you and the everything

longing for god like a widow and a fiancé

Some mornings, within the first hour of waking, I will remember a fragment of a dream from the night before. I’ll be doing something I do at the top of the day--meditating, exercising, buttoning a shirt—with no memory of having dreamed, and a tiny bit of the dream will flash through my awareness. Sometimes the image is well-lit and clear, sometimes it’s dark and cloudy, but it’s only a small piece, there for a second, maybe two, and then gone. I then pause what I’m doing, get as quiet, relaxed, and horse-whispery as I can and wait for that small piece to return or for other pieces of the dream to add themselves. In the place of deepest knowing, I know that, now that I’m ready for it, now that my heart is prepared to receive it, if enough of that dream were to enter my consciousness, I will know everything I ever need to know, I will know the everything, I will feel the everything, be with the everything, be in the everything, and the everything will be the One True Love I have dreamed of and longed for my entire life.

But the rest of the dream doesn’t come. I’m shown the back of the whale, a shimmering sliver that every now and then rolls above the surface, but never the whole great creature of the deep.

There is sweetness and frustration, both, in being so tantalizing close, and the effect on me runs in two directions. Some days, these brushes with the Infinite imbue the rest of my day with love and wonder. Everyone I meet, it feels like, every crow, every cloud, every field of grass rippled by breeze is carrying another fragment of the same deep dream, and being with these other dreamers, I feel more of the everything sounding around me and resounding within me. But other days, , the disappearing of the shimmer, the there-and-gone-ness of it, the this-and-no-more-ness of it, leaves me frustrated, agitated, and “hangry”--hungry and angry—for the everything that does not come to me.

The twentieth century mystic Valentin Tomberg knew this. He wrote that, in relation to the everything, human beings are “widows and fiancées” (“widowers and fiancés”). We all carry within us a memory of God we can’t forget and a longing for God we know will not be satisfied “in this life here below.” We live, he says, “as if widowed, in so far as [we] remember, and is if engaged, in so far as [we] hope” (Meditations on the Tarot, 125, italics in original).

A mystic of an earlier century, John of the Cross, knew it, too. In the first stanza of his poem The Spiritual Canticle,

Where have you hidden, 
Beloved, and left me moaning? 
You fled like the stag 
after wounding me; 
I went out calling you but you were gone. 

I think that much of the meanness and greed in the world, maybe all of it, is the meanness and greed of grieving widows and hangry fiancés. I think that much and maybe all of the constant craving, restless striving, and bottomless overindulgence we witness in ourselves and others, much and maybe all of the power-grabbing, resource-guzzling, people-slaughtering, and nature-destroying we witness in history, past and present, is the acting out of an agitated aching for the Beloved Everything we feel is missing.

And if that’s true, the antidote to meanness, greed, restlessness, and destruction involves recognizing our longing for the real thing, the Everything, learning to be nourished by the radiant fragments it scatters among us, and allowing ourselves to be radiant fragments scattered among others.

I’m not one who can tell you how to do that. There’s no program, no procedure, no protocol. There’s only a dreamy presence, hiding in our normal, un-dreamy awareness, awaiting a “let it be” from us that turns longing to love.

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That last sentence felt like the right place to stop, but I can’t resist adding two bonus bits. First, another John of the Cross quote, the last stanza of the last poem he ever wrote, The Living Flame of Love:

How gently and lovingly 
you wake in my heart, 
where in secret you dwell alone; 
and in your sweet breathing, 
filled with good and glory, 
how tenderly you swell my heart with love.

And second, a link to the R.E.M. song You Are the Everything. If you’ve never heard it, or haven’t heard it in a while, now might be a good time.

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As long as I’m tacking things on to the end of this piece, I’ll go ahead and add a request: that you share Spiritize (Spirit eyes) with someone you think might appreciate it. Some of you are new to this space, and some of you have been here since I started using the Substack platform in January. But however long you’ve been reading, if you have a feel for what’s happening here and know some others who might want to read these emails, please use the “Share” button at the top or bottom of the page and pass it along. I will appreciate your help, for sure, and hopefully they will, too.

(Photo credit: Miguel Á. Padriñán: Pexels)