CHAP III. AT THE LIMITS OF THE BODY. Matter, Faith and Revelation

The strenghts of the weak

Are those of affection.

Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things.

How they know an edge is an edge?

By passionately wanting in not to be.

Anne Carson.

Focus your eyes on the center.

Saint Teresa of Avila. Interior castle.

​ I had never before managed to master this calm that accompanies me today, melancholy is a state one learns to tame as one comes to know who one is. Answering certain questions to see myself from other perspectives: who I am through your eyes, what my will projects, the meaning of my faith, an existence filled with that which I repress whilst I attempt to shatter reality to create new possibilities. The questions that remain unanswered are the cracks in the bridge I must cross: How can I define myself fully and independently? How long will it be before you stop repressing that part of yourself which you recognise in me? My desire to abandon what I know in order to move towards a necessary transformation seems inevitable.

The schism in what I perceive as sacred envelops me in the realm of faith, a depth that invited me to enjoy the fall, when I had to come to my own aid, to be attentive to the horror and the shout of my voice, to let myself die, not once but many times, to abandon all pretence of immediate meaning, to learn to tolerate the absurd and to redefine what I interpret as a lack. In the process, I learnt to sustain the body, renounced words and began an osmosis with the gesture that welcomes and sustains.

Now I also pray when my body offers itself as a mirror, when the other sees themselves in me and I recognise, without shame, their shadow and my own. Desire -when it is not corrupted by projection- can become a key: a form of revelation that demands openness. The bridge between the profane and the sacred becomes blurred when the body burns in full presence. And, in that fire, everything I sought to hide becomes the stuff of creation,

The first time I heard an Adhan was in Morocco. A subtle voice, shot towards the sky like an invisible arrow, I experienced it as a face-to-face encounter with the divine, I felt my density ready to dissolve like an oceanic sensation calling me to break ranks with everything I had blindly believed up to that point, untamed redemption welling up from my chest, like Saint Teresa of Avila glowing in her ecstasy, showing me that the divine clearly also had physical dimensions. I realised that the need for sacred experiences I had felt since childhood was an open wound, a threshold that had waited three decades to be crossed. The rite of collective and public prayer, so distant from my early Catholic upbringing, was the point where my faith found a new form. It was not about religion: it was about surrendering to the mystery that dwells in all living things. I then sought to cultivate this sensitive connection with the world in order to learn to tolerate the void.

What now?

Why now?

And how now?

More than the search for a utopia, it is the need to create new strategies for existing in a time that seems to offer nothing but unease: a subjectivity that does not fit in is perceived as a threat. A present to which I will not submit; nevertheless, I decide to sketch out ideas to connect with my joy amidst the many ways of being in the world today. May the divine return to the material to make it potent, and may this pierce me with all the complexity it inherently holds.

Within this framework, love ceases to be an illusion when it becomes a mirror. It no longer projects: it reveals. And in that revelation, pain and the temptation to flee constantly disarm me. To look at the other without embellishment requires having first held one’s gaze upon one’s own abyss. And to hold that gaze, recognising the irreducible complexity of the other—and of myself—as fertile ground for a real bond. Not even unconditional love has the final say when I accept that everything I love is ultimately free to disobey me.

Today the light flows through me according to its own law, in the stillness of my days, uncovering, like a river returning to life, my rugged inner landscape. I move towards a future where existence is in itself a pure ceremony, without judging either radiance or shadow.