Love is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls

Preface to the Fourth Edition

CAN IT REALLY HAVE BEEN TWENTY YEARS SINCE MY JOURNEY WITH RAFE BEGAN? Flipping through my old datebook, I see that, yes, it was indeed March 1994 when I made the momentous decision to quit my job in Maine, pile my essential belongings into my old Subaru wagon, and head out to Colorado to live in closer proximity to the hermit monk, teacher, and soul mate whom fate had thrown in my path.

I hope you didn’t come all the way out here for me! Rafe used to say, only barely jokingly. He was nearly seventy years old and well set in his hermit ways, and he knew fully well that it was absurdly unrealistic for him to take on, as his final task in life, a committed partnership with a woman more than twenty years his junior, whose vision of spiritual union was still fatally confused with romantic notions of star-crossed lovers. But he also understood, as I did, that, essentially, there was no choice in the matter. Something larger than ourselves had brought us together and was shaping us to meet its ends. We both knew that, beneath our situation’s seeming craziness, a deeper divine coherence was at work, which would somehow eventually bear fruit. So I settled into an old ranch house that was adjacent to the monastery property where Rafe lived and about a mile down the hill from his hermit cabin. And for the remaining year and a half of his earthly life, we both gave our relationship our best shot.

The clock was already ticking from the moment I arrived. While there were no outward signs that Rafe’s life was nearing its end, we both knew from early on that the living phase of our relationship was merely the beginning, and a deeper, invisible terrain awaited us. Our experiment, as Rafe liked to call it, was a seeding into the future. And indeed, in December 1995, the living phase of our love came to an abrupt end when he was felled by a massive heart attack. I was quickly cast back out into life—adrift and bereft, beset with the usual obloquy that faces former monastic consorts. Whether our relationship had simply been a huge delusion or whether it had, in fact, been a genuine and life-changing transformation for both of us, it was far too soon to tell. You must trust the invincibility of your heart, Rafe had told me.

It was the effort to do just that—to name and stand in my own truth—that led me to write Love Is Stronger than Death, the first edition of which appeared in 1999. Returning to many of the esoteric wellsprings that Rafe and I had drawn upon during our time together—in particular, G.I Gurdjieff, Jacob Boehme, and the contemporary Jesuit mystic Ladislaus Boros—I was able to piece together a metaphysical map that corresponded to what I was actually experiencing in my heart. And I continued to experience an unfolding connection with Rafe that was new for both of us. It was not as if I were remembering what he taught me, or even channeling his presence. Rather, we were still doing exactly what we had done during our human time together: bushwhacking a path into the unknown through the fire of our yearning and the depth of our trust. On my side of the divide, I found myself knowing and saying things that I could never have realized on my own, and teaching from an experiential ground that Rafe and I were jointly bringing into reality.

Over the years, my writing and teaching have come to be less and less like either traditional Christian contemplative mysticism or by-the-books Fourth Way teaching. Where do I come up with this stuff? Rafe, I always say. I am teaching Rafe—not the Rafe I knew twenty years ago who taught me what he knew then, but the Rafe who is still exploring and growing beyond death—and I am learning things about the convergence upon that final divine consummation that would literally knock your socks off! As I hold the tether on this side of the divide, I can feel Rafe on the other side, swooping and soaring closer and closer to the fire, ranging into that other intensity, as he called it, like the cosmic falcon he always has been. And I, his earthbound falconer, feel the string tugging, and I know beyond a doubt that something still holds.

The twenty-year anniversary of my cross-country journey to be with Rafe, which is being celebrated in the publication of this new edition, marks another milestone as well: I am now the same age that Rafe was when we first met each other in that momentous barnyard encounter that I share in Chapter 1. It’s amazing how much one’s point of view changes between the ages of forty-seven and sixty-seven! With another season of life now under my belt, I finally understand certain aspects of the struggle Rafe and I had with one another during our human time together, things that were simply incomprehensible to me then, no matter how spiritually aware I might have otherwise been. As I stand on the threshold of my own elderhood, I sense, more clearly than ever, the inner imperative to hew the line more deeply, as Rafe called it, to undertake my final spiritual tasks with an intent that is yet more conscious and serious.

I understand now, far better than I did then, Rafe’s need for space—for a conscious relationship with his own interiority that would preempt all others, even a flesh-and-blood beloved. I also understand what he meant by the term a growing inner vastness that was both a siren call and a foretaste of the Life Eternal opening up inside him. And I marvel more and more that at his stage of spiritual attainment—as a hermit monk of crystalline interiority—his faith in the divine unfolding and his love for a vulnerable young woman would be sufficient reason for him to break through the walls of that magnificent interior castle and plunge us both into holy free-fall. If I had been in his shoes, I don’t know if I could have done it.

