Читать книгу Seduced by Grace - Michael Bernard Kelly - Страница 10

towards a spirituality of desire

All my life I have been haunted by longing.

Do you remember Christmas mornings? In our house they used to begin very, very early. After sleeping in fits and starts one of us children would shake the others awake in the still, pre-dawn darkness, wondering if it was ‘time’ yet. Giggling, with a delicious sense of conspiracy, we would tiptoe breathless and wide-eyed through the slumbering house to peek at the Christmas tree. ‘Mum! Dad! Father Christmas has been!’ And the door would be flung open and we’d be on our knees before all these brightly wrapped marvels, tumbling in anticipation and delight.

And if you were lucky, there was at least one special present, one that you couldn’t guess. You’d hold it and shake it and turn it, and you’d wonder. I would unwrap this present slowly, not looking, not wanting to catch a glimpse of a label on the box and guess the secret before the wondrous moment of unveiling. Savouring the edge of possibility. Tasting the wonder, the miracle of this gift that could be – anything! Could be the very thing I longed for, which I could not name myself, which I had wanted and waited for, without knowing it, all my life. Could this be It?

Here, now, in this moment I was on the threshold, I was touching the hem. Was this how the woman in the Gospel felt when she touched Jesus’ garment, hoping to be made well (Luke 8: 43-48)?

Eventually, inevitably, the present was unwrapped. Immediately, something wondrous was lost. This was not It. And yet… there was that moment, that luminous moment when everything was possible. Such a moment! Even today something in me rises to meet it, wide-eyed and open-hearted.

Why do adults so love Christmas time, so often reflecting that ‘it’s just not the same without children’? I believe that the sweetness of this remembered childhood moment lingers. Something in us all is still waiting, still longing, still hoping. Just to be here again on this threshold is delight, as we see, shining in the eyes of children, our own wonder and hope. Perhaps this year!

We are all children, waiting on the threshold for the Wonder to show itself. We are all haunted by longing.

Do you remember your first orgasm? I remember mine. I didn’t really know what it was. I was used to the excitement and pleasure of arousal, but this was completely new and unexpected. I remember very clearly saying to myself that it felt in that moment as if everything I had ever wanted had been given to me. Everything. Not this and that, but the Essence. It. I had tasted that for which I longed. In that brief splinter of time all was ecstatically complete, fulfilled.

Yet, even as it burst into my life it was gone. Of course I soon learned I could taste this delight again and again, and despite the turmoil, chaos and guilt that came to accompany it, the purity and power of that moment of ecstasy remained. It fired my longing and undid both my own plans and the dictates of a repressed and frightened Church. Again and again I would stand on the threshold and, unlike the Christmas present, this did not disappoint. Here, however fleetingly, I crossed the threshold and tasted the wonder. Yet, like Christmas, it too was gone in the very moment of its sweetest delight.

Do you remember your first taste of spiritual joy? As a boy I had been very religious, loving ritual, prayer and ‘holy things’. However, when I was about fourteen, something new broke into my life. One day when I was spending a lonely lunchtime in the school chapel trying some simple methods of prayer that I had read about, I had a sudden sense of immediate, mirror-like contact with the One to whom I prayed. It was simple (no visions or lights or anything) and it was intoxicating, like drinking at a fountain of joy. For several months this continued, especially after Holy Communion when I alternately felt as if I were flying as high as the ceiling, or as if I were about to burst from joy. God only knows what my schoolmates, bored by the daily liturgy, must have thought as I closed my eyes and drank from this hidden spring.

Again, I was on the threshold, again tasting It. Yet It withdrew. Soon the spring dried up, went underground and my prayer became plain and dry. However, I had known what it was to have my heart on fire and I would never be satisfied until it consumed me completely.

The liminal moment

These three sacred moments: the gift giving of Christmas, sexual awakening and spiritual awakening, can be called ‘liminal’ experiences. Limen is the Latin word for ‘threshold’, and it refers in a special way to the threshold of the temple: an entrance, a barrier, a meeting place between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’, between the ‘divine’ and the ‘human’, between my ‘deepest self’ and my ordinary ‘daily self’. In liminal states we taste a level of awareness beyond the rational, analytical and image-making mind, sometimes even tasting the deepest centre of self that opens into Absolute Mystery, that ground of our being where ‘God’s Spirit with her own Being is effective’.¹

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^{1 Meister Eckhart, quoted in M Fox, Original blessing, Bear and Co., New Mexico, 1983, p. 132.}

These liminal experiences cannot truly be controlled by the individual, by Church or by society. They take us beyond. And that is the point. They are profoundly free and freeing, shaking up all the structures of the self and unmistakably asserting the sovereign freedom of God in the heart and soul of every person. All are called to ecstasy.

