I think we are meant to spill over into each other, like wine from a carafe into a glass, like a fountain leaping over, falling towards, touching, and forever changing, the water below.
This spilling over is, I think, something we experience most often in this life when we are sharing suffering with each other, but I think that it is actually a taste of life before the Fall, or life as it is meant to be lived. It is Holy Friendship, and most people deeply desire to be a friend like that. Most of the time, we fail, I fail, but failure only shows more clearly the ideal--I hope.
We are meant to be like glass filled with liquid and light, open and with our own unique liquid. But like water that sits in a container for too long, if we do not share ourselves, we become bracken, stale, contaminated. My own experiences with people I suspected were hidden saints are always prism-memories of sparkling light, glass, color, liquid spirit pouring like blood, an openness and a promise of refreshment: the wine of Cana transformed by the action of the Lord. These people have become, instead of water held for washing hands, fine wine that warms the spirit and breaks down division and just pure uptight-ness in general. They seem unconcerned about the vessel emptying; they have some eternal source. Some of these people have been people who do not claim to be religious, but have been filled with rain, with something of God, with love.
My experiences with darkness--in myself, too-- have been stone-memories of simply hitting a wall. It is being a stone-jar person filled with unused water. It can happen from wounding, more easily healed; it can happen from arrogance, pride, security in abilities or eccentricities, and ends with petrified vessels. Some stone jars filled with brackish water are the most outwardly religious. Perhaps the piety can be taken in, like everything else, to only strengthen the concrete mixture of pride and complacency.
I am teaching Dante in the next few weeks, and perhaps these images rattling around in my brain come partly from him. Dante's Comedia is structured, in part, on the image of a city, perhaps a building upon St. Augustine's City of God and City of Man. The Inferno is a hard, stone, brittle megaron, a monstrosity of concentric circles filled with various forms of hellish liquids and fire and rock; the center of Hell is frozen, stone water. All cities must be held together by some sort of structure or meaning, but Hell is full of enmity and dissension...so it must be held together by hard stone, torturers, threats, envy, and horrible bureaucratic terms like 'constructive dismissal' and general sneaky stuff. It is the evil of particulars used for power, compartmentalized from principles, and the evil of principle as a stick to beat others, with no regard to the particular person.
When we move through Dante's Purgatory, and into Heaven, the opaqueness, the hardness, the forced, isolating 'comraderie' slowly gives way to light, the city of the heavens, in which one can see infinite distances, and the sense of openness and freedom becomes more and more intense, to culminate in the heavenly rose where the saints spill into each other in light, and love, and singing, so much so that they themselves are the structure of the city. It no longer needs hard substance to create community or infrastructure; it is structured by love and humility and simply the sight of God.
The freedom of love and encouragement and mercy and honesty is, simply, that we do not need to be structured, any longer; by loving the right way, with humility, we structure ourselves, we simply are part of the order of goodness, effortlessly. It is the meaning of St. Augustine's cry to "love God and then do what you will." It is the freedom symbolized by the light, openness, and fluidity, and results in profound and tremendous influence over others for good. But it is born, for us, through sorrow and suffering and humiliation and necessary discipline...and feasting and joy and through others who will pour themselves on our wounds.
We are meant, created, to spill over into each other in love, to bear one another's burdens as practice for a greater, more joyful bearing of one another in freedom. Suffering together, and best of all, suffering for what is good, for what is right, for the weakest among us, prepares us by asking us to pour ourselves out for the other.
I have had friendship made in almost an instant through a recognition in the furnace. This brings great joy, if we can stay in righteousness together, and not ourselves become a stone circle, an inner circle to keep out the world rather than a true intimacy. The best explanation of this is CS Lewis' lecture on the inner circle, given at a graduation. I've committed that sin, too--to take an opportunity of deep friendship, a pouring into one another and allow it to be turned into an inner circle of holier-than-those-jerks. Then destruction, opaqueness, the stone of hell, sets in and the friendship becomes destructive.
I have had friends who have poured themselves into my life and yet have kept their eyes--and mine--on continuing to ask for the wine, the grace, to be continually transformed, always aware that we're jerks a lot, too. Some of those friends are in Lander, some in Seattle, in Oregon, some on Orcas, New York, California, and other places. Just the thought of them sends the warmth of wine into my soul as we pack up the house and sell things only the way absent-minded academics can do it.
I have had the privilege of meeting friends in the furnace, friends like this, in Australia...even in this short time, and these are the eternal connections that will be well met again, I know, where nothing is more important than love, reaching across many boundaries, where boundaries are no longer needed.
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