The following is not a typical love story, and Brother Raphael Robin and Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault were no ordinary couple. Rafe, as he was known, was a Trappist monk and hermit living in a cabin near Saint Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. Cynthia was an Episcopal priest from Maine who’d recently divorced her second husband. They were, in Bourgeault’s words, “part teacher-student, part kindred spirits, and completely devoted to each other.”
They first met in 1990, when Cynthia was in her midforties and Rafe in his midsixties. She was attending a workshop at the monastery in Snowmass when the shower drain at the apartment where she was staying froze up. Rafe, the resident plumber at the monastery, came to thaw the drain. The two talked, she says, “as if we had always known each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gone on for eternity.” When the conversation was over, though, they went their separate ways.
Cynthia’s marriage soon ended, and she began spending several months at a time in solitude at the monastery, traveling back and forth between Maine and Colorado. When she was in Snowmass, Rafe would stop by to deliver food or work on the plumbing at the ranch house she rented. They discovered a common interest in twentieth-century mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and began to talk about spiritual matters. “What was striking from the start,” Cynthia writes, “was an extraordinary emotional trust between us. Even early on, the innate grasp of who the other was allowed us to fall through the surface roles and postures and address each other from dead center.”
In June 1994 Cynthia came to live full time at the monastery, and they gave themselves over to “the experiment” — Rafe’s term for their relationship. In part, it was a tug of war between Rafe’s commitment to celibacy and the force that drew them together. People often ask Cynthia which side won out. “He was a Trappist hermit monk,” she writes, “and our love for each other, while it certainly ‘pushed the envelope’ of the category generally known as spiritual friendship, abided within the terms and integrity of his vocation.”
Rafe died on December 11, 1995, but their relationship did not end there. Cynthia felt Rafe calling her to “a continued partnership.” But was she merely clinging to his memory, she asked herself, or did their connection really transcend the grave? Her attempts to answer this question resulted in the book Love Is Stronger than Death (Lindisfarne). In it, she writes about “a little-known but ample body of knowledge within the Christian tradition that supports the possibility that the heart already intuits: the death of a beloved does not mean the end of a relationship, but simply a new and more subtle phase of the walk together.” In the following excerpt, she describes her time with Rafe, particularly the last year of his life, when their bond was repeatedly tested and its true nature began to emerge.
“Stronger than Death” is excerpted from Love Is Stronger than Death, by Cynthia Bourgeault. © 2001 by Cynthia Bourgeault. It appears here by permission of Lindisfarne Books, www.lindisfarne.org.
— Ed.
If, on a visit to St. Benedict’s Monastery in Colorado, you were to drive about a half mile beyond the main turnoff, there on your right you’d come upon a washed-out driveway leading to an abandoned ranch house known as the Stanley place. The yard is overgrown now, and the dangling barn-board siding and several broken windows leave the house fatally open to the elements. Out front is a large pile of trash and building debris, the remains of an abortive attempt by a new tenant to gut the place and start over. Inside is a strewn mess of smashed cabinetry and broken dishes, and a film of flour and sheetrock dust laced with mouse droppings. It’s hard to imagine that anyone ever lived here.
Yet only a little while ago, the Stanley place was a functioning household: funky, to be sure, a real sixties period piece, but with all the comforts of home, even “hot and cold running water,” as Rafe liked to boast. For four years, off and on, it was my home. This was the house the monks generously made available to me while I was in transition from Maine to Colorado. They accepted a modest rent in exchange for my equally modest efforts to stem the tide of entropy. Rafe was assigned as caretaker, and it was through working together on the place that we really came to know each other.
