“‘With [Moses] I Speak Mouth to Mouth’”
[“‘ . . .My servant Moses, / He is faithful in all my household; / With him I speak mouth to mouth, / Even openly, and not in dark sayings, / And he beholds the form of the LORD (YHWH)’” (Nu 12:7-8).]
O Lover,
In the Book of Numbers You are said to be speaking “mouth to mouth” with Móshe. That these are words both radical and arresting is an understatement. Since initially stumbling upon this powerful image, I have been goaded by a raft of questions.
On the one hand, is not this depiction self-evidently amorous, perhaps anticipating the ways in which both the Judaic and Christian traditions would infer the deeper meaning of the erotic The Canticle to be Your divine love story, whether involving the Jewish people or the individual person, respectively? Did not the mystical edge of two millennia of participants in the community of Jesus repeatedly employ the Lover/beloved as its principal metaphor? Yet, might the “mouth to mouth” imagery attract us because it is viewed as accessible, familiar, and kataphatic? Does it anthropomorphize You in ways unduly shaped by our projections of You, and thus risk sentimentality, ”spirituality lite,” even idolatry?
On the other hand, might the words “mouth to mouth, / Even openly, and not in dark sayings” point to a kind of loving intimacy which is direct, ineffable, and, finally, unmediated by thought or word or image of any kind? Is this image apophatic insofar as it repeatedly connotes vistas far beyond depiction or representation? Does not such an impact of this image (actually an “un-image” or “negative image”) surface much more often in apophatic writings? Thomas Keating, SJ, for example, appears to view our text’s image in such a way. He also sees this same emphasis in Jesus’ discussion of “secret” prayer (Mt 6:6) in the (metaphorical) enclosed closet where both external and internal chatter give way to silence.
And then there is this phrase regarding Móshe: “he beholds the form of the LORD.” O Formless One, You who transcend all names, descriptions, and forms, what might this statement mean? Is Móshe somehow an exception to, an aberration of, texts such as “You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live!” (Ex 32:20)? Is he one of the few—e.g., Juan de la Cruz—who experience You so directly, unmediatedly, and profoundly as to be said to “gaze upon” You, but only via transformed faculties of a wholly other sort? Is Móshe thus anticipating Meister Eckhart for whom Your “form,” like all other depictions, finally gives way to You as “No-thing”? In any event, does not the prominent paradigmatic role of Móshe in the Synoptics’ transfiguration accounts shed light on the “mouth to mouth” spirituality in which Jesus was formed and to which he witnessed?
But I want to say more as to why this “mouth to mouth” image has so impacted me. As You know, O Lover, in Your relationship with us creatures the apophatic seemingly has the greater heft, the unbounded more promising than the delineated. In the text’s specificity regarding Your ongoing entanglement with Móshe, this rather than some spatial and/or temporal remoteness, I myself experience encouragement in my own “here” and “now.” Furthermore, the amorous aura of “mouth to mouth” hints of a kind of final antechamber to union in the tradition of Your “all in All[ness]” (I Cor 15:28) or unítas indistinctiónis.
But how could I restrict the resonance of this post’s image to Your relationship with this exile/murderer/sheepherder of yore? Does it not explode tsunami-like beyond all confines? For a moment I allow myself to play out the matter: the Infinite and the finite: “mouth to mouth”; the Cosmocrator and the cosmos: “mouth to mouth”; the Self-diffusor and the diffused: “mouth to mouth”; Eckhart’s bullítio (“boiling”) and ebullítio (“boiling over”) or Grunt (“Ground of Being”) and the total aggregate of creatures: “mouth to mouth.” Is this not Your M.O., Your “all in All,” the eternal consummation of Your propensity for unítas, for drawing all You have wrought up into Your divine Life? Is this not the largest meaning of the Euangélion of the Christ: You and all having being “mouth to mouth”?
