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2. THE AFFECTIVE LIFE

2.1 In this is love

"In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation of our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another". (I Jn 4.10f)

All apostolic life is a sharing in that redemptive love of God for humanity. If it is not, then our preaching will be at best a job, and at worst an exercise in manipulation of others, the propagation of an ideology. Perhaps in some countries the churches are empty because the preaching of the gospel is seen as an exercise of control rather than the expression of God's boundless love. So to become alive, abundantly alive as preachers, means discovering how to love well. "My vocation is Love".(12)

But one could put it the other way around. For us Dominicans, learning how to love is inseparable from being caught up in the mystery of God's redemption of humanity. This is our school of love. Today religious formators all over the world are beginning to face the question of "affectivity", a word I dislike. How can we form those who join the Order so that they may love well and fully, as chaste religious? Most of us had little or no formation in facing our emotions, our sexuality, our hunger to love and be loved. I do not remember ever receiving any formation in this area. It seemed to be assumed, or perhaps hoped nervously, that a good run and a cold shower would solve the "problem". Alas, I cannot run and I dislike cold showers!

In this letter I will not discuss issues relating specifically to formation and affectivity, since I hope there will be a letter to the Order on the topic of formation soon. I will just say this: it is not enough to hope that all will be well if we recruit well-balanced young men and women, free of obvious emotional disorders. Would well balanced people lay down their lives for their friends? Would they leave the ninety-nine sheep and go and look for the one that is lost? Would they eat and drink with prostitutes and sinners? I fear that they may be too sensible. Commenting on St John's gospel, Augustine wrote "Show me a lover, and he feels what I am saying". (13) It is only those who are capable of love who can possibly understand the passion of the apostolic life. Unless we let ourselves be caught on the wave of that immense love, then all our attempts to be chaste may end up in being exercises in control. We may succeed, but at the risk of great damage to ourselves. We may fail, at the risk of terrible damage to others. So unless our apostolic impulse and our capacity for love are deeply integrated, then they become a matter of either controlling others or myself. But Jesus let go control of his life, and placed it in our hands.

2.2 "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." (Jn 15.13)

Loving humanity may be very admirable but it may seem like a pale and abstract substitute for that deep and personal love for which we sometimes hunger. Is it really enough? And we may feel this all the more in contemporary society in which the dominant model of love is the passionate sexual love of a man and woman. When we feel this urgency, then can we be satisfied with loving humanity?

That passionate, spousal love is indeed a deep human need, and I shall say something about it later. It may also be an image of our relationship with God, for example in the medieval commentaries on the Song of Songs. But there is another complementary tradition which is perhaps more typically Dominican. It is at the heart of John's gospel. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lays down his life for his friends." So this is what the mystery of love looks like, someone giving away their life for their friends. Here we see a love that is profoundly passionate, in Jesus' relationship with the disciples, with the prostitutes and publicans, the sick and the lepers, and even the Pharisees. It is a passion whose consummation is the passion that leads to Golgotha. Is not this as passionate as any love affair?

Our society may find our way of loving incomprehensible, since we have apparently rejected the typical experience of love, the sexual union with one other person. We may feel that sometimes ourselves, that we have missed out on "the big experience", and that we have not lived. But St Thomas Aquinas taught that at the heart of the life of the God who is love is friendship, the unutterable friendship of the Father and the Son, which is the Spirit. For us to live, to become unutterably alive, is to find our home in that friendship and to be transformed by it. It will overspill into all that we do and are. As Don Goergen OP wrote, "Celibacy does not witness to anything. But celibates do".(14) We witness to the Kingdom if we are seen to be people whose chastity liberates us for life.

Our communities should be schools of friendship. When he was dying St Hyacinth repeated the words of St Dominic to the brethren, "Have goodness and gentleness (dulcedo) of heart. Keep love of God and fraternal charity".(15) Are we always sufficiently good and gentle hearted towards each other? In religious life there has often been a fear of friendship, but perhaps this has not been so present in the Dominican tradition. From the beginning there have been profound and loving friendships, of Dominic for his brethren and sisters; of Jordan of Saxony for his beloved Diana and for Henry; of Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua. I remember an old Dominican saying in Chapter when I was young, "I have nothing against particular friendships; it's particular enmities to which I object!". This friendship is never exclusive, but profoundly transformative, painfully and slowly liberating us from all that is dominative or possessive, all that is patronising or contemptuous. If it is a sharing in the life of the Trinity, then it will be a love that lifts the other to equality and sets them free. As Bede Jarrett, the English provincial, wrote in 1932, "Oh dear friendship, what a gift of God it is. Speak no ill of it. Rather praise its Maker and Model, the Blessed Three-in-one."(16) If it is truly a friendship which is of God, then it will propel us out into the mission of preaching the good news.