My first winter in Colorado, Rafe and I spent Christmas together at the Stanley place, to the surprise of us both. His long-established pattern was to be in seclusion up at his cabin from the week before Christmas until well into the new year. But that year, old patterns seemed to vanish in the happiness of new circumstances. On Christmas morning a knock came on my door, and there was Rafe decked out in his cowboy finery, a box of Christmas ornaments under his arm and a small present peeking out from his coat pocket. We decorated a tree, cooked a fancy Christmas breakfast, and, of course, exchanged gifts. He gave me an Indian bear-claw necklace. I gave him a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. We sipped our coffee in the sunroom and listened to Gurdjieff’s music on my old tape deck while the sun grew round and full over the snow-sparkled mountains, and both of us felt completely aglow in the joy of the day and each other. “The most wonderful Christmas I ever had,” said Rafe as he took his leave. The memories of that day kept me going for almost a year, and by Thanksgiving I was already anticipating a repeat performance.
And then, two days before Christmas, Rafe announced he was heading back up to the cabin for his usual time of deep solitude.
I was devastated — as much by the abruptness of his manner as by the actual prospect of spending my first Christmas alone — and tore off down to his shop yard to remonstrate with him. He was readying his snowmobile, a goodly bag of provisions already strapped aboard, and he was in no mood to chat. “But if last year was the most wonderful Christmas you’ve ever had . . . ?” I pleaded. He fired up the engine with a mighty yank on the starter cord and took off. In a rage, I walked home the long way, through the creek bed, dodging the icy branches and brambles that picked at what little was left of my Christmas spirit.
When I got back to the Stanley place, I saw snowmobile tracks at the foot of the driveway — come and gone again — and the crisscross marks of Rafe’s boots tramping a trail up the walkway. Propped up on the kitchen counter was an old monastery postcard. On the back of it were two lines, carefully lettered in Rafe’s inimitable hand:
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.
And below it, as a kind of postscript: “Not to worry. All is swell.”
The lines are from “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets. I don’t know whether he copied them from the book I had given him the previous year, or more likely from Helen Luke’s essay on “Little Gidding” in her book Old Age, one of Rafe’s favorites up at the cabin. Luke’s profound counsels for “growing into age” had, in more recent years, melded seamlessly into the already pronounced set and drift of Rafe’s life. At the heart of his hermit striving was a continuous self-pruning, a struggle to detach himself from the petty tyranny of “habits and emotional laziness,” as he put it — in order to make room for something of an entirely new order.
“Don’t you see how people who love each other trap each other?” he would snort. “You say, ‘I love you,’ but you won’t let me change. How can that be love? I think that’s why so many marriages fail, don’t you?”
It had all sounded good when we’d talked about it back in August. But that was August, and this was Christmas Eve, by God! Couldn’t he just once make an exception? But already I was beginning to catch on to this most unusual aspect of Rafe’s character. For Rafe there were no exceptions. What you believed, you enacted. Period. All the rest was talk. And all talk was last year’s language. Seeing what he saw, he was doing what he did. And my gift that Christmas was to learn to live with it.
Looking around at our handiwork that winter of 1995, Rafe and I had to admit that the Stanley place had come a long, long way. Two years of chipping away at it together had restored the place not exactly to elegance, but at least to decent habitability. I had the distinct feeling that Rafe was enjoying the process as much as I. I was the carpenter, he was the plumber and electrician, and we both had a pack-rat mentality. He would bring chairs, a rug, a bathtub — scrounged from the monastery dumpster or bought dirt-cheap at the local recycling barn — and occasionally a real gem, such as the powerful Ashley wood stove in the sunroom, or the matched bar stools for the kitchen counter. “What this place needs is a . . . ,” he’d start, and the next thing you knew, there it would be — ungainly, most likely mismatched, but in its own way a treasure.
We even had a cappuccino maker — our one brand-new joint household purchase. After teasing me for a week or so with “What this place needs is a real cappuccino bar,” he walked in one day and plunked eighty-seven dollars down on the counter. “The whole of my Social Security,” he announced with twinkling solemnity. With that money and my credit card, we went downtown and bought a cappuccino machine, two festive stoneware cups, and a bag of espresso roast. From then on, for the rest of our time at the Stanley place, the ritual was to sit at our barstools, raise our cups, look each other squarely in the eye, and offer the inevitable toast: “To the deepening celebration.”
