Love Is Stronger Than Death*
(Excerpts)
Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault
"The Wake"
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 monestary 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 departed 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 bootliners. It was a good thing. I would need them.
After a brief service and a few moments of silent meditation, I joined the groundswell of monks and friends filing past Rafe to pay their final respects. As I stood before him, suddenly I 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 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 three-thirty 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.”
At about 4 A.M., after the service of vigils was over, I adjourned to the church reception room where another of the monks brought me, and himself, a cup of tea before the hour-long monastic meditation began at four-thirty. Not trusting myself, I kept the conversation pretty much to small talk, and the whole encounter seemed low-key. Only several weeks later did he tell me, “I loved being with you for that time. You’d been awake all night—you’d been with Raphael all night—and your whole being was just oozing love. It was pouring out of you.” (27)
"The Road Not Taken"
Almost immediately, however, that nuptial ambiance was challenged. Still half-molten with Rafe’s presence from our night in the chapel, I was met at the funeral liturgy the next morning with the usual assurances compromising the Christian understanding of death: that Rafe had completed his work, had found what he was striving for, and was now at rest. Free of worldly cares and attachments—the requiem text proclaims—“the souls of the just” find their “repose” in a “place of great refreshment,” where in imperturbable bliss they await the final judgment and the resurrection of their bodies. It was supposed to be comforting, but the raw edge of my heart kept asking, “How do they know?”
In those first weeks after his death, I found myself caught in a cross fire between Rafe asking me to hold on--as best I could make out--and virtually everyone else telling me to let go. The sense of Rafe’s presence continued to gather force, but whenever I attempted to verbalize the experience to a few trusted friends, even in an indirect way, or suggest that there might be a path still to be traveled together, I was met with responses ranging from wry sympathy to shocked rejoinders. Rafe’s work was done, I was reminded, he had been called to higher things. My refusal to release him could only be interpreted as clinging. Not only would it hurt me; it might very well hurt Rafe.
This was pretty frightening. I soon realized that the only category my mentors on the spiritual path could use to compute what I was saying was that of a “ghost”—those unfortunate souls who because of the unusual and generally tragic circumstances of their lives fail to make a clean break and hand around causing trouble. I knew Rafe wasn’t a ghost, but the thought that I might be exerting an unintentional psychic drag on him that could hinder his progress in the next realm was a concern I needed to take seriously, and I knew the safest course was to do my best to release him. My friends were encouraging. For a little while they reassured me, my love for Rafe would remain jagged and particular. But gradually, in time, Rafe would disappear into God, and my own tightly focused love would follow him there--and find its true home.
Those were my marching orders. And for awhile I tried hard to walk down that path.
Marking the way along this journey of release are several wise and loving guidebooks, including the contemporary Jesuit John S. Dunne’s haunting The Reason of the Heart. Woven through his philosophical reflections is a poignant story, clearly personally lived, of falling in love and letting that person go. The death he feels is real, and his words ring with an authentic compassion that makes this book perhaps the most eloquent statement of a scenario that might be called “Christian mystical bereavement”: falling through the lost beloved…into one’s true self.
Yet at the same time these words speak through a filter—the filter of celibate, monastic spirituality, of which Dunne is a true son. His starting assumption:
If I set my heart upon another person, then I cannot live without that person. My heart becomes divided. On the other
hand, if I give my life to the journey with God, then my heart becomes whole and I can be whole in a relationship with
another…
defines the inevitable outcome of the journey:
When I give my heart to my life [with God], I become capable of letting go of the other person in hope…What happens is that I enter into a new relationship with the person I have found and lost in which my heart is no longer divided.[1]
It makes perfect and hopeful sense—provided that one accepts that the intimate journey with God, and the intimate journey with a human beloved cannot occupy the same space, and that love divides the heart. These statements I now believe, can emerge only out of a celibate monastic milieu. They result in an essentially tragic view of human love, in which renunciation, rather than complete self-outpouring, is the price one pays for wholeness.
