Danger!
If you think this is dangerous stuff, please stay away.
:- Doug.
To my good friends–
Intimacy is a fearsome thing. It also gets in the way of making money or watching games on television. Perhaps we need to be reminded of our fear. Perhaps this fear needs to be not ridiculed but increased, made more threatening, so that we see the reality of it and our need. Intimacy is not even primarily sexual—it is spiritual: it is connecting with another without masks and knowing that we are vulnerable and that the other is pointing to our most vulnerable place.
Why do we need intimacy? In order to be who we are. Can we ever be our highest and best unless another sees us as we truly are? Can another see us as we truly are? The paradox is that the other can touch us and hold us in the palm of their heart and know us as we truly are and still find there is more of us to know.
So it turns out that intimacy is irrelevant to our age. We want nothing to do with intimacy. Intimacy scares us to death. It ought to: we have need of dying to the false little people we are and to rise from those ashes as persons, large and real. Be irrelevant. Meet: be intimate. Find out. Be found out.
There is One who can be intimate with us. It takes work and courage to be intimate with this one. It takes opening. It takes daily and minute by minute work. It is here and now, in the body, not in some distant never-world. It is in our meeting and our sweat. Intimacy is available through this One in every one.
What is just beyond this verge? What can intimacy hold? Everything and nothing. Is it not more likely that it holds everything rather than nothing? Are we to fear everything, or is it on the whole good?
Ordinary life is seeing through a veil; when we rip the grey cloth we see colors and they touch us.
Who we are we barely, rarely know: until we rip that grey cloth. Then there is—life!
:- Doug.
