The Wounds of Love

[english]

As I move forward, dear friends, I’d like to share a few final reflections about the last two years and the explosion that led up to it.

For the past two years, I have not been able to go more than a short time without being overwhelmed by sharp pangs of pain, suffused with tears. I feel devastated anew each day by the radical and complete nature of certain betrayals. There is something so terrible and devastating about being betrayed by close friends; words cannot hold the immensity of the pain. One can, of course, only be betrayed by people one is certain could never betray one. It is only Judas, the most trusted and beloved of Jesus’ friends, who can betray him. Betrayal is intimately bound up with love and trust. Yet, paradoxically enough, it may be that we can be reborn only after having been betrayed. Perhaps it is only when all the cords we have attached to others are fully disentangled―when our mothers and fathers have abandoned us―that God can gather us up.

I remember a thousand conversations I had with the small group of people who were part of my inner circle. They were conversations of love, commitment, trust, and radical intimacy. Conversations of beauty. Conversations in which we asked each other to hold in precious safekeeping our fragility and vulnerability.

There was never any sense between us that anything transgressive was happening. Holding privacy did not mean that we felt that anything wrong was happening. It was simply a precaution, a way of holding a container to prevent anyone from being able to misconstrue or distort the nature of the relationships. All of the hundreds of pages documentary material between these people and myself confirms that all of us, at the time, felt the relationships to be beautiful and good, not ethically wrong in any sense at all.

I never had any idea that, even in the worst of circumstances, anyone could act as some people apparently did. I did not protect myself against them because I could not imagine that they would try to hurt me. I held my private life privately for fear it might be distorted, but never dreamed that the distortion might mean a shattering of a magnitude even vaguely similar to what took place. No part of me expected anything like what happened. Each time I think of it, a part of my heart is wounded, pierced, and stabbed anew. I experienced my death at the hands of those I loved a thousand times in my dreams, in the hallucinations of my waking hours, and in the indelibility of traumatized memory.

Through all of it, but one prayer remained on my lips: God―do not take away my ability to love. God―do not make me bitter. Allow me to die into your arms and be reborn in your bosom, to do your will in love, in any and every way in which you command me.

T.S. Eliot held my hand, and St. Francis of Assisi held both my heart and my hand.

T.S. Eliot’s

Four Quartets (East Coker, part III):

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the
waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

marc gafni

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