Yet that is the filter through which our Christian spiritual tradition is channeled, and it is so deeply engrained, that to stand against it felt like making myself a rock in a flowing streambed. “Let go!” the wisdom of tradition screamed. “Let Rafe go, let it all go; fall through the center of your nothingness into God, discover in place of Rafe…your own true self.”
But every time I tried, there at the bottom of my falling was Rafe himself. He did not seem to be asking me to let go, or to let him go; in fact, when I came anywhere near trying to renounce the whole thing as absurd and getting on with my life, I would be almost literally buoyed up by the lightness of his presence within me and a strong sense of ongoing partnership. Far from a tragic view of love, this seemed to be much more a comedy, in the classic sense of lightness and harmony and a joyous ending brought about through mutual understanding. And this, of course is what Dante also called his walk with a beloved beyond the grave, a “divine comedy.”
Slowly but steadily the conviction grew in me that Rafe and I were indeed living one life. And this life is not simply a re-creation of his life, the master’s wisdom passed on to the student, but brand new territory, in which our untapped gifts and our commitment to each other’s continued becoming plunge us both deeper and deeper into the Mystery of Christ—a new creation that remains open-ended for both of us. (31)
"The Abler Soul"
In the weeks immediately following Rafe’s death, by far the most anguished part of my grief was the fear that this magical process between us would now come to an end. To have seen the puzzle coming together only to have it ripped apart again seemed cruel beyond measure. It was not so much my wholeness I mourned, but our wholeness: the chance to emerge fully into those amazing people we were starting to become in the light of each other’s love. Only gradually have I begun to understand what Rafe was trying to teach me that night when he pointed so sharply to the full moon behind the crescent and said, “That’s us!” When the wholeness is there—seen or unseen—the sliver need have no fear about how it will grow. (141)
"Do the Dead Grow?"
“Receive the growing Raphael. . .” But are we really talking about growth here, or is it a metaphor? Beyond death, can people still grow?
This is the “Holy Planet Purgatory” issue again, which seems to make Christian theologians so nervous. Even the best of them, such as Boehme and Boros, categorically deny the possibility. “After this life there will be no bettering, but everything remaineth as it returneth home, writes Boehme.[2] And Boros takes up the traditional doctrine of the inalterability of the state we reach through death: “A human existence that has passed through death has reached a final state in which no further change is possible in its basic tendency. At death, a man’s final figure with the destiny it deserves is irrevocably attributed to him. Once beyond death no more decisions altering the course of one’s existence can be made…Death, therefore, is the dawn of finality. In it man receives his definite shape. Death transports existence to the realm of thongs ‘valid for eternity,’ to the state of ‘done once and for all.’[3]
This is the overwhelming tenor of our received Christian tradition of existence beyond death. Allowance is made that the prayers of the faithful can improve the state of those who have reached eternal life “hanging by a thread” (In Boehme’s picturesque language)—the traditional notion of purgatory; but this has always been understood as a release from the debt of sin rather than an organic increase in personhood. Our fundamental understanding is that the dead rest—“in the hope of rising again”; our deepest prayer is for the “repose of their souls.”
And yet in my heart of hearts I know this is not true. The Rafe I encounter beyond death—vibrant, opinionated, reveling in his newfound freedom—is definitely not at rest; he is surpassingly in movement. Our traditional Christian concepts of the state beyond death cannot possibly honor the quality of its aliveness, let alone the possibility of a reciprocal nurturance with the world here below.
Part of the problem is that our notion of growth, from the human perspective, is linked to linearity and progress (Boros’s “existential set toward the future”); time is an essential dimension of growth. When “time is swallowed up in death,” it is nearly impossible to visualize what growth looks like.
But starting from love rather than time, I understand something else: for growth is an essential quality to love—in fact, its innermost reality. Remember Beatrice Bruteau’s powerful insight that love calls forth the reality of the beloved, and the act of loving calls forth one’s own deepest reality. Love is precisely that which calls forth the continued emergence of the beloved, that guides into being the new life, the new potentiality. Love’s nature is that it evokes an increase in being. Where there is love, there must be increase.
