The Lover as Destination
[“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Mt 22:37-8).]
O Lover,
Having experienced again All Saints Day and Día de los Muertos, I ponder how it is that we finites hold and name Reality beyond time and space. The language for the “Greater Life,” a term both vast and elastic, gets loaded up with many heavenly benefits, consolations, favors, and other finite “goodies”: e.g., escape from damnation, reunion with loved ones, rewards for virtue, rest, multifaceted satiation, a “new earth” (Apoc 21:1), none of which in and of itself totally escapes the egoic. The Christian tradition is replete with such references. However, one of the richest gifts from the mystical edge of that tradition is its subsuming to You Yourself of all graced with being. Indeed, the marker of the mystical vision is the hunger, the thirst, the cry: I want You; You alone (Tu Sólus) do I aspire to love with all that I am.
The radicality of this cry cannot be overstated. Presupposed is the ultimacy of You, both transcending and permeating all beings, above all “these and thats,” not least in the precincts of religiosity. It is thus You for whom nearly all inquiries must be responded to agnostically; it is You who cleanse our palates of thoughts, images, and theologies of absolutization, of the seductive drift toward pious idolatry. No way, method, summation or creed is fully commensurate with You. Thus essential to the transition from active to passive (“receptive”) spirituality in Juan de la Cruz is the painful letting go of penultimate certitudes, a passage often painful. The mystical path almost always involves our comforts being stripped away.
But what can be said about who You are as this stripping away of our reassuring scaffolding proceeds? Alas, very little. As the atrophying of our erstwhile constructs unfolds, we encounter “God as naked,” as “No-thing,” in the words of Eckhart. Stated otherwise, our being thus denuded opens us to experiencing You more directly, apophatically, unmediatedly. But again, who are You amid this “nakedness”? Unlike us finites entangled in causation, there is nothing anterior to You; You are Télos without télos, Princípio sans princípio (“sourceless Source”). And loving You for Yourself above all else is gradually identified as that for which all of our loves, from the tawdry to the beautiful, have ever been pointing. However unknowingly, it has always been You, finally, for whom we “pant” (Ps 42:1).
In the Christian tradition the core answer to the question “Who are You and what is Your disposition toward us finites?” is glimpsed via the Christ. He it is who embodied/embodies the Good News that You, Love Itself (I Jn 4:8,16), are drawing all creation consummatorily into Your Divine Life (Jn 17 & I Cor 15). I have experienced this Christic embodiment, one both trustworthy and sufficient, to be pointing to Reality Itself. You, O Lover, are Reality Itself; You Yourself are the Ultima. In a word, You Yourself are the Destination of all You have wrought!
