“Beyond All Mortal Dream”
(5/8/23)
[“Even with darkness sealing us in, / We breathe your name, / And through all the days that follow so fast, / We trust in you; / Endless your grace, / Beyond all mortal dream. / Both now and forever, and unto ages and ages, / Amen” (stanza #2 of Stephen Paulus’ “Pilgrims’ Hymn,” The Three Hermits [opera]; text by Michael Dennis Browne).]
O Lover,
Having received Your Christ, I returned to my pew in the left transept the Basilica of [Your] Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame. The orderly Roman Catholic communion drama around and before the alter, both ambulatory and astonishingly silent, was concluding. We were but minutes from the priest’s final blessing and sending forth.
And then, suddenly, oxymoronically, I was ambushed by what, both then and in retrospect, was the highpoint of the entire liturgy, at least for me. The organ broke the silence with a familiar introduction and then the balcony-ensconced liturgical choir under director Andrew McShane began Stephen Paulus’ “Pilgrims’ Hymn.” As ambushes go it was a gentle one, albeit incontestably real. I simply sank into it mouthing the familiar words which were, to employ traditional jargon, being transubstantiated into my own prayer to You, O Lover. I found myself, again, in that exceedingly rare zone of being stripped of argument, persuasion, time, doubt, even, seemingly, faith itself.
Later at home, my spiritual guide the Browne/Paulus’ text before me, I opened myself thus to You, O Lover: Interred beneath innumerable dimensions of darkness, I find myself nevertheless inhaling Your presence. Ever aware of the finite number of my remaining days, I trust in Tu Sólus (“You alone”). And yet again I wager all on Your lavish Love, unencompassable by either existing possibilities or our most wild and impossible imaginings, whether within or beyond chrónos.
Yes, there was a modest rush in my being ambushed by You in the left transept, an experience in the aftermath of which I was again drawn in opposite directions. On the one hand, I have walked with Juan de la Cruz too long to be unaware of the hazard of feeding attachment to that rush, to its frequency, to its replication (a la the Synoptics’Petrine outburst on the Mt. of Transfiguration). Indeed, such fixation quickly becomes a trap and may be my chief workshop for the nurturing of gelássenheit (“releasement, relinquishment”). Having much to learn from some of my Mennonite forebearers’ fixation on a particular experience of You, addiction to rapture is no mere abstraction. My defining thirst is for You, O Lover, not for some canonical mode of experiential mediation.
On the other hand, in the aftermath of being ambushed by You via Your acolyte music I remain strangely and unusually full of joy. I, including my (desirous) heart, my (momentarily stymied) intellect, my (ever-lagging) body, still have the capacity to be inundated (cápax Déi)! I am indeed crafted so as to be aware of You! I am still alive! My aspiration to love You with the totality of my personhood is reaffirmed. And amid my continuing journey through and beyond this or that, my longing for that “beyond mortal dream” (a poetic equivalent of apophática), You agapeicly ambush me rather than abandoning me to total agnosticism. You do know me! And You, Tu Sólus, are enough! Básta!
I know not when or whether such an ambush will be granted me again. Nor will I fret over the frequency question. For a protracted moment, one languid and luminous, all was open, all was light, You were self-evident. And although that moment too is tethered by transitoriness, it the day’s manna the hoarding of which is not allowed (Ex 16:19-21), yet beyond this given is the Reality, yet again refreshed, that You are. And I? In the startling line of Jessica Powers, OCD, “I am with [You] and toward my godhood tending” (SPJP,84).
