Of Saints and Other Lovers

I have reached the conviction that love, in its most absolute state, is neither human nor divine; it is the anxious conversation between the two. Saints attempt to get to heaven through renunciation of the world; lovers attempt to get there by fully embracing the world so it collapses into the form of the beloved. Both are ultimately on the quest for annihilation. The saint kneels before God, the lover kneels before another soul trembling for more, but the request is the same: take me entirely; do not leave a speck behind that might recall itself.

As I write to you tonight, I am a person who has failed at being a saint but succeeded at possibly loving too much. There are moments when I devote myself to you, and experience it like liturgy; each breath becomes a psalm, and each silence the incense burnt in your name. And then there are the nights I feel like I am cursed by the same devotion, and I have worshipped a body too fragile for the type of eternal marriage I beg it for.

There are times when I think that perhaps in his infinite boredom, God created love as a terrible joke to see if mortals could even endure with all eternity inside such fragile cages in their chests. Well, here we are, correcting Him wrong and right at the same time. For I have known both revelation and ruin in loving you. I've learned that desire can be prayer, and longing can be a kind of return. 

To put it plainly, I would say, I don't want heaven if you're not in it. What does eternity count for if it gets no breath of your laughter? What does salvation count for, if I can't remember your touch? The saints talk of transcendence, and I talk of immersion. The saints talk about escaping the world, and I want to drown in the scent of a woman until the world has lost importance.

Yet, I acknowledge the dual quality of love, both a gift and a burden. The more I love you, the more I perceive the fragility of life, the absurd paradox of savouring your sublime being, and concurrently know that one day it shall come to an end. The heart, the poor thing, as if aware of life's fragility at a conscious level, continues to choose love; yet, oh, so transcendent.

I have begun to consider love less as a contract and more as a pilgrimage; a ceaseless motion in the absence of actual arrival. I move toward that which I can never possess. Like the saints who walked the desert from shrine to shrine in search of an unseen god, I walk the barren desert of time chasing the oasis of you. Each moment with you is a sip of eternity; each moment away issuing your name with my parched tongue as if it had weight in the absence of air.

There are times when I think about the end of everything, not out of fear, but a kind of deep and aching peace. The stars dissolving back into dark, oceans shrinking back into memory, the saints and the sinners forgetting entirely why they prayed.  And in the stillness of the universe, I imagine one last sound: your name leaving my mouth, but it is not language; it is surrender.  Perhaps that is salvation: to lean so wholly into love that the self no longer gets between lover and beloved, soul and soul.

Do you know what frightens me the most? That this love that feels infinite will one day resolve into a story told by a more tempered version of myself.  That your name, once spinning at the centre of my axis, will dissolve into the shiver of a dying prayer. But even then, if time washed away the last trace of our breath, and the last recollection of our faces disbanded into dust, I still believe the universe will hum quietly with our syncopation. Every atom we ever kissed, every sigh into each ordinary breath will resound in perpetuity.

There is something sacred in our ruin, something divine in our despair. Perhaps all lovers are failed saints, those who saw eternity in another’s eyes, and could never again kneel to an unseen god. And maybe all saints are failed lovers, those who, because they were terrified of the burden of touch, went looking for the idea of love rather than its effects. 

But I no longer want to choose heaven over flesh. I no longer want to be saved. Salvation, to me, is overrated compared to your hand finding mine in the dark. Let the saints have their paradise; I have found mine in the curve of your shoulder, in the mortal warmth of your skin. 
And when the end comes - when stars are burnt out and even the memory of desire is extinguished - I hope the last bittersweet drops of the universe remember us not as lovers, nor saints, but as two souls who, defying silence, whispered one another's names into the void.

What is the nature of love, if not the final act of defiance against a void? What is faithful love if not the strength to hope that which is here and gone is timeless all the same? If it is imperative and necessary that I die, let it happen in your arms, where the barriers of God, self, and love cease to matter and all become unspeakable.

What is saviour, if not the time I first touched your face and could comprehend the meaning of my own existence? And what is condemnation, if not the stretch of time after you are gone?

Oh my beloved—should the universe collapse, or time collapse in upon itself, I would find you there still, not as some recollection, not as some ghost of memory, but for the very reason that existence was ever thought to initiate. For it was not God who taught me devotion, it was you....

Yours,
In worship, ruin, and infinite return