Musing

A proof of God: When I feel rejected, when no one can be my companion, when the most dearly sought affections are denied and no one can fill the void because they all have made the void -- then I am most mercifully embraced, then I am enveloped by warmth, then someone breathes into all my pores and heat courses through my body, throbbing at every extremity; and I am loved: at that moment of crushing absence, God appears and I am loved.

And with this love I can love.

The single person and the celibate, perhaps, know this love better than any contented couple, and maybe better, too, than the discontented couple. The love that appears when all others have gone -- or never arrived; the love that appears when life has gone, or never came to be; the love that appears when love is gone. This is the eternal love, the indivisible love, the love within which existing loves run their course, the love that grounds these loves, the love from which they spring forth and return.

There are two kinds of people: those who have a call to love this world to life, and those who have a call to love this world into the world to come. Each of us is a little of both kinds of people, but we are mainly one or the other person. Let no one diminish incarnational love, the love that shows us who we are, the love that shows the goodness of who we are: the love seen in life partners and friends. But some of us are destined mainly to model eschatological love, the love that shows us who we are becoming, the love that shows the absolute horizon of our destiny.

Love is both figure and ground. Incarnational and eschatological. In this world and not of this world.

God loves us, and God teaches us to love. God gives us the experiences of love by which we come to love in our distinctive and different ways.

Human nature is less fixed then we imagine. Sexual vocations may not be permanent. But I think married couples best model incarnational love, while the single person and the celibate best model eschatological love.

There is some doubt in my mind about this, but I believe I am called chiefly to model eschatological love. If that is so, then let me be a loner in a world of absent lovers.

***

I have learned from the homeless men and women of Boston. I have learned how to be at home without a house, how to discover my sense of place without claiming property. They have "house-broken" me. They have undomesticated me.

But I still need a personal, even a private, sacred space. Communal, or communitarian, space is of course personal, but a person needs an individual space, an intimate space for one's true becoming-self.

I don't know what that space is like. I've forgotten, if indeed I have ever known it. I've known houses of creaturely comfort and felt suffocated and numbed in them. I've known houses of hospitality and still felt lost in the city.

I feel at home without a home of my own. But my spirit knows that if all space is personal, then nothing is personal. And then my soul hazards hubris, daring to claim all space as sacred space when it actually condescends toward domesticity and the practices of consecrating the very places where it rests.

***

Religious liberty is a convenient cover for spiritual apathy.

***

Posing for photography makes my soul feel vulnerable. This feeling has nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with the diversion of energies. If I'm at a social function I'd rather not pause my activity or conversation to look at a camera. And I dislike putting on appearances even for the sake of helping others to preserve benign memories. (Trust your memory more!) So do not ask me to smile for the sightless lens. Better to catch me unaware, smiling at someone. But I won't smile for the camera. For the person behind the camera, maybe, and only rarely. My advice to the photographer is to kiss the joy as it flies.

***

Remember to pray for peace and for all good things. Remember to pray as your parents and elders taught you, as your friends in faith would have you pray.

Remember to pray for all the correct things for which we should pray. Even remember the formulas you have been given, for they are helpful when the words fail you.

But remember also to pray for Eleanor Rigby, and the Brothers Karamazov. Pray for the sun and moon, the earth and the water. Pray for the saints and the prophets. And for the love of God, pray for yourself.