As you’ll read in Chapter 2, in those first raw years after Rafe’s death, when I found myself bombarded with conflicting roadmaps and spiritual counsel that was at variance to the truths of my own heart, I finally, in desperation, took the situation in hand by setting up what I called a Pascalian wager with myself:

If Rafe is calling me to continuing partnership, and I say yes—then the world is ours.

If Rafe is not calling me, and I say yes anyway—then I will have wasted my life in a concocted fantasy.

If Rafe is not calling me, and I say no—then cynicism wins another small victory.

If Rafe is calling me to continuing partnership, and I say no—then I will have missed the greatest opportunity of my life.

Laid out in this fashion, I wrote, my course of action became obvious. The only thing I had to lose by following my instincts were the twenty or so remaining years of my life, and what did that matter, really?

Well, those twenty years are now nearly up! And while there are certain things I would definitely have done differently (way less clinging, for a start!), I can say without the slightest hesitation that my answer is still resoundingly, unequivocally yes! The decision to take a risk on that highest possible outcome has changed the way I live, the way I know God, and, above all, the way I continue to walk the walk with Rafe. I am undyingly grateful.

In the fifteen years since the first edition of Love Is Stronger than Death, I have also felt grateful to the many readers who have thanked me for validating their own experiences of working with a beloved beyond the grave, and for helping them stay true to the path. And I am grateful that this book somehow miraculously stays in print, quietly pointing the way toward those hidden outposts of the human heart.

—Cynthia Bourgeault

Spring 2014

PART I

MEETING IN THE BODY OF HOPE

CHAPTER 1

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

When love with one another so

interinanimates two souls,

the abler soul, which thence doth flow

defects of loneliness controls.

JOHN DONNE, The Ecstasy

e9781939681362_i0005.jpg WHAT THE THEOLOGIAN SHRINKS FROM , the poet grasps intuitively. I write as one of a small band of those who have been invited to search for a beloved in the realm beyond death. It was not a journey I ever expected to make.

My partner in this undertaking I knew for the five years of our human time together as Rafe—Brother Raphael Robin, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado. In the last years of his life we formed a close and inscrutable friendship: in part teacher-student, in part kindred spirits, and completely devoted to each other. Accepting the insurmountable constraints upon the full expression of our love, we still—in the words of Dylan Thomas—sang in our chains like the sea.

For a good three months before his death on December 11, 1995, Rafe and I both had a strong intuition that it was imminent. Physically, there was nothing obvious to confirm this. Certainly he was aging, a man nearly seventy-one still living a brutally labor-intensive life in his little mountain hermitage above St. Benedict’s Monastery. But it was a graceful aging. He was still wiry and angular and fit to do a day’s work. And yes, he had somewhat high blood pressure, and a serious bout with an infection that past summer had hospitalized him for a week. But he had recovered, and while his energy was somewhat fragile, there were no obvious signs of trouble up ahead—only, as Rafe put it, a growing inner urgency to complete what needed to be done.

But Rafe didn’t live out of an ordinary consciousness. His awareness grew out of the mystical prayer that for forty years had been central to his life. From that center, he could sense the completion and yearned for it. And after two years of intense interaction with him, some of that same awareness was rubbing off on me. I fought against the realization with common sense, but knew it anyway in my heart. We both sensed keenly that the purpose of our time left together was, as Rafe put it, to forge a conscious connection that would endure from here to eternity.

Do you suppose that’s what we were called together for? Rafe pondered one day as we were driving back from a doctor’s appointment in Aspen. Of that much, at least, we were fairly certain: we had to have been called together; there was simply too much synchronicity to explain it away as chance. From halfway across the continent and against incredible odds, our lives seemed to have been drawn together on a slowly converging course. Before I knew him, I’d lived on an island in Maine where I thought I’d be for the rest of my life. Well ensconced in a difficult but stable second marriage, I tended a small Episcopal congregation as their part-time priest, wrote and edited for additional income, and was slowly developing a ministry as a spiritual guide and retreat leader.