The liminal experience comes in many ways and with many textures – I have mentioned only three. In this essay I wish to talk specifically about two: the spiritual and the sexual.

It is especially in these two areas that society and the Church set out to claim, construct, sanction and control the liminal experience. This happens primarily through the structures of marriage and of official religious ritual. Some experiences, some pathways into the Mystery, become hallowed, celebrated, enshrined, even made mandatory, while others are forbidden, condemned, denied and even demonised. Some people and their experiences are ‘in’, and other people and their experiences are ‘out’. However, true liminal experiences cannot be legislated for or legislated against. Indeed, in them a deep freedom and truth is discovered, a touchstone by which to test the preaching and posturing of the institutions themselves, if we have the integrity and the courage.

All the same, it is not simply malice and power that lead society and the Church to try to control and issue caveats around these experiences. That which is tasted in them, whether it comes through prayer, sex, nature, drugs, dance or ritual is intensely powerful, even overwhelming. Wisdom, prudence and guidance are essential in the drinking of this water, as a little taste of it goes a long way. We all know, I suspect, the seductive tendency to seek the thrill of the liminal moment again and again at the expense of ‘ordinary’ life, relationships and commitments, ultimately forfeiting the true transformation to which the liminal moment itself points, as we shall see.

But first, if we are to be human, to be free, it is essential that we become profoundly open and deeply attentive to our own liminal experiences, and especially in the areas of our sexuality and in our prayer. There can be no true spirituality or growth without this. The ‘Wisdom of the Ages’ is vital, but we must live our own lives, live from our own deepest centre, which is sensed and glimpsed in these moments. We must embrace them even as we are embraced in them. Better, we must embrace not the liminal moment itself, nor its context (church, sex, dance, drugs, nature, etc.), but rather we must embrace that which the liminal moment reveals to us: that Mystery, that essence, which we taste and surrender to, inarticulate and inarticulable, utterly free. We must embrace and drink deeply of the Mystery whenever and wherever and however and in whomsoever it reveals itself. Laws must not stop us.

Elsewhere I have referred to this as ‘telling the truth’, first to ourselves.² Let us drink deeply, letting the ‘chips’ of social, religious and personal structures fall where they may in that moment. We who are ourselves ‘on the edge’, whose spiritual and sexual experiences are so routinely condemned and denied, can we have the courage to ‘drink of the truth’ and to proclaim it to others, witnessing to the freedom of the Spirit who will not be articulated, legislated or controlled, who ‘blows wherever she wills’ (John 3:8)? Here is a truly prophetic, truly revolutionary, truly human vocation!

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^{2 See my video course The erotic contemplative:the spiritual journey of the gay/lesbian Christian, vol. 1, Erospirit Research Institute, Oakland CA, 1994.}

What then of the wisdom and prudence I spoke of earlier? And what of the inevitable, all too immediate moment when the tasting, the embracing, the showing is gone, and we either tumble deliciously in its wake like dolphins behind a ship, or feel the chaos and emptiness it has stirred up in our stagnant pond of a life? What then?

The showing and the withdrawing

This withdrawing, this ‘hide-and-seek’ is the other essential quality of the liminal experience. It must be faced. All too often we, who are excluded from so much that society and Church hold dear, cling tenaciously to the thrill of the moment, seeking it over and over again, compulsively, even desperately, ‘like vultures fighting over a corpse’, as a gay friend put it recently. We must allow the withdrawing. We must let go.

When Heidegger says, ‘that which itself shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the Mystery‘³, he is expressing a truth that all of us know at a deep, soul level. We also know it in our bodies. Perhaps the experience of orgasm is the clearest example of this for most of us. In that very moment of ecstasy, in that tasting, that bliss, that knowing, that briefest communion with that which cannot be named, as we are thrown over the peak of consciousness, at the burning ‘white hot tip of sexuality‘⁴ as ‘It’ shows itself, it withdraws. We are left astonished, filled and shattered by sex, but still we are left.

