Only now am I beginning to accept that it has been my destiny to be broken. I was born into an experience of separation and I have spent much of my life trying unsuccessfully to escape that experience of feeling separate. When I was born human, I was fashioned for intimacy, but not in a way I could have imagined. So I began a life of being seduced in a realm where I would always feel the unease and attempt to escape the disquiet of being broken.
For my heart to be open, I see that I must accept its being broken apart. The protective wall of an imagined separate self has to be allowed to be broken. The inner nakedness and exposure has to be not only allowed but be fully embraced and accepted. I have to be willing to surrender to a world that might be hostile or intensely beautiful. As I reach for intimacy with a blooming plant, with savory food, with another person, I must allow myself to experience being progressively and constantly broken.
To accept being broken, I have to accept that I will never achieve what I most desire. It must come to me. I must allow the free fall into the Gap of separation. This is the Gap that exists between my most ardent desires and the most attractive, beckoning objects before me. Once broken open, my heart allows for more than I could ever imagine, even though my heart never quite touches or is joined with the object I most desire.
To feel that I am crossing the bridge to what I most desire, I must abandon all hesitation and security. I must become fully broken with full awareness. Then I begin to realize that the bridge is only an illusion and I am actually plunging into the chasm below. The Gap engulfs me and the bridge dissolves. My broken grasp that once held on to a notion of a separate self, allows for a kind of intimate absorption never really imagined in my quest for intimacy with the world beyond me.
The Gap is where I belong, even while I struggled so much to bridge or escape it. It is my true home. But to get there I must first learn and experience what it means to be broken. I have to abandon any notion of an intact heart and break open to an intimacy that always lies just beyond my reach. I have to abandon all my imagined security of an intact self and be deeply aware how only a divested, naked and broken heart can enter into the deep experience of intimacy. Deep intimacy will be experienced by descending and remaining in the Gap.
I know that I am not alone on this quest for deep abandon and deep union. It is a realm I invite my companions to experience and join me. We can assist one another, gently helping one another to yield to the destiny of brokenness. We settle into the Gap. We serve one another in experiencing a life of being fully human.
What may appear as intimacy is actually an invitation to go deeper, to become absorbed in the Gap of non-union. The experience of non-union is like a step into emptiness. The surrender to what appears as brokenness is only the beginning of something else.
To me it feels like what Harry Potter must have experienced as he accepted his destiny and went to meet Lord Voldemort in the woods. He accepted and entered the Gap, with the help of a few friends. Only then did he become truly free.