"Silent Friend ...    How Your Breath   Enlarges All Of Space" (1)    by    Ignatius Feaver O.F.M. Cap. For further info and contact click here

In an earlier paper Ignatius Feaver unfolded the experience of walking with Harold in the initial weeks of having been told that he was HIV+. The experience evoked in him memories of journeying with Peter, a young man who was in the last stages of AIDS.  More recently he has come to realize the richness of memory in light of the Jewish notion of remembering. That is; remembering makes that which you remember, present. The Greek word 'anamnesis' embodies this meaning. It is not just a nostalgic looking back; but the essence of what is remembered is made 'present':

"What was 'changed' in me in the experience of walking with Peter is present in me now; that is, the embrace of 'truth' in one's life or the immersion in the immense suffering of that moment, lives in me now. It enabled me, in the present, to be with Harold in a way that was not an isolated event but rather as a 'moment' in the unfolding drama of human suffering. It is what Metz calls the "memoria passionis"; the insertion through remembering of the waves of human suffering that the post-modern world seeks to avoid." (2)

   A few years ago I had the privilege of journeying with a gay man, Peter, who was dying with AIDS. Up until that time I had had no contact with anyone living with this disease. Peter was an exceptional person; a gifted teacher, talented musician, witty and a man of wisdom, insight and faith. We developed a close friendship of trust and he subsequently invited me to walk with him in the last months of his life. 

   There are several moments in these last months of Peter's life that I would like to speak about. As I reflect back, I am able to articulate the mysterious and profound movements in Peter's life that announces the unique and sacredness of the human person. This sacredness is, as Palamas says; "a participation in divine things".(4)This was something that Peter fully embraced in his life, that initially I was not aware of. As a gay man he had come to see his life as 'blessing'; and the only way he could authentically journey to God. In fact, it is as James Alison would say; the only way he could be a truly moral being. In his book, Faith Beyond Resentment, Alison articulates my experience of Peter in this way:

....for those who feel themselves excluded, or treated as defective, by the reigning social and moral order, it is of incalculable importance  to discover that this feeling of being excluded or defective has nothing to do with God.(5)

   I was not with Peter in the early days when he was diagnosed HIV+. However, reflecting on the Ricouer/Heidegger scheme of movement through the crisis moments of our life, I believe that Peter had embraced the second naiveté. He had come to the level of knowing his suffering not as 'enemy' but in a way that he felt connected to something greater than himself. I believe that Peter had come to an inner freedom. Perhaps something of Mary Ward's "state of verity". In speaking of Mary Ward's understanding of freedom, Cover says it is; "...integral to human beings that real freedom is a return of oneself and one's choices to God."(6)

   There are three very different incidents of my journeying with Peter where I sensed this "return". The first one happened about two months before he died. I had found a poem by Dylan Thomas entitled; "Do Not Go Gently into that Good Night".(7) Thomas had written this poem as a way of dealing with the dying of his father. I decided to bring this poem to Peter and to read it to him. Peter quietly listened as I read the poem, his eyes never leaving me. When I finished reading the poem, feeling somewhat satisfied that I had communicated something quite deep and meaningful to Peter; maybe offering him hope in this moment. Peter, still looking at me, a small smile on the side of his mouth said; "Ignatius, fuck Dylan Thomas! He wrote that poem for the living!". I stared at him seeing a  wide smile came over his face; and in a moment I 'saw' how profoundly self-serving this gesture had been. We both broke into to laughter. What did Peter teach me in that moment? My poem reading was really a denial of his experience. I was missing his dying; and his living in the moment. In fact, it was as Bruggemann (asked) in Prophetic Imagination, could I be there in his suffering, in his struggle, in his 'lament'? In my own denial of the 'truth' of the moment, I was there with this kataphatic sense of trying to 'fix it'; all you have to do Peter is "rage against the dying of the light". The reading of the poem became a metaphor for me of how I remained outside of Peter's experience; and thus I missed the 'darkness' of his suffering and the movement of 'presence ' in his life that was changing him. I think of Metz's recounting of Elie Wiesel's experience of the gas chambers in Auschwitz as they in silence faced the horrors of this immense suffering; and as Wiesel says;

... then, very quietly at first, but finally crying out louder and louder, like madness we began to speak that eternal prayer of the Jews: Shema Israel - "Hear oh Israel, God is our God, God is one" - once, twice, five times ... (8)

   One day, a few weeks before Peter's death he asked if I could visit him. When I arrived I found that there were two other friends there. He said, from his sick bed, "this morning I saw this great recipe on TV and I want to make it for you". You must understand, he was skin and bone and literally had been confined to his bed. Asking us not to help him, he got up and made the recipe and then he served it to us; and retired back to his bed to watch us eat it. I was so overcome by the 'sacredness' of this moment. It was truly and most profoundly a eucharistic moment. I felt immensely connected not only to those I was eating with but most especially to Peter. What made this such a profoundly, sacramental moment? In reflecting back I sense that Peter understood the Jesus of John's gospel; the one who washed feet at that last meal "....you ought also to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should so as I have done for you".(12)  He understood Jesus' message and actions as one of brotherhood, that takes its shape and purpose in service. 