Occasionally in those talks with Rafe, I said something right. One time we were having cappuccino at the Stanley place, looking out across the mile or so of valley toward the chimney of his little cabin up the hill. I was telling him about my recent small victory in the ongoing struggle not to come up for a visit when he was in solitude. Early in our time together he had welcomed these visits and spent a lot of time patiently teaching me the cabin drill, but lately my presence at the cabin was increasingly an intrusion. I struggled to honor the widening space inside him, and this time the strength was in me. “I figured,” I said, “that if I could love you across the space of a mile, I can love you across the space of eternity.”
He broke into a huge smile. “Now you’re getting somewhere!” he exclaimed. And then, as if in appreciation, he shared with me a story from his own formative years. About 1971, he told me, he’d left the monastery in Georgia to head west in search of a deeper solitude. A friend of the monastery had offered the use of a rustic campsite in a remote corner of southern Colorado, and there, uprooted from everything familiar and totally on his own, Rafe began his hermit life. It was an exhilarating time for him with his newfound freedom, but the strain of loneliness and disorientation — not to mention the sheer physical brutality of the site — gradually took its toll. Late one afternoon he was out in a thickly tangled, rock-strewn field, trying to move a large boulder to clear a site for his cabin. He strained and strained with pickax and crowbar, but the boulder wouldn’t give.
“And suddenly I burst into tears,” he said. “I was so tired; it all just felt so lonely, so totally useless. I sat there on that rock and said to myself, ‘Listen, God didn’t ask you to come here; you came here yourself.’
“I’d never felt that way before. It was an ache all the way to the end of the universe. I realized this must be my ‘bare self.’ ”
Over those next long months, Rafe said, he gradually became accustomed to it. That ache all the way to the end of the universe was how things would be, how they had to be. “God can only work in us through our bare self,” he averred. “At that place, if a person is really willing to wait there, God says, ‘Aha! Now we can get down to work. At last there is something to work with.’ ”
Later, in an astonishing observation, Rafe added, “We only think that place is bare because the light is so intense that it blinds us.”
Rafe was a kid of the old school. He had been formed in the classic monastic tradition of spiritual warfare, the subduing of the “passions,” which are always disordered and always in mutiny against our true spiritual destiny. Rafe took these lessons deeply to heart. In those long years of struggle against his own mutinous nature, he had learned, like Keats, to stand alone on the shore of the wide world and simply let the ache carry him all the way down, into God — “till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”
And I was a kid of the new school. Twenty years younger than Rafe and formed in the psychological climate of our times, I was wary of spiritual practice that buries emotional pain and passion — “the flight into holiness,” as I tagged it. My own instincts were more along the lines of those of Father Thomas Keating, my Centering Prayer teacher at Snowmass: “The way to be rid of emotional pain is to feel it.” Like most of my generation, when fear or sadness arose in me, I thought it natural to expect Rafe to be “supportive” — to stay near, hear me out, and reassure me with his sympathy and maybe a hug. “Don’t you see that by indulging it,” he scoffed, “you only make it worse?” Whenever I started to get into a bad state, he would leave. Only later, when something had shifted in me, would he return, picking up where we had left off as if nothing had happened.
We never resolved this tension. Gradually, by working with him, I came around more and more to his way of looking at things.
But so often I felt a deep sadness in him. His unswerving devotion to “next year’s language,” and that constant vigilance against being lured into “a home of one’s own making,” sometimes struck me as the desert-spirituality equivalent of making lemonade out of the lemons life has dealt you. “I’m gone as of five minutes ago” was one of Rafe’s favorite leave-taking phrases, and there was a profound psychological truth to it. For, of course, running with all speed toward the new is also the best possible strategy for outdistancing the flames of destruction licking at your heels. It was as if something in Rafe knew that everything he loved would be taken from him.