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^{3 F Browning,The culture of desire, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 88.}

^{4 R Burrows, Ascent to love, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1987, p. 115.}

What is going on here? Is ‘God’ playing games with us? (And there are names for games like this!) Are we being enticed, teased and abandoned? It is relevant to state that this precise question is also faced in the spiritual life of prayer, as the One who set our hearts on fire seems to abandon us and we are left ‘on the streets’, ‘beaten’, ‘wounded’ and ‘stripped’ like the bride in the Song of Songs.⁵ This is a serious question, and in our longing we ask it from the depths of our heart.

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^{5 Song of Songs 5:7.}

Could it be that this showing-and-withdrawing actually reveals to us something of the nature of the Mystery itself, something of our own nature, and something of the nature of human transformation? Could it be essential to the spiritual journey? In the Book of Exodus, Moses, after receiving the Law, asks to see God’s face. God tells Moses to hide in the cleft of a rock and as He passes, God will shield him with His hand, so that Moses can look out and see God’s back (Exodus 33:18-23). It would be death to see God face to face – not in the sense of being punished, but because the encounter would be humanly overwhelming, unbearable; it would ‘shatter the container’ of the human.

To encounter the Mystery, the Unnameable One, ‘God’, is to go beyond words, concepts, images and doctrines. It is to stand naked, utterly vulnerable in the embrace of the ineffable essence of That Which Is, encountering It in ourselves, as ourselves, as All. This is that which ‘no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has it entered into the mind of humans to conceive’ (1 Corinthians 2:9). This encounter can only be borne in the briefest of touches; a full revelation of the Mystery is literally unthinkable, impossible for human life as we now live it. Even our fleeting glimpses baffle and stun us.

In the immediate withdrawing of the Mystery, even as it embraces us, as it licks our lips, we see its nature as utterly ‘more’, ultimately ‘beyond’, transcending all, just as in its showing we see its immanence; for it is closer to us than we are to ourselves – intimate and immediate in the depths of our humanness.

In our truly liminal experiences, in the depths of prayer and in the depths of sex, I believe we do indeed encounter this Absolute Mystery, showing and withdrawing, embracing and emptying, and we long for it with all our heart and soul. ‘My body pines for you, like a dry weary land without water’, cries the Psalmist (Psalm 63:1) and the mystic and the lover in us cry out with him. We know the yearning of those who ‘are willing to make shipwrecks of themselves in order to gain the one they love’.⁶ It is the withdrawing of the Mystery that kindles and re-kindles this longing.⁷

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^{6 Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by RS Pine-Coffin, Penguin Classics, Middlesex, 1961, p. 232 (Book X, Chapter 27). 7 This ‘showing and withdrawing’ of the Mystery, the ‘emptying and embracing’ reflect the two great movements of the Christian spiritual life: the Apophatic (negative) Way and the Cataphatic (affirmative) Way.}

This, then, is the second gift of the withdrawing: we are seduced onto the spiritual journey, the human journey to maturity, union and transformation.

In every era and in every part of life there is a tendency for us to focus on ‘experiences’, ecstatic ‘thrills’ – the tastes and touches we have been discussing. This tendency is especially marked in sexuality and spirituality, where the tastes are so intoxicating, fleeting and profound. These tastes are essential; they are seeds, glimpses of that fullness to which we are called. However, they are not the Journey itself, not transformation, not mystical union, not enlightenment. They set us on the road – perhaps they are even glimpses of the destination – but we have not yet arrived. Indeed we have hardly set out! If we become addicted to simply seeking more and more ‘experiences’, whether sexual or spiritual, we never will arrive. We all know this tendency in sexuality, but the seduction in spirituality can be more subtle, more compelling and more soul destroying.

So what is happening? Firstly, some element of this ‘addiction’ is probably inevitable in our yearning and longing, for the taste of ecstasy, however it comes, is so delicious, so overwhelming. Of course we seek it again and again!

