Longing and caring--two ways to seek the divine. Each has its own attractions, each its struggles. Neither fits easily with the other. Circumstances that promote one make the other more difficult; those that allow the second make the first all but impossible.
The edges and rhythms spoken of last month, the spiritualities of the desert and the family, are like two parts of a wheel. Longing is the edge of the wheel. The life it offers is one of exhilaration and speed, but one at times also grinding, hard, and bitter. To give full expression to longing is to seek a life one way or another lived on the edge and so risk the destruction that can come when reaching to the very border of human existence in the hope of touching the truly magnificent, God all powerful.
Caring is the wheel's center. Slower and duller, it is also close to the core of things. To choose a life of caring is to accept the monotony of small demands that can take up a lifetime as easily as they take up a day, in order to become part of the steady rhythm of the eternal.
The spirituality of life on the edge is an answer to the longing for transformation, the hunger for the presence of God. It is a craving for the transcendent which considers everything else-comfort, companionship, peace of mind--unimportant. A harsh, uncompromising, solitary life, it willingly accepts all God asks in order to know all of who God is.
The spirituality of community, and its most intense form, family, is one that answers the human need to love and care fop others. It is cautious, careful, protective. It seeks a continuity and rhythm at the heart of all that is lifegiving, a continuity which shows itself in a daily form as routine, in a communal form as tradition, and in a transcendent form as the eternal.
Each way of life grows from equally strong spiritual needs, and each is just as capable of drawing a person to God. Each way of life is also equally hard to fit with the other.
Even their details vary radically. For the life on the edge, these details involve solitude and subsistence on the barest of human needs; for the life of the family and community they involve company, not simply as companions, but as a center of attention and also a protective care which seeks enrichment, not subsistence.
And each views the other differently. From the standpoint of the desert, families can seem uncommitted to God or to deeper issues. They seem materialistic, lethargic, and caught up in minor matters. From the view of the family, those who go to the desert appear apathetic to human need, irresponsible, and self-absorbed.
Also their goals, though ultimately joined, manifest themselves differently. One seeks out a view of God so powerful that even as it is reflected in only one person's life, it makes people keep away, and as "afraid to come near" contemporary prophets as the people of Israel were to come near Moses when he returned from talking with God. The other seeks instead the whispering voice of eternity which only those close to the changing human seasons can detect.
Measured by the standards of the spirituality of the family, Antony's entire life in the desert could be called into question by the fact that it could begin only after he had renounced the care of his sister. The girl was left in the care of nuns, but the responsibility was his first of all. No more than a child, she had lost both her parents, and now because of his ambition, she was to lose him as well. With the nuns her needs would be met, but would they love her with the sort of love a family gives? Would they teach her of her past, of her connection to her parents and of them to their parents and so draw her into the patterns of the community? These are questions which a community would ask.
In the same way, the family and the communal network that supports it could be criticized from the standpoint of life on the edge because it so often creates structures which resist the prophetic, resist the working of the Spirit. It often happens that those very tendencies which serve to make a community most nurturing to its members are also those which tend to close it off from everyone else. Those strands which most successfully tie a group together, hold it up and make it one, also serve to keep others out, and so form a barrier separating one group from another. "Enlarge the limits of your home," the prophet Isaiah commands, "Spread wide the curtains of your tent." And so saying his voice is unmistakable as one that comes from a man who has been to the desert.
Two spiritualities, two ways of life; each differs from the other in its goals, its intentions, and its practical details. So different from the other, they are in fact joined.
They are joined as a flower is joined to the bulb from which it grows. The bulb, misshaped and uninteresting, lies buried a full year in the soil, then from it grows a brilliant flower. In the same way, it is always from the community, bland and routine as it seems, that grows the passionate searching of life on the edge. And just as it is through the flower that the bulb is able to reproduce itself, it is through the prophetic spirituality of life on the edge that communities are changed and new ones formed.
In finding a new flower in the garden is always a temptation to cut it and carry it indoors, leaving the uninteresting bulb buried in the ground. Yet without the bulb to nourish it, the flower quickly withers, while the bulb, without the flower, must wait another year to be renewed. Just the same are these two ways of life. Cut off entirely from an intimate human circle, the community, life on the edge withers. And yet if the community is such that the other life is never allowed to form, then something of great beauty is lost, something which is also its culmination and its means of renewal.
This flower and bulb can also represent the two forces present in the human soul, the longing for transformation and the need to nurture. The danger of both spiritualities is that while answering one need they will completely ignore the other, and so sever flower and bulb in a way that would leave a person on the one hand withered, without the nourishment of love, and on the other barren, empty, and unfulfilled.
The risk is real. Something of great value is lost, after all, when a person relinquishes the normal joys of childhood, youth, adulthood, and age "to follow a light as elusive as fire" (John S. Dunne, Time and Myth)--something far deeper than the joys themselves. What is given up is a chance to share that deeply creative love which two people can reinstill in each other throughout every day they share together, a love which is like a gentle warmth. Like a warmth it is easily taken for granted, yet missed when it is removed. Only with difficulty do people grow accustomed to this sort of cold. And yet it can go so far that the cold comes to be preferred and even a moderate warmth will seem too hot. People who live too long on the edge can come to grow so unaccustomed to the warmth of human love that they no longer know how it is given, or how accepted.
Toward the end of Thomas Merton's life many of his friends began to feel uneasy and sense that he was somehow beyond their reach. "No matter how much you talked," one said, "you got the feeling that he was always apart" (Edward Rice, The Man In the Sycamore Tree). Two of his oldest friends, Edward Rice and Robert Lax, discussed it when they met. As Rice tells it, "I told Lax that I thought the Old Boy (which was what we called him) wasn't relating to people; Lax agreed. Now, I wonder if he was not literally in another world." One of the greatest dangers of life on the edge is how quickly being in another world can become simply not relating to people.