When his horse Saddalu had died in a snowfield a few winters earlier, one of the monks went up to the cabin to break the news to him. Knowing how Rafe loved that beautiful white Arabian, his brothers figured he would take the news hard. Instead, in towering aloofness, Rafe sent the monk packing. “What’s to be upset about? Horses die, I die, you die; we’re all going to die.” Three years later, recounting the episode to me, his voice still quavered with anger.
I was angry, too. “You just talk that way to protect yourself from being hurt,” I snapped.
He winced almost as if I’d struck him. “You can think that if you like.” The look in his eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. If “haunting” and “haunted” can exist in the same look, that was perhaps it — a naked, bottomless grief. But one could never get close to Rafe’s grief. I could feel it sometimes, and my heart ached for him. But the anger around it was too explosive. After that Saddalu story, it was a week before he would come near me again.
As I said, I thought hugs were good, that there wasn’t much that couldn’t be fixed by someone holding you close. But Rafe was raised in the monastic practices of a generation ago and, to the very end of his days, unreconciled with his sexuality. He had spent a lifetime taming his passions, which he regarded as alien forces driving him away from his yearning for complete absorption in God. Sometimes we did hug, and the space between us grew vast and luminous. At other times he was rough and removed, springing back like a wild animal from a trap. “Just pandering to weakness, pandering to weakness,” he’d mutter.
That always threw us into a bad cycle. He’d mock my clutching and clinging and declaim, “Get thee a husband!” I’d castigate his “flight into holiness” and taunt, “If you’re such a great hermit, why don’t you just stay up there awhile?” In two years we’d been around that circle many times.
And that’s how it started to go again, one Ash Wednesday morning at Rafe’s shop. We were warming our hands by the stove after a good piece of work on a snowmobile clutch assembly, but internally things had been going downhill. All through that morning I could feel him gradually slipping away into that place where I could never reach him. And as my own sense of fearfulness and rejection grew, I watched it trigger that same dumb move I always made in these circumstances. A whiny little voice deep from childhood began to speak: “Rafe, can we have a hug?”
He started to draw back, as he always did at these times. Then, suddenly, something different happened. I caught it the instant it started. Those blue eyes, rather than turning angry and aloof, became intense and focused right on me as he said, “You’ll see; everything that can be had in a hug is right here.”
“Don’t give me that Platonic stuff —” I began, and then stopped dead in my tracks. The last thought I can remember thinking is Dear God, he’s right! The most intense feeling of union, as powerful as any physical hug that had ever arched between us — far more so, in fact — was all right there. For a split second I felt it, knew it: this was the energy of pure intention, both beyond form and inside form, at the heart of it. Aimed directly at me.
A split second — and then my mind shut down altogether. I couldn’t finish that thought, couldn’t even reconstruct the start of it. Several hours later, trying to replay what had happened, my mind could still only creep to the precipice of it before falling off into nothing. All I could be sure of was that the inner essence of the outer hug was there, perfect and in its entirety, the naked thing itself. Rafe wasn’t withdrawing, wasn’t fleeing into holiness. He was simply sharing with me the full brunt of what he knew: that the outer, physical form somehow slowed down or thickened something that could be communicated instantaneously, as raw intention.
In August, I went back to Maine for a three-week trip. A week after I left, Rafe developed a serious infection, lost consciousness driving his old Scout snowmobile down the hill from his cabin, and wound up in the hospital for a week, the first three days in intensive care. He asked for no visitors and sent no word. I knew nothing about it. All I knew was that, from the start, a trip I had thought would be difficult seemed magically supported, one thing leading easily to another. One afternoon, at a beach on Eagle Island, two thousand miles away, I stood facing west and, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, felt my life fill up with hope and strength and joy, a mysterious well-being emanating directly, it seemed, from the heart of the cosmos.
Back in Colorado after my return, we were working on the snowmobiles in the shop. Rafe was still moving slowly, tired, distracted — the usual flight into holiness — and I predictably started to get clingy.
“Rafe, did you miss me when I was gone?”