Moreover, as I have come to understand the nature of this particular path I am walking on, which some have called the Fifth Way, the love of the unique beloved, the distinctive quality of this love is the complete mutuality of giving and receiving. The desire to give all for the other is the essence of true romance, the heart of the alchemy that transforms desire into redemptive love. But this mutuality can be authentic only if the possibility truly exists that my gift means something—that it continues to call forth the reality of the beloved, to help Rafe grow. If the Law of Love takes precedence over the Law of Time—which I think is the inevitable implication of the statement ”Love is stronger than death”—then we must affirm that growth of the beloved beyond the grave is somehow possible, even if we do not know what this means…
…I do not have to repeat what Rafe did here; instead what I must accomplish is something he did not do here; I must do it for both of us.
And it can only be done in the one dimension he now lacks and I still have: time.
Notes
[1] John S. Dunne, The Reasons of the Heart (New York: McMillan, 1978), 141
[2] Boehme, Forty questions of the Soul, 256
[3] Boros, Mystery of Death, 86-87
*Love is Stronger than Death, Cynthia Bourgeault, Great Barrington, Ma.: Lindisfarne Books (1997).
"The Wake"
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 monestary 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 departed 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 bootliners. It was a good thing. I would need them.
After a brief service and a few moments of silent meditation, I joined the groundswell of monks and friends filing past Rafe to pay their final respects. As I stood before him, suddenly I 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 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 three-thirty 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.”
At about 4 A.M., after the service of vigils was over, I adjourned to the church reception room where another of the monks brought me, and himself, a cup of tea before the hour-long monastic meditation began at four-thirty. Not trusting myself, I kept the conversation pretty much to small talk, and the whole encounter seemed low-key. Only several weeks later did he tell me, “I loved being with you for that time. You’d been awake all night—you’d been with Raphael all night—and your whole being was just oozing love. It was pouring out of you.” (27)
"The Road Not Taken"
Almost immediately, however, that nuptial ambiance was challenged. Still half-molten with Rafe’s presence from our night in the chapel, I was met at the funeral liturgy the next morning with the usual assurances compromising the Christian understanding of death: that Rafe had completed his work, had found what he was striving for, and was now at rest. Free of worldly cares and attachments—the requiem text proclaims—“the souls of the just” find their “repose” in a “place of great refreshment,” where in imperturbable bliss they await the final judgment and the resurrection of their bodies. It was supposed to be comforting, but the raw edge of my heart kept asking, “How do they know?”
In those first weeks after his death, I found myself caught in a cross fire between Rafe asking me to hold on--as best I could make out--and virtually everyone else telling me to let go. The sense of Rafe’s presence continued to gather force, but whenever I attempted to verbalize the experience to a few trusted friends, even in an indirect way, or suggest that there might be a path still to be traveled together, I was met with responses ranging from wry sympathy to shocked rejoinders. Rafe’s work was done, I was reminded, he had been called to higher things. My refusal to release him could only be interpreted as clinging. Not only would it hurt me; it might very well hurt Rafe.
This was pretty frightening. I soon realized that the only category my mentors on the spiritual path could use to compute what I was saying was that of a “ghost”—those unfortunate souls who because of the unusual and generally tragic circumstances of their lives fail to make a clean break and hand around causing trouble. I knew Rafe wasn’t a ghost, but the thought that I might be exerting an unintentional psychic drag on him that could hinder his progress in the next realm was a concern I needed to take seriously, and I knew the safest course was to do my best to release him. My friends were encouraging. For a little while they reassured me, my love for Rafe would remain jagged and particular. But gradually, in time, Rafe would disappear into God, and my own tightly focused love would follow him there--and find its true home.
Those were my marching orders. And for awhile I tried hard to walk down that path.