The culmination of our loving will be a dispossession. Those whom we love we must let go; we must let them be. Does my love for another give them freedom to make their own lives and leave me free for the mission of the Order? Does my love for this woman, for example, help her to grow in her love for her husband, or am I tying her life to mine, and making her dependent? This painful but liberating dispossession invites us to become peripheral to the lives of those whom we love. We should find that we disappear from the centre of their lives, so that they may forget us and be free, free for someone else, free for God. This is the hardest thing of all, but I firmly believe that it can give us more joy than we can ever say or imagine. It is when our sides are opened up, so that living water may flow out.

One of the beautiful examples within our Dominican tradition is surely that of the love between Blessed Jordan of Saxony, Dominic's successor as Master of the Order, and the Dominican nun, B1essed Diana d'Andalo. Clearly they loved each other deeply. How many Masters of the Order have written with such openness to a woman? "Am I not yours, am I not with you: yours in labour, yours in rest; yours when I am with you, yours when I am far away?(17) And it is clear that she taught him much about how to love. But in his letters Jordan is always giving her away to the Lord. He is the Bridegroom's friend, whose role is to bring the bride to the bridegroom: "Think on him." "What is lacking to you because I cannot be with you, make up for in the company of a better friend, your Bridegroom Jesus Christ whom you have more constantly with you in spirit and in truth, and who speaks to you more sweetly and to better purpose than Jordan".(18)

We even have to be dispossessed, in a sense, of our own families. We will rightly love them and delight in their love for us, but once we make our profession in the Order we should be free to go where the mission of the Order needs us, even if it is far from the homes of our family. That is part of our poverty. Now our first belonging is to the Order and the preaching of the gospel.

2.3 Sex, Bodies and Desire

a) An unattainable ideal?

This is a beautiful ideal, but it may seem remote and unattainable. As we struggle with sexual desire, with fantasies and possessiveness, then this selfless friendship may seem beyond our reach. The media assures us every day that this ideal is "unrealistic". But God does not transform humanity by inviting us to labour up to heaven. The divine life comes to where we are, flesh and blood. Jesus summons Zacchaeus to come down from the tree and join him on the ground. The Word becomes bodily, takes upon himself our desires, our passion, our sexuality. If we would meet the Lord and be healed, then we too must become incarnate, in the bodies that we are, with all our passions, with our hurts and hungers.

We start from who and what we are. When we are clothed in the habit, we bring to the Order this person, who is the fruit of a history, and carries its wounds. This is the person whom the Lord has called, and not some ideal human being. We come with the scars of past experience, perhaps with the unhealed memories of failures in love, of abuse, of sex. Our families have taught us to love; they may also have inflicted wounds on us that will take time to heal. To grow in this Christlike love takes time, and this time is given. It is a gift, and God always gives his gifts through time. He took centuries to form his people, preparing the way for the birth of his Son. God gives us life patiently, not in an instant. If we accept his gifts, we must accept the way God gives, "not as the world gives do I give unto you" (Jn 14.27). Accepting this gift of time is perhaps especially important in our society, in which adolescence is prolonged, and it is only late that most of us arrive at maturity. We must start with our desires, our hungers, our bodies. We are neither angels nor beasts, but flesh and blood and spirit, destined for the Kingdom. But, as Pascal said, if we make the mistake of thinking that we are angels, then we will become beasts.

b) Desire

"I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh " (Ezekiel 36.26). If our hearts are to become flesh then we must let our desires be transformed.

What are the desires that shape our heart, and which we hide from others and perhaps even from ourselves? "None of us is so self-transparent as to know quite where, in fact, our hearts are set."(19) Until we look squarely at our desires in the face and learn to desire well, then we shall be subject to their control and so their prisoner. This is especially hard in a society which is dedicated to the cultivation of desire. Our society is dying not of famine but of an excess of desire. Every advertisement encourages us to desire more, endlessly, infinitely. The world is being consumed by a voracious, unmeasured desire, that may consume us all. Unrestrained sexual desire is merely one symptom of how we are taught to see the world, as there to be taken and consumed.