Out to Snowmass in December 1990 to attend a training workshop in Centering Prayer, I found myself one morning in rapt conversation with the monastery hermit/plumber who had come by to thaw out the frozen shower drain in the barnroom apartment assigned to me for the week. It was December 10, five years to the day from the last conversation I would ever have with him. We stood there in the monastery barnyard—I remember he had one blue boot on and one orange boot—and for more than an hour we talked, the words flooding forth from some unknown depth in our souls. Of the torrents of words and feeling that passed between us, I can remember only one sentence—when he suddenly took both my hands in his and said, It’s all so simple, so very simple… But what remains with me vividly to this day is my recollection of a circle of light that shone out from Rafe and enfolded us both, and the deep sense of comfort and familiarity between us, as if we had somehow always known each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gone on from eternity.

Back home in Maine, the episode quickly faded from my consciousness. But one snowy February morning for no particular reason I can yet come up with, I sat down and wrote a letter to the abbot of St. Benedict’s Monastery asking if there was some way I might return to Snowmass for an extended time of solitude and discernment—say, two or three months. I was astonished when two weeks later he phoned and said yes.

My troubled marriage unraveled quickly. Within a matter of weeks my husband announced that he was in love with another woman and promptly started divorce proceedings. I could have stayed and fought for the house, but what would have been the point? Staking my future on nothing more than a deep inner prompting that the time in Snowmass was an appointment I dared not miss, I packed up my gear and headed west.

I didn’t connect with Raphael right away. After that first conversation, there didn’t seem to be any real urgency to get to know him better. We were already old friends, and there was an easy sense between us that the details of each other’s lives would fill in as they needed to. He’d stop by sometimes with eggs or bread from the monastery, or to work on the old pump that kept the house where I was staying precariously in water. Little by little we discovered that we’d read the same books and wrestled with the same questions. Like myself, he was fascinated by G. I. Gurdjieff, that early twentieth-century spiritual genius who had laid out a path of inner transformation frequently referred to as the Fourth Way. Most of Rafe’s library up at the hermitage (in addition to his Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) consisted of books by Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff’s three most prodigious disciples, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and J. G. Bennett. In a self-taught fusion of Fourth Way ideas and Christian apophatic mysticism, his deepest wish was to have enough being to be nothing.

Gradually over the next two years, as I shuttled back and forth between Maine and Colorado, our lives became more intertwined. One dismally dark Maine winter day he phoned me up out of the blue to see if there was an uninhabited offshore island he might come live on—to join you more deeply in what your life has been, he said. And one golden Colorado morning that next summer, in the back of the monastery chapel right after mass, he again took both my hands in his and searched my eyes with a look so full of solemn portent that I knew he’d be by later on and the love so long smoldering between us would burst into flame.

Wherever Rafe’s intuition was leading him, we both realized that our human journey together would be brief. I closed out the remnants of my life in Maine and headed back as quickly as possible to join him full-time in the last remarkable chapter of his human walk. From June 1994, when I finally arrived full-time, until his death eighteen months later, we gave ourselves fully to the experiment, as Rafe liked to call our relationship.

Particularly in those final three months of his life, when we both knew with gathering inner certainty that the scepter of death hung over us, we worked hard to set in place a new mode of communication that might guide us in the next phase of the journey. I will speak of it in much more detail later, but in essence this had to do with a radical emotional reprogramming so that I would be prepared to receive and reciprocate his presence, not at the level of memory or sentimentality, but as a raw infusion of spiritual love and energy into my own vital body—the body of hope as he would shortly name it.

‘For certain very high cosmic purposes it is essential that man acquire a soul. The normal way of doing it is through the union of the sexes.’ What do you suppose he means by that? Rafe was fond of quoting from J. G. Bennett’s little book, Sex, which had become his unofficial guidebook to these uncharted new waters. We both knew it wasn’t physical union that Bennett had in mind, but something deeper: a union of hearts that would endure beyond the grave and allow us to grow toward that one complete soul we already sensed ourselves to be. But to get up to speed for this soulwork beyond the grave required a twin drill on my part—one that Rafe had already come upon on his own in his twenty years or so of solitude up at the cabin: the adamant rejection of last year’s language (any kind of comfortable habit, clinging, or stopping at a lesser goal), along with a stubborn trust in something leading inward. Your heart must be invincible, he told me, his eyes flashing meteor-blue. You must trust the invincibility of your own heart.

Were we ready for the moment when it came? Who knows? After a weekend of solitude in his little cabin and a glorious last day down at the monastery in which his words to everyone were I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful, he was preparing to head back up to the hermitage when he was felled by a cardiac arrest. His heart burst; it was sudden, swift, and virtually painless. Time: 11:26 P.M. At home, asleep, I came bolt awake.

THE