Marking the way along this journey of release are several wise and loving guidebooks, including the contemporary Jesuit John S. Dunne’s haunting The Reason of the Heart. Woven through his philosophical reflections is a poignant story, clearly personally lived, of falling in love and letting that person go. The death he feels is real, and his words ring with an authentic compassion that makes this book perhaps the most eloquent statement of a scenario that might be called “Christian mystical bereavement”: falling through the lost beloved…into one’s true self.
Yet at the same time these words speak through a filter—the filter of celibate, monastic spirituality, of which Dunne is a true son. His starting assumption:
If I set my heart upon another person, then I cannot live without that person. My heart becomes divided. On the other
hand, if I give my life to the journey with God, then my heart becomes whole and I can be whole in a relationship with
another…
defines the inevitable outcome of the journey:
When I give my heart to my life [with God], I become capable of letting go of the other person in hope…What happens is that I enter into a new relationship with the person I have found and lost in which my heart is no longer divided.[1]
It makes perfect and hopeful sense—provided that one accepts that the intimate journey with God, and the intimate journey with a human beloved cannot occupy the same space, and that love divides the heart. These statements I now believe, can emerge only out of a celibate monastic milieu. They result in an essentially tragic view of human love, in which renunciation, rather than complete self-outpouring, is the price one pays for wholeness.
Yet that is the filter through which our Christian spiritual tradition is channeled, and it is so deeply engrained, that to stand against it felt like making myself a rock in a flowing streambed. “Let go!” the wisdom of tradition screamed. “Let Rafe go, let it all go; fall through the center of your nothingness into God, discover in place of Rafe…your own true self.”
But every time I tried, there at the bottom of my falling was Rafe himself. He did not seem to be asking me to let go, or to let him go; in fact, when I came anywhere near trying to renounce the whole thing as absurd and getting on with my life, I would be almost literally buoyed up by the lightness of his presence within me and a strong sense of ongoing partnership. Far from a tragic view of love, this seemed to be much more a comedy, in the classic sense of lightness and harmony and a joyous ending brought about through mutual understanding. And this, of course is what Dante also called his walk with a beloved beyond the grave, a “divine comedy.”
Slowly but steadily the conviction grew in me that Rafe and I were indeed living one life. And this life is not simply a re-creation of his life, the master’s wisdom passed on to the student, but brand new territory, in which our untapped gifts and our commitment to each other’s continued becoming plunge us both deeper and deeper into the Mystery of Christ—a new creation that remains open-ended for both of us. (31)
"The Abler Soul"
In the weeks immediately following Rafe’s death, by far the most anguished part of my grief was the fear that this magical process between us would now come to an end. To have seen the puzzle coming together only to have it ripped apart again seemed cruel beyond measure. It was not so much my wholeness I mourned, but our wholeness: the chance to emerge fully into those amazing people we were starting to become in the light of each other’s love. Only gradually have I begun to understand what Rafe was trying to teach me that night when he pointed so sharply to the full moon behind the crescent and said, “That’s us!” When the wholeness is there—seen or unseen—the sliver need have no fear about how it will grow. (141)
"Do the Dead Grow?"
“Receive the growing Raphael. . .” But are we really talking about growth here, or is it a metaphor? Beyond death, can people still grow?
This is the “Holy Planet Purgatory” issue again, which seems to make Christian theologians so nervous. Even the best of them, such as Boehme and Boros, categorically deny the possibility. “After this life there will be no bettering, but everything remaineth as it returneth home, writes Boehme.[2] And Boros takes up the traditional doctrine of the inalterability of the state we reach through death: “A human existence that has passed through death has reached a final state in which no further change is possible in its basic tendency. At death, a man’s final figure with the destiny it deserves is irrevocably attributed to him. Once beyond death no more decisions altering the course of one’s existence can be made…Death, therefore, is the dawn of finality. In it man receives his definite shape. Death transports existence to the realm of thongs ‘valid for eternity,’ to the state of ‘done once and for all.’[3]
This is the overwhelming tenor of our received Christian tradition of existence beyond death. Allowance is made that the prayers of the faithful can improve the state of those who have reached eternal life “hanging by a thread” (In Boehme’s picturesque language)—the traditional notion of purgatory; but this has always been understood as a release from the debt of sin rather than an organic increase in personhood. Our fundamental understanding is that the dead rest—“in the hope of rising again”; our deepest prayer is for the “repose of their souls.”
