Modern Love, Loving God, Part II

Cambridge, MA. In last week’s entry to this column, I explained how I attempted to write a piece for the Sunday New York Times’ Modern Love section, on loving God. I explained that I thought that we should be able to speak of loving God in a modern, accessible way. My piece was not accepted, hence my decision to publish it here. As such, it was not written for a blog, and it may seem out of place in America. To remind readers of its origin elsewhere, I put it in quotation marks, though it has not appeared in print elsewhere. I welcome readers’ comments, and likewise urge you to think of how you would write of your love for God, for Modern Love or in other such contexts.
      “I fell in love unexpectedly on a summer night in 1966, in New York, when I was 15. Awake in the night, I felt a fiery touch that burned its way inside me; and although I hardly knew myself at that time, I knew it was God. It was a kind of captivation, a most physical experience, even if — since it was God — it was also not to be seen, nor heard, nor for any words I knew at the time. I had just read The Brothers Karamazov, and saw in myself what had happened to the young monk Alyosha, when he no longer knew himself, fell to the earth, and then was given everything back, even the heavens, all at once. It was then that I started loving God all the way, in a fullness I could never have chosen for myself.
       “Things like this cannot be easily explained especially when you are a teenager, so I told no one about what happened — it seemed — in the night, but I needed to act out the possibility in some way, so I decided to be a priest, to live in that space between God and everyone and everything else. So in 1968, as the world around me turned upside down, I paid no notice, instead entering the Jesuit seminary just outside Poughkeepsie, New York. I had just turned 18 and I still did not, could not, really know what I was getting into. Even now, I can hardly say what it means to love God body and soul, mind and heart. I stepped aside, followed a more obscure path that was the only way I could travel. I kept on it, and a decade later was ordained a priest, and so I have been all these years.
     “Loving God can take your breath away. Sometimes it is all about not-loving and not-being-loved close up. Jesus had nowhere to lay his head, the Gospel says, and for me at least being a priest has been to be homeless, the wayfarer watching out for God, here, nowhere, everywhere. Being a cleric, a priest, a Jesuit can be quite comfortable, but it also means never marrying, and so it signals what hasn’t happened, chances not taken, how it is to live apart from the ambiguous flesh and blood encounters where others make their homes: no spouse, no partner, no living together with just one person, the emptiness of a narrow bed always only my own; many brother priests, and dear friends — but no lovers, no body on body, nothing but sporadic spurts of love, inside out, imagined, growing cold. But such loss is also a cure, the awakening, since in the loneliness He comes near again, every moment, in the touch of every thing. When I awake, He is there. Sometimes when I stop and take a deep breath at midday, He is so close it takes my breath away, and ordinary things seem impossible, until I see that here too He is nearby. At night, the day folding in upon itself, He takes it all back, it is once more the night we met.
      “God has never been my only love, but the other loves keep seeming impossible. At 25 I found myself in love with one of my fellow students, quietly, because I did not know how to say that I loved her. He was keeping me apart, bereft of words, and so the moment passed, and there she was, with someone else. I thought of filling this empty space by becoming a monk, but then He came back, this time not in fire but light, as if to say, “I am enough for you; all this is yours — so let go.” In my 30s, I fell in love twice more, each time never telling her how I felt, for still there were no words, God in-between, mastering my words, holding my silence. Since then too, I have reached the far borders of love, but after the first steps it has remained beyond my reach, God again seizing the moment, making me turn and look Him in the face. I cannot speak for other Jesuits — who may think this odd indeed — but so it has been for me, emptied inside, dug deeper, hollowed out for the bliss of my drowning. Life, given back, is simpler still, because He is near as no one else can be. It is not that I have not loved, but no one else can fill the space when He is there, and He is always there.
      “Loving God is hard to talk about, but I do not live in silence, I live in words. Most Sundays I say Mass in a small parish in Sharon, MA, and there I keep finding my place with God, especially there with God’s most amazing people, living our most ordinary lives. What I say in church is mostly from the book, but in the middle I give the homily, the Word of God on my tongue, as in desperation I allow God to make my word His word, just for a moment before it passes back into unwritten silence. I leave out the most important things, yet sometimes people seem to find their way to God as I speak, as if words are windows through which we see ourselves, our God.
      “I am also a professor and I use many words that way too. Lectures, ideas, arguments, so many questions and opinions, but this too is about clearing the mind, opening spaces where we can think honestly, no longer afraid of finding our way back to God, on campus, in the seminar, the lecture. I am a Christian theologian, but for nearly forty years I have also given myself over to studying Hindu wisdom, images, sounds, sacred places, all so strange yet very familiar to me right from the start. To some, I think, my love of India has seem a kind of adultery, the priest turning to other gods, but it is a purification — losing Christ, finding Him still further on, things turned upside down, lest I imagine Him small and easy, a well-known thing. Christian and Hindu words mingle inside me in a disturbance that sets God free, encountered as if for the first time. I write too, as professors must, but even my bookish words are pulled one by one from inside me. I have been told that I always seem to be writing about myself, and so it is, but really it is of God that I write.
      “I will be 60 soon, and as my life becomes settled, slower, slightly more fragile, loving God has become a most familiar thing. He comes and goes like an aging wife asleep beside me, as ordinary as breath and food and sleep. It is Christ I see in the mirror, older, lined with my memories, the radiance I lose by the day. Perhaps that’s it, nothing else will change. Or He will come again as in the beginning, fierce new love even for the end time, or I will find the words to write a very different book, the diary of this peculiar love, my last word, made flesh.
      “As for the very end, I cannot say. But when I die, He will be there as in the beginning, Love taking life and giving it back, perhaps killing me, becoming then too my after-life. Love is stronger than death, they say, and so it shall be, death reborn, arising.”