‘You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet perfume. I tasted you and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and I am inflamed with love of your peace’, says Saint Augustine,⁸ and in our different ways we know what he means. However, we must allow the withdrawing to take place. It is the withdrawing that will draw us towards the transformation, to the abiding fulfilment of that which we taste so briefly in our ecstasies. How does this happen?

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^{8 Saint Augustine, op. cit.}

To become that which we taste

When we taste the Mystery we long to drink deeply of it, to take it into ourselves, to be possessed by it, to surrender to it, to become it in an abiding way, ‘forever and ever’. To become that which we taste. I think of our images of sexual ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’, not just our desire to ‘do it’ with this or that person, but to ‘drink them in’, ‘gobble them up’, nibble, lick, suck, swallow – all, the ‘eating’ metaphors and delights of sex. This is mirrored very powerfully in the images of spiritual communion, where we eat and drink ‘the body and blood of the Lord’, our very bodies merging and becoming transformed into the One who is the Beloved of our souls.

This is the heart of our yearning: to become that which we taste and hunger for, not briefly, but fully, totally, permanently, being utterly transformed into that which we desire so deeply. Union. Ecstasy. The ‘Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover‘⁹, the seeker transformed into that which she seeks.

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^{9 St John of the Cross, The dark night, st. 5, trans. K Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD, ICS Publications, Washington DC, 1973, p. 296.}

This truly is to die to ourselves, to lose our life so as to find it (Luke 9:24), to enter into the mystery of death and resurrection. This is what we hunger and thirst for in our bodies, in our sexuality no less than in our spirituality, and this is what we taste in both. All that is deeply and authentically human is a pathway into this transformation, but sexuality and spirituality draw us most profoundly, most ecstatically. I think of Jesus speaking to the woman at the well (John 4:5-42), seducing her onto her spiritual journey with the promise of a spring of living water that would never run dry. We taste this spring and we thirst for the day when rivers of this living water will rise within us flowing out of our ‘belly’ and welling up to eternal life, eternal union, eternal love (John 7:38).¹⁰

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^{10 There are those who would applaud these words as applied to ‘holy longing’ and ‘spiritual desires’ of the soul, but would wish to accord sexual yearning a lower place. I refer them to the Mystery of the Incarnation. There is one hunger, one thirst, one longing, one love moving in the depths of all that we are. We feel this most powerfully, most physically in our longing for sexual intimacy and ecstasy.}

The Mystery that shows Itself must withdraw. It must seduce us. It must play a game of ‘now, and not yet’ with us, enticing us, leading us on and on, inflaming our longing at deeper and deeper levels. It must also teach us that the taste of this ‘living water’ is not enough, and allow us to find both bliss and bitterness in the tasting (especially when we become ‘hooked’). It must teach us to follow the withdrawing, to let go and go deeper, learning the lessons of how to become, in the abiding, ordinary, everyday reality of our lives, that which we taste and thirst for. Nothing less will satisfy our hunger, fulfil our longing, and transform our humanity into the divinity we seek.

How does this look in practice, in people’s actual lives? Firstly, it is important to say that there are as many answers to this question as there are people to ask it. The human journey of transformation, while it has universal qualities, is profoundly personal and particular and will look very different in individual lives as each of us experiences growth and purification in ways we least expect, but most need.¹¹ Those of us marginalised by mainstream society, both secular and religious, because of our sexuality need to remember this, as does anyone who seeks to guide us. The ways we experience and embody our deepest longings often look very different from the ways sanctioned by a heterosexist culture, and likewise our path of transformation will look very different.

11 R Burrows, op. cit., pp. 108-109. Burrows shows how the ‘Dark Night’ can look very different according to people’s different needs and personalities.

In us the free, uncontrolled Spirit of God offers a gift to humanity, freeing others to embrace this journey so particular, so universal. We must dare to be different; we must risk becoming our true selves.

The heart of our longing

What then are the universal qualities of the transforming journey? They are many and there are many books written about them in all religions. However, the ‘bottom line’, I believe, is the fact that, in the end, we are all longing for the same thing. In our spiritual practices, in our sexual desire, in the lives and relationships we build, when all the fetishes, dreams and different ‘shapes’ our longing has taken over the years – when all these have run their course, worn out or faded away – we will find that we are all longing for communion with the Other, and self-transcendence in and through that communion. Communion and transcendence. Intimacy and ecstasy.

