Holy Love

The Longing and the Yearning

Dear Kathy,

We are coming up on nine years since you left this earth. Nine years without your laughter, without hearing you sing to me, without your gentle teasing. Nine years without watching your paint-splattered fingers move across a canvas or sitting on the floor of your sound studio, listening as you brought heavenly sounds into music, a parrot perched on your shoulder. I remember walking through the forest with you and watching you gaze at everything with such wonder. I remember driving behind the van that carried you to doctors, hospitals, and sometimes to the Outer Banks, looking at the other cars on the road and thinking how extraordinary it was that no one knew who was traveling among them. No one knew who you were, and most would never have believed it if I had told them.

How do you write a love letter to someone who has become your entire world, who has shown you that the world itself is an illusion, and who has taught you that the love you feel for her comes from somewhere far deeper than your own heart? You once told me there are no rules in love. I have spent most of my life learning what you meant.

When I first met you, I fell in love instantly. Everything about you mesmerized me. I wanted to be with you constantly, as did so many of your initiates. I worried about you, tried to control you, laughed with you, cried with you, and cried over you. I watched you suffer physical pain that no one should have to endure, knowing that you had willingly taken on a human body and all that came with it for the sake of your children.

There is something familiar about falling in love with a living Master, and something so entirely different that ordinary language fails us. The mind becomes almost obsessed with the Beloved. Every thought returns to her. Every separation feels unbearable, every reunion a gift. But this love reaches into the very source of the soul. The Master awakens a longing that was there long before we ever met her, a longing for God, for reunion, for the end of the separation we have imagined to be real.

I have come to believe that so much of our uneasiness, our anxiety, even our fear, is this longing buried beneath everything else. The soul remembers something the mind has forgotten. It knows where it belongs, and the Master comes to remind us.

I was a little girl who loved fiercely. My mother was my entire world, young and beautiful, but fragile in so many ways. She was often ill, hospitalized, suffering migraines, and I spent much of my childhood caring for her or worrying about her. My little brother Ned was born fragile too, and I became his defender. I remember getting into a fistfight in fourth grade because neighborhood boys were picking on him. There were always injured birds, puppies, kittens, anything small or helpless that I could find and try to care for. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder whether all that love and worry were preparing my heart for you. But nothing could have prepared me for you.

After I had been with you for about five years, you sent me away. I didn't understand why. I thought I had done something wrong, and everyone around me seemed to think so too. Later, you told one of my closest sisters that I had learned everything I could at that point and needed to return to the world, but that I would come back.

That year nearly broke me. I wandered up and down the East Coast, staying in hotels, unable to remain anywhere for more than a few nights. I couldn't bear the silence of your absence. There were nights when the pain of missing you was so physical that I could barely move. It felt as though my blood had turned into shards of glass. I cried in meditation, driving, walking, sometimes sobbing like an animal, with no concern for who might hear me. And yet, something extraordinary began to happen.

You started appearing in the most unexpected places. A stranger would say something that sounded exactly like you. Someone would finish a sentence in a way only you would have. Conversations unfolded that seemed impossible to explain. Slowly, you began revealing something of yourself that I had been unable to recognize when I was sitting beside you every day. You were teaching me to find you within.

Years later, I stood in a hospital room watching the line on a monitor as it slowly began to flatten. The hills became smaller, the spaces between them longer, and time seemed to pass so terribly slowly. I watched that line as though my entire existence depended upon it, until suddenly it lay completely flat. Someone said, "That's it," and someone else announced the time. It all seemed so mechanical, so terribly ordinary, until silence filled the room and the reality of what had happened began to reach us. You had left your body.

Even now, I can almost hear you saying, "Kelly, don't tell them about the line. Tell them how you hopped over it looking for me." You would want me to speak of resurrection, of the everlasting life you had spent so many years teaching us about, of the truth that the Master never dies. But I have to tell you about the line, because I was there, and I loved you, and for a long time I could scarcely bear what it meant.

I went to California, three thousand miles away, hoping somehow to recover myself. Instead, I became a wild thing. I wandered among the redwoods, drove for hours along the Pacific Ocean, walked the beaches with bloodshot eyes and uncombed hair, and lost myself among the trees. I was hollow with missing you. Several of your dearest initiates kept me connected to the world, offering me a safe place to return to and coming to check on me. I could work, and I could function when necessary, but much of me was somewhere else, searching for you.