“Nah,” he grunted, and he glanced at me briefly with a look of complete condescension. No, on second thought I could see it was more a look of deep disappointment, as when a gift one has given at great cost is received lightly, casually tossed aside. He shook his head and muttered as he returned to his work, “You still don’t understand, do you?”
I could tell that Rafe was getting beyond his emotional limits when he later shared the story of what had befallen him during my absence. He plunged on with the details of that nightmare ride down the hill, passing out at the wheel of the Scout, hitting a tree, finally fetching up in a barbed-wire fence and staggering down to the monastery. Perhaps we were both in shock. The joy of seeing each other again masked it for a while, but soon we were both backpedaling fast. He beat a hasty retreat, and I lay awake all night replaying the details in growing horror and disbelief.
The next day, we were into our worst ever “get thee a husband” cycle — Rafe in full flight, and I in dazed pursuit. The more I tried to come near him, the more he pushed me away. At last he ordered me up to the cabin, to stay there until things calmed down. He spent the night at the monastery.
I was still sitting there the next morning in his old chair — somewhat calmer, I thought — when I heard the rumble of the Scout in the driveway and, a moment later, the sound of his feet on the landing. I guess he was a little surprised to find me there, and his mood had by no means softened. He set down the bundle of firewood he was carrying and, with a look of icy contempt, headed straight back out.
I said, “Rafe, please, can we talk?”
“There’s nothing to say,” he grunted, and yanked open the door.
That was the moment it happened. Something inside me snapped. “No!” I screamed, with a force that swept away all inner restraint. I leapt out of the chair, wrenched the door from his hands, and slammed it shut in front of him, pleading, “Rafe, Rafe, please don’t go, don’t go. . . .” I couldn’t believe it, but there it was.
He couldn’t believe it either. He stared at me for an instant in sheer animal terror, then shoved me out of the way and stomped down the landing. I lunged after him and grabbed on to his legs.
That was the start of it. For the next half hour or so, we wrestled. I am not talking metaphor here. We spilled down the landing and rolled and writhed around the yard, locked in a desperate contest of wills. I clenched his leg, his arm, holding on for dear life. He brought his boot heel down on my jaw and twisted my wrist so hard I thought it would snap. I screamed but didn’t let go.
“You’re crazy!” he hollered.
“It doesn’t matter!” I hollered back.
After a while, our combat began to take on a strange, almost surrealistic configuration. We’d wrestle for a while and then rest, sitting at opposite ends of the woodpile, eyeing each other warily. Sometimes we’d exchange a few words. “Can this be love?” I remember wailing at one point.
He shook his head sadly. “I’m gone already,” he said. “You try to grab me, and you’re only holding on to yourself.”
Then he’d make a move to leave, and the wrestling match would flare up again. But with each new round, it seemed as though more and more of the anger had gone out of it and something deeper, almost holy, was fighting through us. The image of childbirth passed fleetingly through my mind.
At some point it ended. The fight had zigged and zagged its way to an irrigation ditch a little beyond the driveway, and there, under a serviceberry bush, I finally let go. I couldn’t hold on anymore; the storm in me was spent, and I just lay there and sobbed. Rafe went a short distance away, stood under an aspen tree, spat . . . then slowly walked back to me.
Silently, not touching, we walked back to the Scout. “Is it OK to go now?” he asked.
I nodded. Somehow it was.
“Rafe, will you give me your blessing?” The words suddenly tumbled out of my mouth.
“You already have it,” he grunted. Then he drove off down the hill, and I went back inside the cabin.
What had possessed me? I didn’t know. Surely it was all over; Rafe would never return. And yet, why . . . why, as I sat there with my emotions reeling and my jaw throbbing, why did I feel this strange feeling of hope? Why, strangely, something like pride? Out of the shame and confusion welled up this gathering sense — how shall I say it? — that, for perhaps the first time in my life, I had done something right.
I sat there with this odd feeling for a long time before it gradually subsided and I drifted into stillness.