From the first orgasm, and in every orgasm since, I have sought that ecstatic moment, and its allure colours so much of my life still. Seeking out its possibility, feeling its approach, surrendering to it and allowing the rigid sense of self to melt deliciously as it rises within me, letting myself be caught up in the juicy passion that draws me toward it. There is an aloneness in this, as I close my eyes, go deeply into my experience of pleasure and let the ecstatic flow become all that I am. There is a deep solitude in the drinking of this water.

However, I also long to share this ecstatic vulnerability with another person, and that which I seek to drink in ecstasy, I am drawn to in and through other persons. Put simply, I long to have sex with another person, however intense solitary sexual pleasure may be. At a conference on AIDS I once tried to persuade a Church group that we needed to reassess the potential goodness and grace in all kinds of sexual relating, including ‘recreational sex’. An agitated woman finally snapped at me, ‘Well why can’t you just masturbate?’ I snapped back, ‘I do, don’t you?’ My real answer, however, would be that it simply is not the same. There is another whole dimension of life – and of ecstasy itself – present in my relating with another, or other persons, whether it is in a casual encounter or in a lifelong relationship. This other dimension is communion, intimacy.

As one matures, this desire for communion deepens and the ecstatic moment itself begins to seem somewhat incomplete, even empty, without this growing, broadening communion with another, with the other in others, in all the dimensions of one’s life and personality. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that without the allure and ecstatic possibility of self-transcendence in and through our relating, communion itself can all too easily become complacent and tasteless. (And we go out looking!)

So, we long for communion and transcendence. We long for them, and sometimes experience them as separate and sometimes as intimately interwoven. At depth, however, they are two faces of the same Mystery: Love. It is clear that those we call ‘lovers’ seek the truth of this. We see it, too, quite graphically in the almost universal desire to ‘climax together’ with the person we are having sex with. We also see it in the Christian spiritual teaching that the saintly hermit and the saintly activist are both, at depth, ecstatically transcending self and Michael Bernard simultaneously in communion with God and with all beings. Solitude and union; communion and transcendence; intimacy and ecstasy: Love.

This longing for communion and transcendence is the essence of spirituality; it is what I seek when I pray, what I try to live out in service, what I call true holiness when it matures in a human person. This is the same mystery that I long for in sex, in the daily reality of my life, in my choices, relationships and dreams. It is not esoteric and exotic, but ordinary and human, like true spirituality. It is this ordinariness, this humanness, this embodiedness that opens onto divinity. We will find it at home, in our cells, in our sweat.

This opening onto divinity is the truth of all that is genuinely human, and it cannot be restricted by the dictates of Church and society. Often, indeed, it will happen most profoundly in people and in situations outside the approved norms where people are on the edge, seeking to follow their hearts, having only their thirst for their guide. Saints, lovers and mystics have never been fit for polite society. They drink from the same well, perhaps in different ways and at different depths, but it is the same thirst and the same water. Little wonder, then, that their passionate language of love so often sounds the same!

However, mystics and lovers also know, if they are honest, that the Mystery which shows itself in intimacy and ecstasy also withdraws. We have looked at one dimension of this withdrawing. Is there another?

The Mystery that must withdraw

We long for communion and self-transcendence. In our sex and in our prayer we taste this. Sometimes this ecstatic, intimate experience is especially deep and comes through a particular person or in a particular context. We feel profound allure. Here is the chance to drink deeply and abidingly of this water, to be possessed by and to possess the Mystery, to be transformed, becoming what I taste, having ‘all my dreams come true’. And we make life choices on the basis of this liminal experience of allurement and possibility. We form relationships, join communities, serve the poor, get married, learn tantric sex, choose celibacy, take up a spiritual practice, move to the beach. All of these are ‘shapes’ our longing takes at certain moments, and sometimes throughout many years, and we embrace them hoping to drink deeply and become what we taste in and through this person, this practice, this path. We celebrate and send out invitations!

Sooner or later, however, the camellias turn brown, the honeymoon ends, and we ask, ‘Who is this at the breakfast table? My God what have I done?’ Sooner or later the Mystery withdraws. What now?

The first thing to say, again, is that the Mystery must withdraw. However holy or sexy this person, practice or path may be, the Divine Mystery lies both in and beyond them.