In the first place, that love which is friendship invites us to see the other without seeking to possess them. We delight in them without seeking ownership. It is hard to attain this liberty of heart if we remain captivated by the culture of the market, in which everything is there to be acquired and used, even other people. Thus true friendship asks of us that we break with the dominant culture of our time. We have to learn to see aright, with clarity, with eyes that do not devour each other and the world. St Thomas wrote "ubi amor, ibi oculus". "Where love is, there is the eye." (20) He says that when we lust we see the other as the lion sees the stag, as a meal to be devoured. Love is therefore inseparable from a true poverty of heart. As William Blake asked, "Can that be Love that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?" (21)

So the healing of desire implies a different way of being in the world, true poverty. And what sort of sign would chastity be if we remain just as acquisitive in other ways? As Don Goergen OP wrote, "If I partake of consumer society, defend capitalism, tolerate machismo, believe that Western society is superior to others, and am sexually abstinent, I am simply witnessing to that for which we stand: capitalism, sexism, western arrogance, and sexual abstinence. The latter is hardly deeply meaningful and understandably questioned." (22)

We also need to see sexuality clearly and free ourselves from the sexual mythology of contemporary society. We have to demythologise sex. On the one hand a sexual relationship is usually seen as the culmination of all our hungers for communion and the only escape from loneliness. It has been called the last remaining sacrament of transcendence, the only sign that we exist for another, or even that we exist at all. To be without a sexual relationship is therefore to be half dead. On the other hand, sexuality is trivialised. An English madam

recently declared that sex is of no more importance than having a cup of tea. It is this combination of the deification of sexuality and its trivialisation that makes celibacy so hard to bear. We are both told that we must have it, and that it is ours to have without a moment's thought. The re-education of our human hearts demands that we see sexuality clearly. It is indeed a beautiful sacrament of communion with another, the gift of oneself, and so it can never be trivialised. Yet them are other ways in which we may love fully and completely and so its absence does not condemn us to isolation and loneliness.

Finally, faced with the insatiable desires of the market place, we are invited not to repression, but to hunger for more We are passionate people, and to kill all passion would be to stunt and wither our humanity. It would make us preachers of death. Instead we must be liberated into deeper desires, for the boundless goodness of God. As Oshida, the Japanese Dominican, says, we beg God to make himself irresistible. Our desires may go astray not because we ask for too much, but because we have settled for too little, for tiny satisfactions "The ideal is for us not to control our appetites at all, but to allow them full rein in the wake of an uncontrolled appetite for God (23) The advertisements that line our roads invite us to struggle against each other, to trample upon each other in the competition to fulfil our endless desires; our God offers the satisfaction of infinite desire freely and as a gift. Let us desire more deeply.

This transformation of desire will surely imply some asceticism. This is a conclusion which I have long resisted! Dominic surely arrived at his freedom, his spontaneity, his lightheartedness partly because he was a temperate man, who ate and drank little. He feasted with his brethren but he also fasted. There is an aceticism which is not a Manichean rejection of God's world, but teaches us a proper pleasure in it. "It is about giving up not desire itself which would be inhuman - but its violence. It is about dying to the violence of pleasure, to its omnipotence." (24) Temperance measures our appetites against the real needs of our body, and so rescues us from the delusions of fantasy and the tyranny of desire.

c) Bodies

I cannot have a mature relationship to my sexuality until I learn to accept and even delight in human bodies, my own and other people's. This is the body that I have, and that I am, getting older, fatter, losing my hair, evidently mortal. I must be at ease with other people's bodies, the beautiful and the ugly, the sick and the healthy, the old and young, male and female. St. Dominic founded the Order to rescue people from the tragedy of a dualistic religion, which condemned this created world as evil. Central to our tradition from the beginning is an appreciation of corporeality. It is here that God comes to meet and redeem us, becoming a human being of flesh and blood like us. The central sacrament of our faith is the sharing of his body; our final hope is the resurrection of the body. The vow of chastity is not a refuge from our bodily existence. If God has become flesh and blood, then we can dare to do so as well.

We discover what it means for us to be bodily in that climax of Jesus' life, when he gives his body to us: "This is my body, given for you". Here we see that the body is not just a lump of flesh, a bag of muscles, blood and fat. The Eucharist shows us the vocation of our human bodies: to become gifts to each other, the possibility of communion.

The immense pain of celibacy is that we renounce a moment of intense bodiliness, when bodies are given to each other, without reserve. Here the body is seen in its profound identity not as a lump of flesh but as the sacrament of presence. This sexual act expresses, makes flesh and blood, our deep desire to share our lives. That is why it is a sacrament of Christ's unity with the Church. We religious too, in our corporeality, can make Christ present in our way. The preacher brings the Word to expression, not just in his or her words, but in all that we are. God's compassion seeks to become flesh and blood is us, in our tenderness, even in our faces.