And then, in the mirror of that stillness, there suddenly emerged a face — a face long buried deep in my unconscious. Later, looking back through old journals, I was astonished to discover that I had last seen that face on August 27, 1980 — fifteen years earlier, to the day.
The face was my mother’s. She was lying in her bed in a Christian Science nursing home in California, dying of cancer. They called it “a touch of arthritis.” An impenetrable wall of denial separated us. I saw her eyes racked with pain, momentarily reaching out to say goodbye . . . then drawing back and motioning me away. I stood for a moment in her doorway, then turned and walked out, knowing I would never see her again.
The picture disappeared almost as quickly as it had formed, but I began to understand. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” wrote the poet Dylan Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” And I had raged — for my mother, for myself, for Rafe, for a lifetime of things slipping away through the door, irretrievable and unacknowledged. “Oh, Rafe, Rafe!” I wailed aloud. Love had torn out of me that morning the grief I had not known was there.
After a long time of tears — how long, I don’t know — I heard a rumble in the yard and the squeal of brakes. The Scout was back. Slowly the door pushed open, and there stood Rafe.
He had been crying, too. His eyes were red and tear-streaked, and there were dust smears on his face where he had roughly wiped his cheeks dry. He stood there for a moment, then started awkwardly, “I wanted to make sure I didn’t hurt you.” We looked straight into each other’s eyes, and in the same breath spoke the same word: “Forgive.”
And then we both burst into tears again. He crawled into the chair with me, and, holding each other, we sobbed out a lifetime of losses and sorrow. And as the words flowed between us, of memories long buried and remorse never confessed, Rafe and I yielded our grief to one another, like frost emerging from the spring earth.
Afterward, when the tears had run their course, we headed down the hill together in the Scout. He dropped me off at my gate, and we stood there for a moment, searching each other’s eyes. I said, “Rafe, you’re the first person I’ve ever loved enough to fight for.”
“I know,” he said almost in a whisper. “And you’re the first person I’ve ever loved enough not to run from.”
Early on in our time together Rafe used to say “I love you” quite easily and often. But toward the end of that last summer, the I-love-you’s began to thin out considerably and finally ceased altogether. Except for that one time, he never again said those words to me in his physical life. When I asked him if he loved me, he’d say, “No.” Yet he insisted that nothing was diminished. The words, he said, “were all just attraction.”
“So what?” I said. “What harm can it do?”
But Rafe had no desire to be casual about this. Somehow, sometime, during one of those nights of mystical traveling, he had been given to know the difference between the love he aspired to and this “attraction” business, and to understand how far anything human fell short of the mark. After that, the most he would say was “I wouldn’t honor you to call the feeling I have for you ‘love.’ ”
Toward the end, this unresolved tension settled into a deep sadness inside me. I knew that time was running out. I saw Rafe slowly fading, slipping away. More and more confined to the monastery, he’d come up to the cabin only when he could manage it, and the usual operations he’d done there for so many years — the logging and chain-sawing — left him breathless and exhausted. I split and bagged wood for him when I could, so at least there would be usable firewood when he got there. With every new snowfall, a deeper foreboding rose inside me. Soon, too soon, he would be gone, and I’d never even really know where we had stood.
A major storm on Columbus Day briefly filled the valley with heavy, sodden snow and issued its solemn portent of winter. Rafe had made it up to the cabin that weekend, and I’d also taken off to a friend’s cabin high in the mountains, well above the snow line. That Sunday afternoon I sat by a frozen mountain lake already in shadow as the sun dropped behind the ridge, and I painfully came to terms with the reality that could no longer be evaded.
Rafe was dying. Neither of us knew exactly why, but it was clear that life was slowly draining from him. It was also clear that the space between us was widening. And against this backdrop I had to face that the suspension of I-love-you’s meant exactly what I had most feared. It was Rafe’s way of asking for his freedom back, for a release from our relationship. Was I holding him against his will? Was it time for me to go away? Suddenly the answers seemed obvious, and my own clinging pathetically clear. There was only one thing to do, for his sake and for my own: settle once and for all where we stood with each other, and then — as now seemed overwhelmingly evident — bid him farewell, break camp, and return to Maine.
