making love to god: part one

Among my various unpublished works is Making Love To God, a potent manuscript that weaves my highly personal experience of Divine Union with a look at contemporary spiritual relationships (including my own). The words carry a frequency that can unlock the hearts of those who are ready for such a path.

In the interest of unfettered sharing and as a deepening of my own truth, I begin today to offer up the manuscript in a series of consecutive blog posts. I trust this material will be received and honored in the Spirit in which it is given. May we all find the courage to strip away anything that separates ourselves from our own Divinity.

Image is “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” by Gianlorenzo Bernini. The marble sculpture (1647-52) stands approximately 11′-6″ tall, in the Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

Making Love To God
by Rachel Snyder

Author’s Note: I have relied on the words God, Goddess, Creation, Divine, Jesus, and Beloved to represent energy that is inherently indefinable. Interpretation lies with the reader.

Introduction

There is a place where love flows freely and can grow to unspeakable heights and depths. It lies just outside the container in which you rest whole and complete, just inside the space where you are open to connect with others.

Love sits so close, yet access is daunting. Your road is cluttered by misplaced signage in confusing language. There are so many turns you can take. But which ones? If the map to Divine Love were simple to follow, extraordinary relationships of limitless joy would unfold before us.

There is a new kind of love present and available to those who are ready. Its very essence is expansive: Infinite love does not ask that two souls contract into one. To receive this gift, you must first know where your own edges stop – and you must have gained that understanding by bumping up against them time and time again until you know without question they can withstand the battering. You must have a crystal-clear grasp of that which is you and you alone – and you must have the strength to hold fast to that hard-won knowledge.

True, unalterable, Divine Love cannot meet in the boundaryless places where individual edges intertwine blurry and unformed. Attraction may occur and chemical reactions may take place there, but the environment cannot support love’s highest expression.

The place where love meets is pure, as a vacuum. Here the beloveds make good the offering of spiritual union. Here the relationship serves as a vessel of transformation, in which worldly concerns are overshadowed by a remarkable love directed by angels and the God they serve.

The journey to this place of true spiritual relationship is an arduous one. Along the way you will rise until you crash headlong against the ceiling of your bliss. And then, in an instant, you will plummet into dark corridors that lie outside your imagination. You may flee, screaming, from the object of your affection, only to find yourself compelled to return to the very arms from which you once sought refuge.

This is love whose reflection may wax and wane, yet like the moon, will rise and set each night in an unending dance. To the mind’s eye, this love will begin in darkness, appear as a mere hint of illumination, crescendo to a ripened and radiant fullness, and return to darkness once more. The pattern never ceases. To the uninitiated, the lovers may appear to disconnect and reconnect without pause. Do they ever rest? we ask ourselves.

Yet beyond the mind and the senses, this love never flickers. Unlike a love between two humans sanctified in the sight of God, this love is a holy triad. it rests on a broad and balanced foundation and carries us to the heavens. In this radical, new form of spiritual marriage, Self, Beloved and the Whole of Creation are joined in a potent and transformative union of earth and sky, spirit and flesh.

* * * * * * *

One

I found myself making love to God at a time when there was no man beside me.

How I arrived there I am still not sure. I know only that for days in a row, when spring was reaching tentatively through the snow, I awoke in darkness, driven from my bed to pour out the most succulent words of love and desire to something I scarcely knew.

Whose words are these? I wondered. Whose cadence? Nothing had prepared me for these outpourings, nor for the tremblings that accompanied me through my days. I knew I had touched something far beyond ordinary existence, yet I could not fathom why, or how, or by whose anointing.

Here were words springing from my own hand. Words suited to ancient poets. Words crafted to be sung in glory from the upper reaches of grand cathedrals or silently intoned in the starkness of the novitiate’s cell.

I do not recall asking for such experience.

I certainly never expected it.

The intricate workings of God, however, are inexplicable. Something in the human heart says I am ready, and one cannot politely decline. Your outward situation makes no difference. You simply go about your daily business and suddenly find yourself lifted up and placed in the arms of a love you never even knew existed. Ready I must have been. Ready to dance an ecstatic dance of spirit and flesh, to adorn myself as befitted a goddess, and steal away for an unplanned liaison with Creation.

To pine for an erotic merging with God is one thing. To feel as though you have consummated the affair is something altogether different. It is a solitary enterprise for which women of the church have been labeled blasphemous and those outside the walls of devotion have been destroyed.

Yet there I was. A second-generation Jew raised in a secular household. A 20th-century woman who had left her marriage the year prior and who lived an unsteady material existence. I had ventured joyously into the world of Spirit many times, yet never had I asked that realm to supply rapture in its most earthly form.

Yet there it was. I was transported out of the mundane by glorious images and magnificent sensation. God was in my heart and on my lips and in my arms, and I fell flush with a heat of unknown origin. Deep inside me, the seed of Divine Love had been planted.

I carried my secret alone, certain the light of day would quash its brilliance and toss me back onto a grey heap of discontent. Yet I had been awakened and could never go back. I yearned to discover in man the same ecstasy I had tasted ever so briefly with God, and when the search appeared fruitless, I fell prey to a lingering disappointment, deeply dissatisfied with the material life that seemed in absolute opposition to everything my heart yearned for so fervently.

In time, I stripped my longing down to something more attainable. Perhaps a man, not a God, would do. Better yet, something in between. . .

(to be continued)