In the Old Testament, we often find the prayer that God's face may shine upon us. This prayer was finally answered in the form of a human face, Christ's face. He looks at the rich young man, loves him and asks him to follow him; he looks at Peter in the courtyard after his betrayal; he looks at Mary Magdalene in the garden and calls her by her name. As preachers, flesh and blood, we can give body to that compassionate look of God. Our bodiliness is not excluded from our vocation. "And the man who is both a preacher and a brother can learn, painfully and probably with every uneven progress, what it means to be a face for God precisely in having a human face, a face that can smile and laugh and weep and look bored ... It is in all our uniqueness and individuality, which is eternally valid and desired by God, that we are also the revelation, the manifestation, the expression of him who is the One Word coming forth from an eternity from the silence of God."(25)

True purity of heart is not about being freed from contamination by this world. It is more about being fully present in what we do and are, having a face and a body that expresses ourselves, beyond deceit and duplicity. The pure in heart are not concealed behind their faces, watching warily. Their faces are transparent, unprotected, with the nakedness and vulnerability of Christ. They have his freedom and: spontaneity. "Only he who has a pure heart can laugh in a freedom that creates freedom in others." (26)

d) Generativity

Perhaps more than anything else, I have missed not having children. And if I, as a man, feel this, then what can it mean for a woman not to have given birth? This is a fundamental desire we must recognise. Yet if our apostolic life is caught up in the fertile love of God for humanity, then we will be fruitful. Meister Eckhart says that God's love in us is green and fertile. God is in us "ever verdant and flowering in all the joy and the glory that he is in himself" (27) "God 's chief aim is giving birth He is never content until he begets his Son in us. And the soul too is in no way content until the Son is born in her." (28)

It belongs to our love of the brethren and sisters that we help each other to be fruitful. The apostolic life is not just a matter of endless work. If our apostolates are alive with the abundance of God's own life, then we shall share in his creativity.

But to be a parent is to live through the joy and pain of letting your children go. The consummation of being a parent is to give one's children their freedom, and let them build lives which are different from what we hoped for them. We too must let go what we bring to birth. We know that we have really been fruitful when projects that we have initiated, and to which we have given our lives, take off in new directions, and are in the hands of others. That is hard, but the generosity of parents is to give their children freedom.

2.4 How may we sustain one another?

If we let the love that is God touch us, then we shall slowly become alive. It may seem safer to remain dead, vulnerable, untouchable. But is this so? "Nature abhors a vacuum. Terrible things can happen to a man with an empty heart. In the last resort it is better to run the risk of an occasional scandal than to have a monastery -- a choir, a refectory, a recreation room -- full of dead men. Our Lord did not say 'I am come that they may have safety and have it more abundantly'. Some of us would indeed give anything to feel safe, about our life in this world, as in the next, but we cannot have it both ways: safety or life we must choose." (29) If we choose life, then we shall need communities which support us as we come alive, which help us to grow in a love which is truly holy, a sharing in the pouring forth of God's Word.

a) Communities of hope

Above all we should offer each other hope and mercy. Often we are drawn to the Order because we admire the brethren. We hope that we will become like them. Soon we will discover that they are in fact just like us, fragile, sinful and selfish This can be a moment of profound disillusionment. I remember a novice complaining of this sad discovery. The novice master replied to him, "I am delighted to hear that you no longer admire us. Now there is a chance that you might come to love us." The redemptive mystery of God's love is to be seen not in a community of spiritual heroes, but of brothers or sisters, who encourage each other on the journey to the Kingdom with hope and mercy. The risen Lord appears in the midst of a community of timid and weak mem If we wish to meet him we must dare to be there with them. Jordan of Saxony wrote to the brethren of Paris, who were clearly just like us: "It cannot be that Jesus will appear to those who cut themselves off from the unity of the brotherhood: Thomas, for not being with the other disciples when Jesus came, was denied sight of him: and will you think yourself more holy than Thomas?"(30)

Above all we will need our communities if we fail in love. We may fail because we enter a time of sterility when we feel ourselves to be incapable of any love, when our hearts of flesh have been replaced by hearts of stone. Then we will need them to believe for us that:

"Hidden within the deepest
self -- no matter how
treacherous one has been

or how corruptible -- hidden
within the deepest self
the seed of love remains. (31)

