partner is unable to satisfy completely.
‘They’d both noticed a change in their relationship before Tony, my eldest brother, was born, so that wasn’t the cause of it. But it did add to the difficulties both were experiencing in their relationship. My father humbly admitted that he felt my mother was giving too much of her love and attention to her firstborn, at his expense. He began to feel a little jealous, and this added to the shadows that were beginning to loom. Then Tony was seriously ill and nearly died. His prolonged visits to the hospital added further to the worries that affected my mother, even more than my father, and so a further dimension to their dilemma developed.
‘By the time I was born, my father said, he had entered into what he could only describe as an “emotional limbo-land” where the feelings, the emotions, the passions that had once been so important in their relationship seemed to have all but disappeared. My mother seemed to find herself in a similar plight.
‘It was then that Gus turned up. He’d apparently been an old flame of my mother’s before my father had reappeared on the scene. My mother always denied it, but that was my father’s story anyway! The fact was that he’d certainly been very friendly with my mother before he left home to become a Benedictine at Belmont Abbey in Hereford, where he later became abbot. Despite my father’s suspicions, he immediately took to the young monk, who had an easy and genial manner that endeared him to all who met him. He was on extended home leave because his mother was ill, and he was busy working on the translation of a book on mystical theology by Anselm Stolz, a German Benedictine, that was eventually published in 1938 under the English title of The Doctrine of Spiritual Perfection.
‘His name was Aiden Williams in religion, though my mother always called him Gus. He was a deeply spiritual man and although he claimed to have no expertise as a marriage counselor, he was able to show my parents that their love had not come to an end but to a new beginning. Love, he taught them, can never be judged in this life by feeling, but by giving, by giving even when you don’t feel. In fact, giving while asking nothing in return is the most perfect expression of love in this life. This is the highest form of loving possible on earth. This is the meaning of the Cross – it is a symbol not just for Christians but for all men and women who want to enter into the fullness of life. Only through a spiritual dying to self through selfless giving can a person open him or herself fully to the love without which life has no ultimate meaning. He showed them how, with the best will in the world, the most idealistic of men and women will always come to an impasse in their spiritual journey, when the poverty of their own imperfect love suddenly becomes a barrier to receiving, in ever-greater measure, the love they want to receive without measure.
‘At this point the celibate or the married lover has to undergo a profound purification within, so that the self-centered lover who is always lurking just below the surface can be taught how to grow up, by learning to love like an adult – in other words, by learning to give time and time again, especially when they receive nothing in return. This is how an adolescent becomes an adult; once they have been purified, the journey they have already embarked upon can be resumed on a higher level. He convinced my parents that they were both on the verge of an exciting new development in their married life – if they could only forget about themselves and grow up into adult lovers by continually recommitting themselves to one another, no matter what they felt. With his encouragement and advice, they made a new start in the journey that they were both beginning to feel had come to an end.
‘As they came through that first major crisis in their married love, my father discovered, in the months and years that followed, how a new dimension gradually began to open out in their life together. Precisely because they had suffered and sacrificed together, they became surer and more secure in each other’s love. A new and more perfect experience of love now began to develop in their relationship, which my father could only characterize by the words “height” and “depth”. There were moments when they were bonded together more perfectly than ever before, when they were united in mind, heart and body in an experience that bordered on the ecstatic, an experience that is completely unknown to the person whose idea of love never rises above the purely physical.
‘Gus explained to them that these moments were to be especially prized, precisely because they signified the moment when the sacrament in which they had committed themselves to one another reached its climax. The most sacred moment of that sacrament is when the couple are bonded together to one another, in every way possible here on earth. Then they give to each other their hearts, their minds and their bodies as a means of giving their inner selves, through a union that will grow deeper and deeper. It will bond them ever more fully to each other in their mutual journey into the perfect love that will have no end this side of eternity.
‘He taught them how to savor these moments, as one should savor the bodily union with Christ in the Sacred Mystery. He taught them how, when they had mutually reached the climax of their loving, they should remain still, side by side, to assimilate and digest what they had both given and both received, or even physically leave each other for a time so that not even each other’s presence could distract them from the Presence of the One whom they had just ministered to the other. He even tempered my mother’s enthusiasm for early rising to go to the sacrament in the church, when the sacrament of their marriage could be celebrated in her own home with the minister she had been leaving behind. You can minister Christ to each other where you are, he told them, by exercising the sacrament to which you have both committed yourselves.