Slowly, one boot in front of the other, I trudged down the mountain.
He was sitting in his old overstuffed chair by a crackling evening fire, disgruntled to be interrupted, but I pushed on anyway.
“Rafe,” I said, “I need to know where we stand. If you still love me — if you still want me here — I need you to tell me. Otherwise I think it’s time to quit.”
“What does your heart tell you?”
“My heart tells me you love me. But your words tell me you don’t.”
He looked straight at me, and all of a sudden everything that was spent in him seemed to grow powerfully concentrated. When he spoke, his voice, which these days was usually somewhat wheezy, was sharp and ringingly clear:
“Your heart must be invincible. You must trust the invincibility of your own heart.”
The sly fox! No, of course he was not going to tell me, take away from me precisely the work I had to learn to do. What did my heart tell me? I closed my eyes and saw the cappuccino celebrations, those toasts as we lifted our mugs and gazed deep into each other’s eyes: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” I saw the groceries delivered, the hot and cold running water, the clothes I was wearing, head-to-toe gifts from him . . . the time, the kindness, always and everywhere the quality of his attention — even now, both of us, every muscle poised and straining to see what the other would do next.
At this point Rafe was fully engaged, too. He jumped out of the chair and stood by the fireplace, his hands outstretched and trembling. “Look at me. Look at me!” he said. “You must see how changeable I am; you must see that. One moment it wants this, the next it wants that. One minute I grab you, the next I push you away; one minute I hurt you, the next I steal your heart. You must see there is no root in me. How can I say, ‘I love you,’ when there is no ‘I’ who can love? You must see that; you must.”
I did. Finally. Lifted my head far enough above my own horizon to look at him standing there, backlit by the fire, the little sentry at his hermit’s post, and to realize that he had spoken his own deepest truth. In his words were contained a lifetime of striving, more than four decades of intense spiritual work on himself, pushing on toward that new man in Christ that ached to gather himself out of his human fragility and changeability. Once, in a moment of intense tenderness, he had told me, “I want to integrate my past, all of who I am, and give it to you.” And still, in my own blind neediness, I could hear the cessation of I-love-you’s only as rejection. Now, I finally saw, it spoke to the sheer heroism of his striving.
“Besides,” he said, as the mood between us softened, “you know that neither one of us is going to quit.”
Were we ready for the moment when it came? Who knows? After a weekend of solitude in his little cabin and a glorious last day down at the monastery in which his words to everyone were “I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful,” Rafe was preparing to head back up to the hermitage when he was felled by a cardiac arrest. His heart burst; it was sudden, swift, and virtually painless.
Rafe was buried according to Trappist funeral custom — simple, stark, and haunting. He was delivered home from the undertaker’s on a plain pine board to lie in the monastery chapel throughout the night, the paschal candle burning at his head, until the Requiem Mass the following morning.
At first I had not planned to attend the wake or the funeral. Since Rafe was now in cosmic space, why celebrate a dead body? But something dragged me there anyway, just as the bells began to toll, and I took my place at the end of the procession receiving his body in the church. Just down from a day of solitude at the hermitage, I had my duffel bag still with me, containing a heavy sweater and a pair of boot liners. It was a good thing; I would need them.
After the brief service and a few moments of silent meditation, I joined the rapidly growing line of monks and friends filing past Rafe to pay their final respects. As I stood before him, I suddenly knew I was not leaving. It was as if a slight motion of will, not quite a physical breath, jumped from Rafe to me, and neither of us was going anywhere. One of the monks seemed to catch it, too; he reappeared shortly with a piece of cake and a cup of tea on a dinner tray. “He told me to get it for you,” the monk said. I ate my cake and downed my tea, the last bit of warmth I would have on that bitterly cold December night that changed my life forever.