Our communities must be places in which there is no accusation, "for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down" (Rev. 12.10). We may sin and feel that we have destroyed our vocations, and that we must leave the Order in shame. Then our brothers and sisters may have to believe for us in God's mercy when we may find it hard to believe ourselves. If God can make the dead tree of Golgotha flower, then he can bring fruit out of my sins. We may need our brothers to believe, when we cannot, that some failure is not the end, but that God in his infinite fertility can make it part of our journey to holiness. Even our sins can be part of our fumbling attempts to love. All those years of Augustine's sexual adventures were perhaps part of his searching for the one who was most beloved, and that chastity was not the cessation but the consummation of his desire.

b) Community and sexual orientation

It is here that cultural differences can be seen most clearly. Great delicacy is needed if we are to avoid either scandalising or wounding our brothers and sisters. In some cultures, the admission of people of homosexual orientation to religious life is virtually unthinkable. In others it is accepted without question. Anything that is written about this topic is likely to be scrutinised to see whether one is "in favour" or "against" homosexuality. This is the wrong question. It is not for us to tell God whom he may or may not call to religious life. The General Chapter of Caleruega affirmed that the same demands of chastity apply to all brethren of whatever sexual orientation, and so no one can be excluded on this ground. There was much debate at Caleruega over this question, and I am sure that it will continue.

How can our communities support and sustain brethren as they confront the question of their sexual orientation? First we must recognise that it touches deeply our own sense of who we are. This is therefore a sensitive and important question for many young people who join the Order, for two reasons. First of all there is often a profound hunger for identity. For many young people the overriding question is: "Who am I?" Secondly, because of the- prolonged adolescence which characterises many cultures today, the question of sexual orientation is often not resolved until late. Sometimes we receive requests from brethren for dispensation because only late in life have they realised that they are fundamentally heterosexual and so able to marry.

If a brother comes to believe that he is homosexual, then it is important that he knows that he is accepted and loved as he is. He may live in terror of rejection and accusation. But this acceptance is bread for the journey as he moves to discover a deeper identity, as a child of God. For none of us, heterosexual or homosexual, can find our deepest identities in our sexual orientation. Who we are most deeply, we must discover in Christ. "Beloved we are God 's children now; it does not appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1 Jn 3.2) By our vows we commit ourselves to follow Christ, and to discover our identity in him. It belongs to our poverty that we are carried beyond these small identities. "At the root of all other possessiveness is the ultimately possessive desire to be a self: the desire that there should be at my centre not that unnameable abyss into which as into a vacuum, the nameless God is inevitably drawn, but an identity I can own, an identity which is defined by my ownership of it."32 Any brother who makes his sexual orientation central to his public identity would be mistaking who he most deeply is. He would be stopping on the roadside when he is called to walk to Jerusalem. What is fundamental is that we can love and so are children of God, not to whom we are sexually attracted. But it does not only concern an individual's personal sense of identity. We have an identity as each other's brothers and sisters. We are responsible for the consequences for our brethren of how we present ourselves? especially in an area as sensitive as that of sexual orientation.

So, every brother should be accepted as he is. But the emergence of any subgroups within a community, based on sexual orientation, would be highly divisive. It can threaten the unity of the community; it can make it harder for the brethren to practice the chastity which we have vowed. It can put pressure on brethren to think of themselves in a way that is not central to their vocation as preachers of the Kingdom, and which perhaps they may eventually discover to be untrue.

c) Falling in love

However much we present friendship as a supreme revelation of that love which is the life of God, yet we may fall in love, and this may be one of the most significant experiences of our lives. One of the first public questions that I was ever asked after my election as Master, at a meeting of a great crowd of Filipino Dominican students, was: "Timothy, have you ever fallen in love?" And the second question was: "Was this before or after you joined the Order?" If this happens, then we will indeed need the support and love of our communities.

For a brother or sister who has professed their lives to the Order, to fall in love is almost certainly a moment of crisis. But as fr Jean-Jacques Pérennès often reminds us in the General Council, a crisis is a moment of opportunity. It can be fruitful. Any experience of love can be an encounter with the God who is love. Falling in love can be the moment when our egocentrism is torn open, and we discover that we are not the centre of the world. It can demolish, at least for a time, that self-preoccupation that kills us. Falling in love is "for many people the most. extraordinary and revealing experience of their lives, whereby the centre of significance is suddenly ripped out of the self, and, the dreamy ego is shocked into an awareness of an entirely separate reality". (33)

Once we have gone through this profound "unselfing", then we cannot just go on living as if nothing had happened. We cannot pretend that we have never met this person, and that we can return to our old life as if nothing had happened. And this may be one reason why if a brother falls in love he may ask for a dispensation from his vows, for that old life to which he pledged himself is over.

When Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian, was at the height of his fame as a spiritual writer, he fell utterly in love with a nurse who had cared for him in hospital. He wrote in his diary that he was "tormented by the gradual realisation that we were in love and I did not know how I would live without her". (34) Othello says faced with the loss of his beloved Desdemona, she is "where I have garner'd up my heart, where I must live or bear no life, the fountain from which my current runs or else dries up".

Then we cannot imagine a life apart from the person we love and so we have to pray for the gift of a life that indeed we cannot imagine, a life which can only come as a gift from God. On the cross, Jesus awaits no imaginable life, only the inconceivable and abundant life which the Father will give him. Then we cannot make a life. It must be given.

It is so very hard to let ourselves go into the hands of the Father at this moment, trusting that this death will give way to resurrection. We will need our friends and brothers and sisters as never before, who may have to believe for us when we cannot, that in this desert we may meet the Lord of life. Possibly we have never before felt so alive, so vital. We may feel that this love is what we have been looking for all our lives. How can we take the risk of losing it? We may become dried up, bad tempered and frustrated! At this moment we have to trust that if we remain faithful to our vows then God will be faithfu1 too. We will receive life abundantly. Merton's biographer says that finally Merton's experience of falling in love gave him "an inner liberation, which gave him a new sense of sureness, uncautiousness, defenselessness in his vocation and in the depths of himself. (35)

It may seem as if I am suggesting that such an experience is almost a necessary step on the road of our spiritual development. This is not what I am saying at all. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." As religious we pledge ourselves to receive the fullness of life in mystery of that unpossessive friendship. Also we priests and religious can inflict terrible damage on ourselves and others when we fall in love. We may be seen by others as "safe" and consider ourselves to be safe too. We can easily abuse others by indulging in a form of "emotional tourism", which leaves us free to return back to the our community when things become dangerous but possibly leaving the other person damaged, and their trust in the Church and even God, undermined for ever.

d) The wilderness of loneliness

In our growth as people capable of love, we may sometime have to pass through the wilderness. This may be because we feel ourselves incapable of love, or because we fall in love, or perhaps fail in our vows. If the apostolic life leads us to the bewilderment of Gethsemane, where life loses all meaning, then crisis in love may confront us with the solitude of the cross.

The experience of loneliness reveals a fundamental truth about ourselves, which is that alone we are incomplete. Contrary to the dominant perception of much of western society, we are not self-sufficient, self-contained beings. Loneliness reveals that I cannot be alive, I cannot be, by myself. I only exist through my relationships with others. Alone I die. This loneliness reveals a void, an emptiness at the heart of my life. We may be tempted to fill it with many things, food, drink, sex, power or work. But the emptiness remains. The alcohol or whatever is merely a disguised thirst for God. I suspect that we cannot even fill it with the presence of other people. A room full of lonely people changes nothing. "The awfulness of this loneliness shows itself precisely in the fact that all share it, none can relieve it." (36) When Merton fell in love, then he discovered that what he was looking for was perhaps not his beloved, but a solution to the hollow at the centre of his heart. She was "the person whose name I would try to use as magic to break the grip of the awful loneliness of my heart". (37)

Ultimately I suspect that this loneliness must not simply be endured. It must be lived as an entry into the loneliness of Christ in his death, which bears and transforms all human loneliness. "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" If we do that, then the veil of the temple will be torn in half and we shall discover the God who is at the heart of our being, granting us existence in every moment: "Tu autem eras interior intimo meo." "You are closer to me than I am to myself" (38). If we take upon ourselves the cross of loneliness and walk with it, then it will be revealed that the modern perception of the self is not true. The deepest truth of ourselves is that we are not alone. At the deepest point of my being is God giving me the abundance of life. St Catherine describes herself in the Dialogue as "dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge in order to know better God's goodness toward her." Profound self knowledge reveals not the solitary self of modernity but the one whose existence is inseparable from the God who grants us life in every moment.

If we can enter this desert and there encounter God, then we will become free to love unpossessively, freely, without domination or manipulation. We will be able to see others not as solutions to my needs or answers to my loneliness but simply there, to be delighted in "Therefore stand still and do not waver from your emptiness". It was at the foot of the cross, where Jesus gave his mother and the beloved disciple to each other, that the community of the Church was born.

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