‘What was received in these sacred moments led them both into a deep spiritual peace, not only immediately after these sacred celebrations, but through the rest of their day, as the profound peace that they experienced began to seep out to irrigate the rest of their lives. This is what my father meant by using the word “depth”. This new understanding of their married love did not mean that all their troubles were over, all their problems behind them – far from it! What it did mean was that because of this new development all the troubles, all the problems which they did have to face, could be faced, because they could be faced together, with an inner strength from God whose love they had ministered to each other.
‘They didn’t have an easy ride through the rest of their married life. Remember that we are talking about the thirties. My father, by force of circumstance, had to go into the family business. They had a chain of shops, but nobody was interested in buying furniture in the Depression. They were hard times for everybody, and what money people did have wasn’t spent on refurbishing their homes, but filling their stomachs. Then there were family troubles to be faced, not least the trouble I gave them with this!’ Peter struck his heavily built-up boot with his stick and then tapped the iron caliper that supported it. ‘I got polio in the late 1930s shortly after David, my youngest brother, was born. Then, just as there were signs that business was beginning to pick up, the Second World War broke out in 1939. It was like being dropped back into the Depression – that is, if you depended on selling furniture for your living. My dad worked in an armaments factory during the war years, earning virtually nothing to be added to the nothing that was coming in from his shops. Yes, they were difficult times!
‘The war had hardly ended when my mother’s father died, then her sister and finally her mother in 1950. They all had long, lingering illnesses that took their toll, especially on my mother. Then my brother, James, fell down the Métro steps in Paris and was killed instantly. I’m not trying to bore you with our family’s troubles, but just to show you how the love my parents had learnt and continued to learn grew with the years, not in spite of but because of the sacrifices they both had to make. It grew and blossomed into a love that continued to sustain them through so many difficult times that they had to face together.
‘A dramatic change took place in the late fifties. All of a sudden my older brother, Tony, left home to become a priest. I left home for good to make my home in the Outer Hebrides. Then I retired to my present hermitage on the island of Calvay at the same time that David went to the novitiate to become a Franciscan priest like Tony.
‘All of a sudden, my parents found themselves alone after over twenty-five years of married life. Now a second crisis had to be faced, and my father said that for him it was far worse than the first. Here he was, alone with my mother, in the house that had once been so full of noise and activity, which had kept his mind well away from the thoughts that now began to rise to tantalize and taunt him. He was middle-aged now, and as he began to look back on his life it seemed to him to be marked by a singular lack of achievement. He had wanted to become a lawyer, not a glorified furniture salesman. He had all the qualifications for university and had been accepted, when his father suddenly dropped down dead at the age of forty-seven. My father had no choice. He had a mother to support, and two younger sisters. Duty came before everything else. All the idealism that he’d had in his youth, all the great ideas, the ambitions that had once inspired him, seemed to have come to nothing. It was too late now to do anything about them.
‘Then he began to look forward, and what did the future hold for him save a steady downhill journey to the grave? He began to go through the middle-age crisis that he’d hardly thought of before. He became depressed. He became angry, and his anger and his frustrations began to show – began to affect not only him but the one who meant most to him in the world. My mother was going through a similar crisis that was exacerbated by the menopause, which started in her late forties. My father admitted that he became so absorbed in himself and in his own problems that he couldn’t see beyond them, not even to the God who’d sustained him in the past but whose very existence he began to doubt in the present. Thank God, they had the humility to realize that they needed help. So they took a plane to Rome, ostensibly on pilgrimage, but in fact it was to see Gus. His time as abbot had come to an end, and he had been posted to San Anselmo as the Procurator General of his Order.
‘Once again they received the understanding, the encouragement and the help that they needed.
‘“The last time, the crisis was about feeling, wasn’t it?” Gus said to my father. “This time it’s a lot deeper. It’s about pride, isn’t it? Now you have to face truths about yourself that you’ve never had to face before, and it hurts the pride of a man who once thought the world was his to be changed. There are usually two major crisis points in adult love. The first is about feelings and the second is about pride. The first is sensual; the second is spiritual.
‘“A great mystical writer called St John of the Cross,” he told them, “called the first of these crisis points the ‘Dark Night of the Senses’, and the second he called the ‘Dark Night of the Spirit’. He may well have been writing particularly for religious in his own way of life, but what he says applies to people of every way of life, who are prepared to push on beyond the frontiers of adolescent love to have their love purified and refined in adult love. This love can only be learnt by those who are prepared to go on giving without counting the cost, whether they feel like it or whether they don’t, no matter how frustrated they may become by the experience of their own inadequacy, which will ultimately be laid bare.”
