Portal/Path/Portal . . .
(7/18/23)
O Lover,
For several years while living in Washington D.C. three decades ago I would begin each Wednesday with morning prayer and breakfast at the Discalced Carmelite friary. Befriended by a novice keen on architecture, liturgy and theology, I was his guest at his thesis defense at Catholic University, his title “Portal/Path/Portal . . .” Ranging from early medieval to Vatican II, he sought to correlate evolving ecclesial architecture with Catholic teaching and worship. Ever since I have rarely entered a place of worship without being impacted by my friend’s template. In this post I play with how our journey to You, O Lover, might be described afresh in terms of his vision.
We approach the first portal for varied reasons: we may be sick (or healthy), lonely (or socially fatigued), poor (or prosperous), marginated (or established). We often do not know who we are, what we want, or for what or whom we thirst. Actually, it matters little. Just as we are, we come. The door through which we enter, whether via blunder or agency, is opaque, at least initially. Perhaps puzzled that we are even here, we nevertheless follow a path to a second portal beyond which is a font. Here we are invited to declare and have blessed by co-trekkers our decision to proceed with deeper intentionality. Just beyond the font sundry trek goodies are available as well as a bevy of guides and handlers. While some of us begin girding ourselves, others settle in, gorging on goodies.
A second path, much longer, stretches out before us. We stride forward with other trekkers, flushed and eager newbies all. The path’s surface now is more coarse, its direction meandering, the cohort diverse in hue, orientation, and privilege. Several elicit our double-takes. We overhear exuberant references to favors granted, blessings received, petitions heard. Above the flushed troupe are the flanking cloud of heroes, their ranks sectioned by descending slants of fragranced luminosity from rainbowed windows. The vaulted space, ablaze with colors bright and beautiful, resounds with great slabs of musical sound connoting stability, solidity, and safety. On closer examination surfaces appearing opaque at the outset, beginning with the first portal, are now seen to be translucent and depthed, and we are now looking into more than at. We note mid-way that yet others have pulled away and are building tabernacles in the side aisles having concluded that THIS is the where and when to be bronzed and rendered permanent. But some of us continue, this path now more serpentine, arduous, and obscure than at the outset. Curiously, each trekker is becoming more distinctive and yet more interrelated.
We approach a third portal now, one very large opening up and out to the sides rather than merely framing the path. We note that the ambiance here at the crossing is shifting: the music more subdued, the light dimmed, the exuberance tempered, the road-chat silenced, the colors modulating to shades of soft. We pass beyond this portal and ascend to a plateau, one dubbed “source and summit,” where we receive both additional encouragement for the trek and sustenance not solely for the flesh. Ripples of awareness are spreading amongst the diminished remnant. There is growing suspicion that we did not merely decide to make this journey, that we were operating as if in a force-field to which we had been unknowingly responding. Furthermore, we sense that however rich the entire experience, we had not made the junket for this or that: our thirst throughout, whether unknowingly or otherwise, had been for what we have neither name nor description, image nor cup.
Here on the plateau that there is yet more self-selection. Several have veered to the left or the right, others retreated to the font signing that this is far enough, that the original plan of getting inside had long since been achieved. Yes, it is time for common sense, the virtue of prudence, the via média. Mutterings heard: “surely we are there already,” “this is my endgame,” “wanting more is rank húbris!”
Our residual cohort resumes its trek, now counterintuitively drawn through the plateau and beyond yet another portal into reaches not known to be. We increasingly experience ourselves and each other as stripped, empty, desiccated, unknowing, and surrendered. On the one hand, that all out here beyond the recognizable is enveloped in darkness finds resolve and qualm jousting within. On the other, distinctions and separations, including with those outside the first portal and of truncated journey, are fading, the draw alone, gravity-like and fiercely relentless, the constant. Unnoticed are itinerária, relics, images and merits variously discarded off to the sides by forebears. What began as a leisurely stroll in the park has become an all-consuming quest, we now arguably less the preyers than the prey. Our varied desires have expanded to the singular: The One having lured, seduced, and brought us to ground in this desert place.
Suddenly we halt, several companions crying out “Whoa!” And what transpires then is wholly out beyond cognition, word, image, or imagination. A Tsunami, as it were—something like light? a Mahlerian denouement? a full-body embrace? home?—inundates, bathes and heals all near and far. Not seeing The Singular as one would an object, but seemingly being drawn into, becoming of . . . of whom there is no anterior, no beyond, no end. Again, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”
And I, an erstwhile fabricated and separated self? My very identity being metamorphosed into You, O Lover, my digits abandoning their device, “I place my hand over my mouth” (Jb 40:4).
