Sublime

For John, union with God was about dismantling, disassembling, deconstructing all corporeal and conceptual forms in a passionate pursuit of the Formlessness that lies beyond the realm of the senses and intellect. For Teresa, union was a matter of embracing every particle of inescapable reality as imbued with, dripping with, overflowing with

It’s not as if falling in love with the Divine rescues us from the travails of the human condition. Our partners betray us sometimes, and our dead remain dead. It’s that keeping the heart open, even in hell, makes space for the Beloved. It is in the darkest nights of our souls, when all we know is that we know nothing, that the presence of the

In the terms of devotion, the lover (the soul) and Beloved (the Divine) begin as one. The lover suffers from the illusion of separation, but then lover and Beloved are restored to oneness. The soul’s longing leads to divine union. In the terms of nonduality, the lover and Beloved have never been two; they have always been one and ever shall be. The

many of us are going to mistake the fire of grief or longing for what we cannot have or can no longer have—for problems to be resolved—rather than as evidence of our holy membership in the human condition and an invitation to spiritual transformation.

The fire of our desire melts the boundaries that divide us from our source, and we surge back home. “For the raindrop, joy is entering the river,” says the Sufi poet Ghalib.