‘He took my father to task and told him that the source of his wounded pride, which was at the root of his midlife depression, was that he’d forgotten the Christian ideals that he’d been trying to live by, and suddenly reverted to paganism, at least in theory. He had looked round in envy at his contemporaries who’d become professional whiz-kids and risen to positions of power and pre-eminence. He had looked at the entrepreneurs who’d taken the business world by storm and ended up millionaires, at the social and political climbers who’d caught the public eye and convinced themselves that they were the leaders of the latest cultural, artistic and intellectual fashions. My father remembered him saying, “No man who puts his shoulder to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.” He remembered being told in no uncertain terms to stop looking round, to stop looking back, but to look only forward at the furrow he had decided to follow from the first.
‘Gus told him that the way they’d been living out their married life had been an inspiration to him and to many others who’d been so impressed by the way they’d lived and loved one another, by the way they’d brought up such a fine family. He explained to them a theological theory close to his own heart, more common in the Eastern Church than in the West – the theory of “physical redemption”, which had been developed particularly by the Greek Fathers, the short of which is that redemption, salvation, is brought about by touch, the touch of God. Christ is the touch of God, whose physical Presence sanctified a world of matter and form, of flesh and blood, by entering into it. Then through touch he communicated the love that filled him to others, who would go out and by their physical presence, their touch, would communicate what they had received to others.
‘This, he explained, was the meaning of the laying-on of hands that has characterized the sacraments from the beginning. Love is communicated by touch. This is the tradition that literally hands on the Faith, which isn’t firstly a body of facts but a Body full of love, raised up on the first Easter Day to enter into all who would receive the touch of life. The Apostles, already touched by the holy Presence, were penetrated through and through by it on the first Pentecost day and went out to communicate what they had received to others. The hands, then, that touch and transmit the life of God to you at baptism were themselves the recipients of a touch that can be traced without a break all the way back to Jesus.
‘Gus explained to them how the physical and intimate loving that was at the heart of their married life was a profound continuation of this process, and not just a continuation but a celebration, in which the love they had both received in the sacred touch of baptism was progressively brought to perfection. Not only did their physical marital loving bring Christ’s life to birth again in each of them, but it overflowed onto the children who’d been the fruit of their loving. Far from despairing at having produced nothing, they should rejoice in the love that they had mutually generated, a love that was now literally embodied in their sons, who’d in their turn communicated to others what they had received from the touch of their parents.
‘My father couldn’t speak highly enough of all that Gus had done for them and what his brotherly support did to enable them to begin again, to make a fresh start. Once again they recommitted themselves to each other, not once but many times over, as they gradually emerged from their midlife crisis closer to one another than they’d ever been before. Once again they received the strength from one another to face all the trials and tribulations that assailed them as they journeyed on into old age. There were joys, too, like the joys of being present at their sons’ professions, seeing two of their sons ordained. But there were sorrows that tested their faith to the limits, like the agony they went through when my brother Tony told them he was leaving the priesthood and the religious life and was going to get married.
‘Then they’d hardly got over that when they had a phone call from Barra to say that I was lost at sea, presumed dead. They were devastated and their grief was all the more difficult to bear because no body had been found. They came back from the memorial service almost inconsolable. The tragedy was, when I did suddenly reappear, the shock was so great that my mother had a minor heart attack that was in some ways the beginning of the end for her, although it was a few years before she actually died.
‘My father said that it was in the last two years that he came to realize just how close they had become. He said that they’d never been more profoundly in love than they had been during my mother’s last illness. Gone were the powerful passions and the strong sexual desires that were so important in the earlier days. They’d been important, they’d done their job, they’d played their part in leading them onwards towards a love that was brought as near to perfection as is possible this side of the grave. And now my poor dad is all alone, all alone and utterly desolate, beyond all consolation. Whatever will become of him?’
Peter was talking as if in a trance. He buried his face in his hands and remained motionless for several minutes. When he took his hands away I could see two telltale tears running down his cheeks.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s all been too much for me, these last few days. It’s not so much my mum I’m thinking about; it’s my poor dad. Whatever will he do without her? Whatever will he do without her?’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
After a minute or two more of silence, Peter raised his eyes from the floor and turned to me, sighed, tried to force a smile and said, ‘Do you know, I woke up this morning thinking of the film of Wuthering Heights. I could see it all so clearly – the final scene, I mean, when Heathcliffe finally died and was buried beside his beloved Catherine. The film ended with the wraiths of each rising from the graves like two mysterious mirages made of mist. They merged into each other and went out onto their beloved moor. It’s a picture that keeps coming back into my mind – it’s a symbol of what it will be like one day when their love will finally be complete.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter, getting up. ‘I’ve overindulged myself. I began by trying to answer your problems and I’ve ended up by loading you with mine. Come, let’s have a cup of coffee and then we’ll get down to business – your business this time, not mine!’