Our Affective Conversions & Identities – Life’s Late Loves
The formative spirituality of one’s golden years, especially for a life well-lived (by that I mean in a manner that was not nearly perfect but clearly radically goodenough), will have a special set of challenges, I suspect. The ordinary dynamics & sequences of our secular & religious conversions and formative spiritualities will have pretty much run their course.
Concretely, then, after a lifetime’s journeys through one’s intellectual, moral, religious & sociopolitical conversions will have been, for the most part, successfully completed, it’s quite likely that we’ll return full circle to where we began. It’s there that our end of life challenges, as related to letting go, will be ordered toward the completion of tasks that are related to our final affective conversion.
It’s quite likely, then, one will finally grasp in one’s marrow, many of the things the mystics have addressed regarding the rhythms of their lives’ spiritual consolations & desolations. For me, this mostly brings to mind stories told by the great Carmelites, Ignatius & Merton. Others may better relate to whomever.
I would describe the nature of this particular formative experience in terms of one’s total and simultaneous immersion in both purgative & unitive graces, while, illuminatively, it’s a thoroughly lights out experience.
It’s truly a drowning in life’s joyful, glorious & sorrowful mysteries with neither a luminous buoy to existentially float us nor spiritual lighthouse to guide us to shore.
In the near death experience, it would mark what one’s initial tumble into the tunnel might feel like, prior to seeing, moving toward & finally bathing in the ineffable warmth, acceptance, joy, love & peace of the blinding white light.
So, exactly what light has gone out? What Light finally reillumines us?
The answer to the first question also answers the second.
Consider, if you will:
Who are you, Lord my God, and who am I? ~ St Francis
You know me, Master GOD, just as I am. You’ve done all this not because of who I am but because of who you are—out of your very heart!—but you’ve let me in on it.
~ King David in 2 Samuel 7
What if the luminous aspect of the Transfiguration as a mystery of light illumined – not only the identity of Christ, but – our identity in Christ, which we concretely realize in Eucharist? We are all theophanies.
I can really say no more in support of this late-in-life formative spirituality hypothesis without turning to storytelling.
What story might I tell to suggest that the light that can often go out, albeit temporarily, for some of us in our golden years involves a final crisis of identity?
And how might that story reflect my belief that, in the end, the answer to who we are will not be conveyed gnoseologically, by further intellectual & moral conversions, but operatively, by a final affective conversion? by a “late love“?
“And where was I myself, when I was looking for you? You were right in front of me, but I had left myself and couldn’t find me” (2017 5.2)
“I had nowhere to go to escape from myself” (1963 8.7)
“I remained for myself a place of unhappiness, where I could not settle, and from where I could not leave. Toward where could my heart flee my heart? Where could I take flight from myself? Where would I not always follow myself?” (2012, 283)
“I was sick and in torture” (1963, 8.11).
“I tried again and I was very nearly there; I was almost touching it and grasping it, and then I was not there, I was not touching it, I was not grasping it” (1963, 8.11).
‘I tore my hair, beat my forehead, locked my fingers together, clasped my knee…. I gave free rein to my tears” (2011, 133).
“I was frightened…. The pack of this world was a kind of weight upon me” (8.5)
“Nemo est qui non amet: sed quaeritur quid amet. Non ergo admonenur ut non amemus, sed ut eligamus quid amemus,” as “There is nobody who does not love. The only question is what does he love. We are not summoned to not love, but to decide what we love” (2012, 96).
“The woman I’d been accustomed to sleeping with was torn from my side …. My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood” (6.25)
~ St Augustine
By the time our golden years arrive, our lives have been filled with authentic loves & grievous losses. Due to our radical finitude, it may often seem to us that, for all sorts of reasons, we must relinquish some of these loves as our multiform resources dwindle (whether physical, mental, emotional, material, financial, etc). However, that’s neither how our desires nor our loves work. Nor need such relinquishments necessarily change our true identity as lovers & beloveds.
Not even one’s eventual letting go of loved ones, living or deceased, need involve a loss of desire, connectedness & caring. The grief, indeed, may be greater if those persons we’ve had to let go are still living, such as a divorced spouse, physically or emotionally distant children, estranged family or long lost friends.
Consider, though, Gerald May’s beautiful insights:
“The only way to own and claim love as our identity is: to fall in love with love itself, to feel affection for our longing, to value our yearning, treasure our wanting, embrace our incompleteness, be overwhelmed by the beauty of our need.”
“Love is present in any desire … in all feelings of attraction, in all caring and connectedness. It embraces us in precious moments of immediate presence. It is also present when we experience loneliness, loss, grief and rejection. We may say such feelings come from the absence of love, but in fact they are signs of our loving; they express how much we care. We grieve according to how much of ourselves we have already given; we yearn according to how much we would give, if only we could.”
We do, however, have to decide, at any given time or situation in life, which of our life’s loves deserve our greatest loyalty, now, in the present moment, as we trust God with our collective past relationships and entrust our glorious re-unitive future relationships to Him in hope.
There’s an undeniable eternal simultaneity that grounds our identities in love, which means that, without living in fear about losing either our past or future loves, we must live with a fierce loyalty to the loves & beloveds now present before us.
That’s one genuine pathway to the affective conversions most often accutely experienced by those who are furthest down the road of life’s ongoing transformative journey. It will take different forms based on our current vocational milieus. Not only the laity but the monastic & eremitic are called, I believe, to a much greater loyalty to the present, to the now & to whomever, as we gift our affective energies now this way, now that, but only ever now.
This reflects the fruits of my own particular life’s journey of grievous losses & great loves. But, in part, it was inspired by Mari E. Ramler‘s article, Sero Sanctitas: Affective
Conversion(s) as Effective Self-Invention. The citations, above, can be found in her list of references.
For all our drowning in the betwixt of purgative & unitive immersions and in the twilight between our existential darkness & illuminative Light, I have it on great hagiographic testimony and no insignificant personal experience that the light comes back on and the sun will come out tomorrow.
We’ll have all been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
Each generation’s moms & dads
Each daughter & each son
The loves we’ll have known continuing on
The pains we’ll have shared forgotten
With the God we’ll have known from ages hence
In Mary’s womb begotten