And yet in my heart of hearts I know this is not true. The Rafe I encounter beyond death—vibrant, opinionated, reveling in his newfound freedom—is definitely not at rest; he is surpassingly in movement. Our traditional Christian concepts of the state beyond death cannot possibly honor the quality of its aliveness, let alone the possibility of a reciprocal nurturance with the world here below.
Part of the problem is that our notion of growth, from the human perspective, is linked to linearity and progress (Boros’s “existential set toward the future”); time is an essential dimension of growth. When “time is swallowed up in death,” it is nearly impossible to visualize what growth looks like.
But starting from love rather than time, I understand something else: for growth is an essential quality to love—in fact, its innermost reality. Remember Beatrice Bruteau’s powerful insight that love calls forth the reality of the beloved, and the act of loving calls forth one’s own deepest reality. Love is precisely that which calls forth the continued emergence of the beloved, that guides into being the new life, the new potentiality. Love’s nature is that it evokes an increase in being. Where there is love, there must be increase.
Moreover, as I have come to understand the nature of this particular path I am walking on, which some have called the Fifth Way, the love of the unique beloved, the distinctive quality of this love is the complete mutuality of giving and receiving. The desire to give all for the other is the essence of true romance, the heart of the alchemy that transforms desire into redemptive love. But this mutuality can be authentic only if the possibility truly exists that my gift means something—that it continues to call forth the reality of the beloved, to help Rafe grow. If the Law of Love takes precedence over the Law of Time—which I think is the inevitable implication of the statement ”Love is stronger than death”—then we must affirm that growth of the beloved beyond the grave is somehow possible, even if we do not know what this means…
…I do not have to repeat what Rafe did here; instead what I must accomplish is something he did not do here; I must do it for both of us.
And it can only be done in the one dimension he now lacks and I still have: time.
Notes
[1] John S. Dunne, The Reasons of the Heart (New York: McMillan, 1978), 141
[2] Boehme, Forty questions of the Soul, 256
[3] Boros, Mystery of Death, 86-87
*Love is Stronger than Death, Cynthia Bourgeault, Great Barrington, Ma.: Lindisfarne Books (1997).
About the author
Modern day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader, Cynthia Bourgeault divides her time between solitude at her seaside hermitage in Maine, and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom path. She is the founding Director of both The Contemplative Society and the Aspen Wisdom School.
Cynthia is the author of seven books: The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, The Wisdom Jesus, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Mystical Hope, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Chanting the Psalms, and Love is Stronger Than Death. She has also authored or contributed to numerous articles and courses on the Christian spiritual life. She is a past Fellow of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural research at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN, and an oblate of New Camaldoli Monastery in Big Sur, California.
Cynthia continues to contribute to The Contemplative Society in her role as Principal Teacher and advisor. She passionately promotes the practice of Centering Prayer, and has worked closely with Thomas Keating, Bruno Barnhart, Richard Rohr, as well as many other contemplative teachers and leaders within the Christian tradition as well as other spiritual paths.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
Cynthia is the author of seven books: The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, The Wisdom Jesus, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Mystical Hope, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Chanting the Psalms, and Love is Stronger Than Death. She has also authored or contributed to numerous articles and courses on the Christian spiritual life. She is a past Fellow of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural research at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN, and an oblate of New Camaldoli Monastery in Big Sur, California.
Cynthia continues to contribute to The Contemplative Society in her role as Principal Teacher and advisor. She passionately promotes the practice of Centering Prayer, and has worked closely with Thomas Keating, Bruno Barnhart, Richard Rohr, as well as many other contemplative teachers and leaders within the Christian tradition as well as other spiritual paths.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.