We cannot fulfil one another’s deepest longings. In this sense I am not ‘God’. I am not the Beloved of another’s soul for I, too, am seeking that Beloved. When I ‘fall in love’, part of what is happening is that I am projecting my own longing for union with the Mystery onto another person. The poet Rilke says that lovers are close to the Mystery, ‘it opens up to them behind each other’. However, they are ‘blocking each other’s view’, and ‘neither one can get past’.¹² Someday we obscurely realise this and we say things like ‘you’re not the man I married!’, and in a certain sense that’s right.

12 RM Rilke, Duino elegies, eighth elegy, trans. D Young, Norton and Co., New York, 1978, p. 73.

However, this realisation, this withdrawing of the Mystery teaches us to do what we can do: nurture, support, love and encourage one another on our own spiritual journey, recognising, too, that in our love-making we do indeed encounter the depths of one another – those depths that go beyond the individual and into Absolute Communion. And then we can, perhaps, join hands and go forward side-by-side rather than face-to-face.

Even in this, however, we must face the fact that this person or these people who we love will one day die, and yet our longing will go on and on beyond them and into death itself.

This is also true of spiritual paths, practices and teachings. They are all fingers pointing to the moon, as Zen has it. Even Jesus said that he was ‘the Gate’ (John 10:9) and ‘the Way’ (John 14:6). The finger, the gate and the way are not the destination! We must follow the direction of the finger, go through the gate, walk the way, trusting more and more and leaving behind all that is familiar, magical and safe. We must embrace the Mystery.

The shapes of my longing, the shapes the Mystery seems to take in my life must play their part, but they must also fail. A gracious ‘letting go’ is what we are called to, but this process is usually deeply painful, even shattering, and can feel soul-destroying. All that we cling to, all of our old ambitions, values and loves will be stripped away, sometimes gradually, sometimes violently. There is nowhere to hide, except in illusion. If we can be open enough, if we can wait, if we can slowly accept the gift of trust in the midst of darkness and desolation we will come to sense, in our loneliness and emptiness, a deeper, silent, ‘dark’ embrace of the Mystery. In the emptying is the embrace.

This can only happen in the depths of my true self, and there is profound solitude in this. The person or path ‘out there’ may have helped me ‘come home’ to my deep self, but as I do I must release them in order to be free to enter the silence of this dark embrace.

Furthermore, it is in the ending of the honeymoon phase of relationships, of love-making, of spiritual life, of sex itself that we glimpse what it might actually mean to become that which we taste. It is communion and self-transcendence that we seek. Sooner or later we must learn what it means to live this out everyday, in the ordinary, mundane, unexciting, ‘non-liminal’ reality of life. We must learn what it means to transcend self again and again, not just in ecstasy, but in taking out the garbage, in the boredom and interior anguish of prayer, in the stink of the poor, or of a dying lover, whom we once embraced so passionately because they seemed to us like heaven itself. We must learn the endless concern, generosity, sensitivity and forgiveness that living a life of communion with the Other demands. This is practical, down to earth, simple and incredibly demanding. This is the other side of losing one’s life so as to save it, of death and resurrection, of becoming a lover. A transformed human being lives a real life of days, hours and minutes, of cleaning, cooking and recreation, of listening, speaking, laughing and crying.

There is a Buddhist saying, ‘After enlightenment: the laundry!’ One might just as truly add, ‘before, during and on the way to enlightenment: the laundry!’ We are not playing games here; we are not seeking just liminal thrills, for all their beauty and power. The Mystery must withdraw into the ordinariness of everyday, for that is the place of learning and of transformation.

In the midst of this hard work of becoming, however, there will still be tastes and glimpses of that which we seek. These refresh us, renew us and encourage us, and they are vital. As the years pass, however, these will have a different, deepening texture, perhaps quieter, perhaps more free, sometimes more searing and overwhelming. Gradually the intimacy and the ecstasy will become one. Gradually, too, we will begin to sense a quiet, abiding embrace in the foundation of our soul.

Spiritual maturity

In the maturity of the spiritual life, the sexual life, the human life, there is a peace, a surrender, and a still, abiding passion that runs gentle and deep. The fireworks are few; they accompanied the momentary collapse of the structures of self that allowed earlier tastes of the Mystery. Now these structures are simpler, softer, more saturated with the presence of the Divine. One thinks of the classic image of the old couple (at least as often gay or lesbian as straight) whose intimacy flows quietly, needing few words or thrilling experiences. They abide in and with one another, loved and known, knowing and loving.