   What happened in Peter's gesture was the visualizing of how deeply he believed in the sacredness of the human person, and how important sharing this with close friends was to him. The entire moment was clothed in an immense love. Although there was no overt religious language used, it was profoundly that. The gesture evoked a strong sense of  'Presence'. The irony of this sacramental moment 'celebrated' by a gay man dying with AIDS was not lost on me. Alison's book, Faith Beyond Resentment, has helped me to find words to express why this was such a profoundly, holy moment for me. Alison's reflection on church as fraternity expresses my experience of this moment. In his outstanding chapter entitled, "Jesus' fraternal relocation of God", Alison says; 

When we talk about discipleship, it is to this sort of fraternal listening and imitating that we are referring. It is through this horizontal discipleship alone that people will come to perceive who God is, and discover God's paternity.(13)

The matter of which Christianity speaks from its core, even today in the continuing process of the Enlightenment and in the widely heralded diffusion of postmodernism - this is, the God of which it speaks - is a fundamental matter on which everyone can join in the conversation and on which therefore everyone must be heard.(14)

The realization of how much I have been bound in by lies. I  don't think that we gay people can accede to truthful talk except by undergoing the utterly disorienting discovery that we have been lied to from the beginning ... we have bought into and been driven by these lies. (15)

... complete discovery that what we had been breathing for years  was in fact not oxygen but some noxious and corrosive gas  that sought our death.(16)

   The final incident for my reflection is the actual dying of Peter. About a week before he died I went to see him and to bring him some chicken soup. He would eat nothing in those final weeks except to try the soup. I was to leave the next day for Vancouver. He spoke about this trip and showed great interest in it. Peter had a wonderful gift of focussing the conversation on the other. As we parted he thanked me for the soup; and I said to him, "Now, I want you to be here when I get back". He smiled and said he would. There was a moment of silence and then he asked if I would do his memorial service that he had prepared. We wept together and then I left. Less than a week after I arrived in Vancouver I received a phone call that Peter was dying and could I come home. I changed my ticket and flew back to Toronto, and went directly to his place. Peter was near death, surrounded by his family and a few close friends. I held his hand and prayed into his ear; he died about twenty minutes later. His nurse said to me later; "I couldn't understand why he was hanging on; he should have died this morning. Now I understand". 

   As I reflect back to that day I ask myself what really happened there? There was something of a 'covenant' here. ... from the feeding him the soup ... to his asking me to do his memorial ... to his saying he would be there when I returned. There was a linking there of a deeper connectedness; the place of mystery. In a sense he had crossed the "great abyss" that Kilcourse speaks of in his article on Merton. Merton says that the abyss, that is, between the finiteness of our corporality and the transcendence of mystery, can only be bridged by response to presence which results in the ethics of relationship.(19) Peter had come to understand in these last months of his life, and in his dying that the sacred image of God emerges in the bonds of friendship; and because of this, it is the only place of true ethical living. 

   In those months of journeying to his death Peter had so embraced his authentic self that mystery surfaced in him; and the paradox was that when he was most unfree physically, his human spirit was most free. In Faith Beyond Resentment Alison reflects on Jesus' releasing of the Gerasene demoniac. Jesus' freeing of the Gerasene is one of insertion; insertion into the very  heart of God's desire; 

... what had been outside the demoniac as one who talked to him is now within him as the heart of the Creator who longs with a passionate and visceral longing for us to be free, and rejoices in nothing so much as our quiet, gentle contamination of each other with the first hints of that longing, translated into the first stutters of a right mind.(20)

   Most assuredly he 'knew' the mystery as his "silent friend" most especially in the "immeasurable darkness". I felt and feel an embarrassment at the memory of my 'immoral' reading of the Dylan poem. The irony is that he did "go gentle into that good night". As unaware as I was of the embracing Presence that was so much a part of those last weeks of his life; of that "breath (that) enlarges all of space", I intuitively felt a sense of the 'holy'. Elizabeth Johnson says it beautifully; 