For the spirituality of community and family, the loss is of another sort. It is the loss of creativity, the loss of opportunities, the loss of that sense of purpose which comes of cultivating the hopes and talents not quite like those of anyone else. It is the loss that comes of stifling that longing which, tugging and pulling, seeks to draw a person into the presence of God. It is the emptiness that comes of setting aside the urge to become all that it is possible to become in order to attend to the many details essential to the working of a family and community.
Each way of life has precisely what the other lacks, and lacks what the other gives. And yet the problem remains. Although springing from equal needs in the human soul and joined together in view of the total human community, they remain ways of life very difficult to merge into one lifetime, and in the history of the spirit there have been few instances when union has been achieved.
Within the Catholic Church, especially before Vatican II, the spirituality of the desert and that of the family could be brought together in one church, but seldom in one individual. The spirituality of the first was reserved for priests, and that of the latter for the lay person. Only through the meeting of these two groups could the separate ways of life make contact.
The Jewish answer found most often in the 17th- and 18th-century schtetles of Eastern Europe was for the two ways of life to be divided between husband and wife. The husband spent his time almost exclusively in study and prayer, while the wife cared and provided for the family. The husband's life was one centered in mysticism, the wife one of care. In the Jewish response the two ways of life were brought together in one family, but again, not in one individual.
In Indian culture the problem is approached another way. A Hindu sees his life as divided into four parts, that of student, householder, hermit, and ascetic. During the first two of these stages he lives the spirituality of the community, first studying, then marrying and having children. It is then he fulfills his need to nurture. When his children have grown he begins the spirituality of life on the edge, first by seeking solitude then practicing self-denial and concentrating his energy on his search for God. Here then are the two spiritualities brought together in one life--though relegated to different periods of that life. For this to be possible, however, a person must live the full span of a normal lifetime--or else believe as the Hindus do that there are many different lifetimes, so that a person cut short from achieving all four stages in one could hope to do better in the next.
Added to these three traditional solutions is a fourth, that of intentional religious communities made up not only of single men or women, but of families. Less common than other solutions, it has, however, been tried again and again in human history and is once more being revived.
The traditional goal of monasticism is to balance the longing for God with a caring for others, and so as a group embark on the solitary journey. Although the family is often the model--the Rule of St. Benedict describing each monk as each other's brother, and the Abbot as their mother--there is very seldom the same need for the sort of single-minded care for others that is so much a part of true family life. Also in these traditional monasteries is less contact with the human seasons. In trying to blend the two, the monastery much more strongly favors the spirituality of the desert.
And yet there have been times in history--and ours is one--when people have taken the monastic hope of joining the fullest longing for God with the need to care for others. They have brought families together to the same purpose, bonding parents and children, and single men and women, into small communities dedicated to living out both spiritualities in all their power and all their mystery. These communities are working to find in their midst a point of balance between the pastoral and the prophetic, between the need to care for others and the deep longing for God's presence.
It is an intense, profound way of life, and yet even it cannot fully resolve the tension between the two spiritualities. In some ways it can only give the tension a more visible form. A community has far more resources to deal constructively with the dilemma, and yet to a large degree the dilemma remains. Most communities know what members of individual families also know: how difficult it is to stand between these two ways of life. And so it remains that the strongest sensation of anyone who has tried to merge the two is one of being perpetually off balance.
Trying to draw the spirituality of the desert into that of the community and family is like trying to stand still and walk at the same time. Since the two cannot be done at the same moment, you do a little of one, then a little of the other; so that after standing for a moment you decide to walk, take a few steps, only to stop abruptly and stand, then change your mind and walk again. It is a halting, uneven, stumbling way to live, always about to fall.
Anyone who has tried knows what it means. It means several days in a row devoted solely to meetings, to working, to a few solitary moments alone to reflect--all done at the expense of the family. For these to occur, arrangements have had to be made, babysitters called, schedules shifted and adjusted, until finally there it is, a little block of time for creativity and self-development.
But soon it is clear that something has suffered. Children have been put to one side, the marriage has not been tended, small rifts and wounds have appeared because the love that holds the family together has not been cared for as it should.
Then efforts shift. Time is spent with children, more care goes into the preparation of meals, there are outings, and husband and wife arrange dinners alone together.
But soon again there grows evidence that something else is being lost. A restlessness and uneasiness begin to creep in, a stirring again of that longing for self-expression, for time alone, for contact with those deeper mysteries uncluttered by human details. Eventually the longing becomes unbearable and arrangements are shifted again.
Back and forth it goes, a step then a pause, a step then a pause, neither quite one nor the other, always off balance.
But perhaps this is the closest it is possible to come to a solution, this halting uneven shifting back and forth from the life on the edge to that of the human intimacy of family and community. Both lives have, after all, been brought together; and if they do not seem to fit comfortably perhaps that should not be taken as evidence of failure but a sign of the health of the struggle which refuses to relinquish either way of life.
And with practice it might be that the unbalance can be steadied, smoothed, and better paced, and so transformed into dance--a life-long dance which draws into one experience a way of life that makes its home in both the community and the desert, seeking to know both the human and the divine.
A Prayer
Lord, steady the unbalance of my days, steady it and turn it to dance. Make it a dance that speaks of the love of man and woman, of parent and child, of sister and brother, of friend and of stranger. And let it be a great, magnificent dance, Lord, paced to the rhythms of eternity, a dance of praise to be performed onto the brink of the unknown, and then beyond, into your presence.
Ernest Boyer was a student at Harvard Divinity School when this article appeared.
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