One thinks too, of the wise old Indian Teacher to whom Ram Dass offered LSD in order to see what would happen. The teacher took it, smiled, and just went on sitting, meditating in unitive peace. He was already there.¹³

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^{13 In the 1960s Ram Dass, with Timothy Leary, was one of the early experimenters with LSD. Disillusioned with the transitory nature of the experience it offered, he travelled to India in search of more abiding transformation. See Ram Dass, Be here now, Hanuman Foundation, New Mexico, 1971}

Old age, of course, is not essential in spiritual growth.¹⁴ Randy Shilts, in his book, And the Band Played On, tells the story of Gary Walsh, a gay man in San Francisco who went through the different phases of ‘AIDS is a spiritual gift’ and ‘AIDS is an ugly curse’ to finally reach a simple, deep tranquillity before he died. On the day he died a friend told him of the effect he was having on others, that people were coming away from conversations with him ‘like pilgrims leaving a holy shrine’.

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^{14 That remarkable contemplative, St. Therese of Lisieux, who died of Tuberculosis in 1897 at the age of 24, is proof enough of this.}

Gary smiled his mischievous grin and interrupted her. ‘I got it, I finally got it’, he said. ‘I am love and light and I transform people by just being who I am.’ Gary recited the words carefully, like a schoolchild who had struggled hard to master a difficult lesson.¹⁵

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^{15 R. Shilts, And the band played on, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1987, p. 425.}

Many of us have seen such simple, human holiness first-hand in our friends and lovers. Many of us are growing towards it right now.

This holy, human maturity is based on our readiness to respond to the deepest challenges of learning, trusting, surrendering, loving, becoming open always to the embrace, but also to the painful emptying, to the showing and the withdrawing, allowing the shapes of longing to fail and fall away, leaving only ‘love-longing’.¹⁶ Becoming that which we taste.

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^{16 Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Paulist Press, New York, 1978, p. 318.}>

Conclusion

We must pay close attention, then, to our liminal experiences, our sexual desire, our orgasms, our loving communion, our spiritual life, our times of wonder and awe, our tastes of quiet, holy presence. We must pay attention to our Christmas mornings.

Equally, we must be open to our emptying and to the ‘school of love‘¹⁷ that is everyday life.

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^{17 A Jones, Soulmaking, SCM Press, London, 1985, p. 1. This is an ancient term referring to the discipline of monastic life.}

Most of all, we must listen to our longing, not simply our desire for this or that person, but to the longing that rises from the centre of our hearts and that leads us on and on through the years, into and beyond our loves, as familiar and profound as breathing. In the embracing and the emptying this centre will become our place of stillness and truth. In the moment of death, it is through this centre that our longing will pass, opening us to the ‘first Alleluia! of my eternity‘¹⁸ and to the eternal dance of desire with the Absolute Mystery of Love in whom we will be transformed from Glory to Glory!¹⁹

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^{18 From the saying of Pedro Arrupe SJ regarding death. Quoted by John J. McNeil in his lecture, ‘Drinking from our own wells’, Berkeley, California, 1992. 19 St Gregory of Nyssa saw the life of heaven as an eternal progression into God as our desire is constantly kindled, fulfilled and rekindled at deeper levels. See, for example, his Life of Moses, quoted and translated by H. Musurillo in his From glory to glory: texts from Gregory of Nyssa, John Murray, London, 1962, pp. 142-148.}

It is for this that we were born, it is this that we taste, it is to this that we are destined – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, straight. It is our birthright.

Unnameable God, my essence;

my origin, my lifeblood, my home.²⁰

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^{20 Psalm 19, verse 14, translated by Stephen Mitchell , The enlightened heart, Harper and Row, New York, 1989.}

And it all begins in the honest, earthy, human desire for love, for<</p>

sex, for communion and self-transcendence. It all begins in that

moment just before a small boy opens his Christmas present.

*

This essay was published in the anthology, Our families, our values: snapshots

of queer kinship, edited by Robert Goss, Haworth Press, Binghamton, NY,

1997.