In a community of companionship in the Spirit that circles the globe today, living saints seek the face of God ... then they pass through the shattering of death into the life-giving hands of God.(22)

Move through transformation, out and in what is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.(23)

In my experience there has been no other group of people where self-sacrificing, unconditional love plays such a prominent role in establishing the mood and atmosphere of life; and I am convinced that wherever this kind of love is present the God in whom I believe is present and active ... .God's love and grace are here manifest precisely where the dominant mentalities in religion and culture would tend to deny God's presence.(24)

... let people come to know you, and to love you, and to challenge you to let go or the pretensions and hypocrisies and fears and cowardice that any of us coming from an organized religious affiliation will have. (25)

   The truth of fraternity speaks to my soul, Maybe it is the Franciscan in me, but I suspect it is much more cosmic. It is about what the Creator has done and is doing through us; and I take comfort from having known someone who moved into that fraternal space before he died. The last verse of Rilke's poem says something of this deep connectedness even in dying: 

   When we move into that place of presence, of imagination and creativity; the place of lament and fraternity there is sense of living in wonder and awe; and most excitedly, surprise! The challenge is to listen deeply for the "I am" that will most assuredly be the voice of 'brother/sister'. 

Alison, James. Faith Beyond Resentment: fragments catholic and gay, New York: Crosssroads Publishing Co., 2001

Black, Peter, "The Broken Wings of Eros: Christian Ethics and the Denial of Desire". Theological Studies 64 (March 2003)

Bruggemann, Walter, Prophetic Imagination second ed., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001

Cover, Jeanne, Love: The Driving Force: Mary Ward's Spirituality and Its Significance for Moral Theology, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997

Doran, Robert S.J., "AIDS Ministry as a Praxis of Hope", found in Jesus Crucified and Risen, ed. Wm. P. Loewe and Vernon J. Gregson, Collegeville: Liturgical Press 1998

Johnson, Elizabeth, C.S.J., "A Community of Holy People in a Sacred World: Re-Thinking the Communion of Saints". New Theology Review 12/2 (May 1999)

Keenan, James F., S.J., "The Open Debate: Moral Theology and the Lives of Gay and Lesbian Persons", Theological Studies, 64 (March 2003)

Kilcourse, George, Jr., "Thomas Merton's Contemplative Struggle: Bridging the Abyss to Find Freedom", CrossCurrents 49 (1999-2000)

Larkin, Philip, ed. The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973

Metz, Johan Baptist, trans and ed. J. Matthew Ashley, A Passion for God: The Mystical Social Dimensions of Christianity, New York: Paulist Press, 1998

New Revised Standard Version Bible, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989 

Palamas, Gregory, ed. John Meyendorff, The Triads, New York: Paulist Press 1983 

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets of Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin Jr., 
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977

Soelle, Dorothee, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistence, Minneapolis: Fortress Press,  2001 
 

1. Rilke, Rainer Maria, The Sonnets of Orpheus (XXIX)
2. Metz, Johan Baptist, Passion for God, 13
3. Romans 14:7
4. Palamas, Gregory. The Triads, 36
5. Alison,James. Faith Beyond Resentment, 18
6. Cover,Jeanne. Love: The Driving Force: Mary Ward's Spirituality and Its Significance for Moral Theology, 123
7. Thomas, Dylan, found in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
8. Metz, 126.
9. Ibid. 119
10. Ibid. 135
11. Doran S.J., Robert. "Aids Ministry as a Praxis for Hope",182
12. John 13:14-15
13. Alison, 59
14. Metz, 111
15. Alison, 137
16. Ibid. 137
17. Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistence, 113
18. Black, Peter. "The Broken Wings of Eros: Christian Ethics and the Denial of Desire", 118-119
19. Kilcourse, George. "Thomas Merton's Contemplative Struggle: Bridging the Abyss to Find Freedom", 94
20. Alison, 143
21. Rilke, XXIX (Sonnets to Orpheus)
22. Johnson,Elizabeth. " A Community of Holy People in a Sacred World: Rethinking The Communion of Saints", 7
23. Rilke
24. Doran, 189
25. Ibid. 187
26. Alison, 80-81
27. Rilke

Brother Ignatius Feaver is presently engaged in the ministry of spiritual direction.  He co-leads a three month internship program for the training of spiritual directors from a Franciscan perspective.  He teaches a similar program in the Spring semester at the Antonianum in Rome.

Comments concerning this article will be forwarded to him by clicking here.

 

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