I do not know how to explain this, and I do not want to exaggerate. I stayed there the entire night, mostly kneeling by Rafe’s side, my hand slipped into his, in the flickering light of the Advent wreath at his feet and the paschal candle at his head. The last monk keeping watch quit at 11 p.m., and from there till vigils at 3:30 the next morning, there was nothing but love, a gratitude conveyed entirely through the skin — body to body, will to will. For that night I knew no sleepiness, no regret; it was the most profoundly luminous experience I have ever had. All was forgiven, understood, poured out; that which in life had been hidden in the changeability of bodies and emotions became steady and consistent. There was a distinct nuptial feeling to it: a sense that our life together was not ending; it was only now truly beginning. And somewhere in those cold, dark hours, a voice that was distinctly Rafe’s came to me, saying, “I will meet you in the body of hope.”
“The body of hope.” It was not a term Rafe and I had ever used, and for the first few weeks after his death I puzzled over what it might mean. Then, one afternoon, I suddenly found out.
In February, not quite two months after Rafe’s death, I was walking up the road past the Stanley place when I was stopped in my tracks by what sounded like a sledgehammer pounding inside and the sight of a pile of debris accumulating out front in the snow.
“The monks are giving me this place for the summer,” said the caretaker of the monastery’s new retreat center, grinning, his face sweaty and smeared in dust. “I thought I’d open it up, get a little light in here.”
Open it up? The place was gutted! It was hard to believe that a single human being in one afternoon’s work could unleash such a whirlwind. Sheetrock and splintered cabinetry lay in a pile on the floor of what had once been the living room, along with smashed dishes and trampled foodstuffs that had gone flying in the melee. Electrical wiring hung loose from the ceiling beams, and a spigot dangling on a piece of copper tubing dripped the last hurrahs for the days of “hot and cold running water.” The Stanley place was, as they say, history.
“I’ll be back in the morning with a dump truck,” he told me. Then he packed his tool bag and left. He never returned. Whether the monks called him off the project or he got overwhelmed by his own chaos, I don’t know. It was like a surgical strike, aimed precisely at that spot on earth where its demolition had to be accomplished.
After the man had gone, I stumbled around for a while in the carcass of the Stanley place. Like debris washed down in the spring torrents, little scraps of memory floated through the wreckage, strangely dislodged and incongruous — a bar stool sticking out from the trash pile, Rafe’s old pair of work gloves in the remains of a drawer. Still taped to a piece of splintered barn board, once the living-room wall, was the postcard from two Christmases ago bearing the reminder “Not to worry. All is swell.” I went out on the deck and dissolved into tears.
As I wept out there in the snow, I began to notice a shift. Although I was still crying, the emotional sting started to lose its force, and a new and tingling presence began to work its way up in me, literally starting from the tips of my toes. I felt like an empty glass slowly being filled with champagne.
In spite of myself, I was fascinated. A sparkling, bubbling life seemed to be pouring into me, filling me with such buoyancy that I could no longer sink into despair. And a moment came when the Stanley place simply fell away, like scales from my eyes, and I was able to look straight through all the relics and memories of love and simply see the love itself. I got up and started dancing on the deck, as in that final scene in Zorba the Greek. I knew in that moment that I was sustained by an invisible and intensely joyous partner.
During his life Rafe had a word to describe the quality of our relationship: he called it our “concern” for each other, and he promised that no matter what happened between us, I would always have it. At the time I resisted the word, thinking that it described some vague, generic affection based on worry or duty. Only in the light of his death was I finally able to see what he had been talking about all along: the spontaneous self-giving that comes from a sheer delight in each other’s being, and from the wish at the center of one’s heart that the other be well. Free from the self-righteousness of duty, or even the compulsion of romantic attraction, it simply “leans and harkens” after the other, in John Donne’s words, never forgetting, never failing to consider the other’s good — even from beyond the grave. Some would call it “conscious love.” It is the pearl of great price I had been seeking all my life, but always in the wrong place. Because I couldn’t command it, I thought it wasn’t love. Only through Rafe did I finally come to realize that’s exactly why it is.