It took years to begin to understand what you had been showing me all along. Everyone must leave the physical Master at some point, whether by circumstance, by her own hand, or through the death of the body. Some go willingly. Some must be pushed away. Some return again and again, knocking at the door until she opens it. Eventually, every initiate must find the Master within. That is where this longing leads us, and why the Master never dies.

For many years I have gone to bed at seven in the evening so I could rise in the early morning hours to meditate. I have set countless alarm clocks, although these days I am usually awake before they ring. I have spent weeks on retreat meditating thirteen and a half hours a day, and many other weeks meditating forty hours or more. Kathy, you always told us that quality mattered more than quantity. My thinking was that if I managed enough quantity, surely there would have to be some quality in there somewhere!

I have tried, from the beginning, to keep my vow to meditate every day. There have been many six-month periods when I sat for my full two and a half hours without exception. Every bit of that discipline, every hour, every moment of longing that brought me to meditation, has been given through the Lord's Grace.

Years ago, I read a passage in which a Master asked what else anyone could possibly pray for other than the Lord Himself. From that time forward, I began offering a little prayer every day. Please give me the longing and the yearning. Please take my heart and my mind and show me how to love. Please help me to be kind, and please lead me to You. Of all the things I have prayed for, the longing and the yearning have become the most precious.

There is a kind of longing described by the Sufi mystics that is so intense it seems to turn tears into blood and blood into rubies. I understand something of that language now. Mystical longing cannot be compared to wanting a possession or even desperately wanting another human being. It comes from somewhere beyond the mind. It is the soul crying out for its own source. It is God longing for God.

I remember sitting beside you one day with a dear sister of mine. We weren't getting along very well, and you were speaking about the golden years. I turned to you and asked, "When is that going to happen?" Without hesitating, you said, "Right now." We looked across you at each other in astonishment. Right now? With all this karma between us, all this difficulty, all this struggling?

Over the years, that sister and I have remembered that moment many times. How we wish we could go back there now, sitting on either side of you, safe in your presence. How much of our lives do we spend struggling toward some imagined future when everything will finally be better? We work to improve ourselves, to become more loving, more disciplined, more spiritual. Then years pass, people leave us, and we find ourselves longing to return to an ordinary moment we barely appreciated while we were living it. You knew. The golden years were right then, and perhaps they are right now too.

As we approach the ninth anniversary of your departure and prepare to enter the tenth year, I have been thinking about what you used to teach us about numbers. Nine, the completion of a karmic cycle. Ten, reducing to one, a new beginning. What a beautiful opportunity this might be for all of us.

You used to encourage us to make six-month commitments to meditation, to sit for two and a half hours every single day, regardless of what was happening in our lives. I remember when we had telephone chains and called one another at two-thirty or three in the morning to make sure everyone was awake and meditating. We haven't done anything like that in years.

As the autumn days grow shorter and the mornings darker, what better way could there be to honor you than to make that commitment again? Six months of keeping our vow, of returning our attention within, of giving the Lord the time we promised. We could help one another, encourage one another, and remember that none of us is making this journey alone.

And perhaps, as the months pass, we will discover something about the longing itself. Because the longing is a gift. It is what draws us back when the world has distracted us, when our meditation has become dry, when our hearts have grown tired. It is the golden key that opens the door to the kingdom within.

Kathy, you are everywhere now. I see you in the trees, in the ocean, in the kindness of strangers, in the faces of my brothers and sisters. This week, visiting a dear sister who is recovering from a serious injury in a care facility, I learned that the woman beside her was named Kathy. I smiled and went immediately into my Names. There you were again.

I know you are within me, sometimes so strongly that I can scarcely contain the love, sometimes so quietly that I must sit very still to recognize you. I hear you in the words of my brothers and sisters, in laughter, in the wind moving through the trees. And still, I miss you. Perhaps that is the great mystery of holy love. We can know that the Master has never left us and still ache for the sound of her laughter. We can recognize her everywhere and still long to see her face.

You have always loved playing hide-and-seek with me, revealing yourself in the most extraordinary ways and then disappearing behind the veil again. Sometimes you are so close I can almost reach out and touch you, and other times I search for you everywhere, knowing all the while that you have never gone anywhere. Perhaps that is the greatest mystery of this love, that even knowing you are within me, I still long for you. And perhaps I always will, until there is no longer anyone left to search nor anyone left to find.

You told me there are no rules in love. I believe you now.