Match to the Flame
Intentional Suffering and the Sacred Heart
Dear Friends,
Today’s meditative essay continues our series, Intentional Suffering and the Sacred Heart. Here are the links, if you wish to refresh on earlier essays.
~ We Live in an Unfinished World
Last week, I ended with a wish for uproars of unexpected laughter, as with the infectious laughter of a child. What today’s essay only begins to intimate, which we will explore soon, is the reverie that sometimes comes through suffering borne with intention.
And so,
with wishes for uproars of unexpected laughter—it’s good medicine, after all—
and with love,
Renée
The Match to the Flame: Intentional Suffering and the Sacred Heart
Your first word was light, and for long you were silent, Rilke cried to God.1 Boehme said of that light that it was Love.2 That out of the murmuring deep dark unto dark, God spiraled through the vortex of infinite Longing, this Longing the eternal Desire to be. And in passing through every already anguish, the fire of Love flared forth through the radiant spark of being. And so, Jesus wept. He wept with sorrow. So, too, did Mary.
This is what is meant by light. It is the radiance imbued in the golden hue of Love, suffered through the agonies of Being, always and everywhere coming into and receding from being in the great Silence at the center of all that is, this Silence the first word of Love. When I hear people say that Jesus was the light of the world, I hear that life is a Love affair suffered with God: God the word that cannot be named; God the essence and nature of being; God the originary and always Presence; God the longing in the human heart; God the whispers of all belonging; God the circle that has no center;3 God the rose red Cardinal be-stilled by the morning sun.
. . .
Your second word was man, and fear began, which grips us still, said Rilke to God.4 You and I speak of love. We like to think we love when that flower of feeling blooms between two people and is too soon forgotten in the human drama. At the ground of this drama is need, namely, how we respond to the recognition of need, vis-à-vis uniquely human expressions of fear.
Need is the poietic impulse within life.5 It is the inner empty that calls life into it—as when the bottom of a sigh draws a long breath to perfuse the body with the world; the emptied heart waits for blood before it drums a beat; as when grace comes at a chiasm—an impasse, a gap that looks both ways and travels neither. To need is to be vulnerable to need not met. Need not met portends the potential of not being. Now we come full circle to the threshold of longing and the eternal desire to be. Need is the inner opening through which divine Love enters and quivers the human heart. It is the suffering burned through longing for, desire to, sorrow of.
By suffering, we are not referring here to struggle. By suffering, we are referring to bearing—being subject to and affected by; experiencing; being acted upon. We struggle when we resist what is and cling to what was or what was wished for projected onto the future. Struggle is a contagion birthed of fear. It exponentiates suffering for ourselves and others. When we speak of conscious or intentional suffering,6 we are referring to bearing the agonies of being with fullness of heart, neither resisting nor clinging, but bearing. When we bear, we become like water.
It is a profound secret of human being that the heart is touched to love by Love through the agonies of being. It is as if the heart penetrated by pain is restored to the inner innocence of an infant whose world is nothing more and nothing less than Love born of need. Intentional suffering is the match to the flame of the Sacred Heart.7
Here, we say we have butterflies in the heart. The physical heart fluttering is the Sacred Heart touched by the primordial Love affair of life. It’s very tender, this mercy of originary Love washing the human heart. And it will kill you.8
It will kill you by intoxicating you with breath so sweet you plead it will end and pray it will not; this tender kiss that comes when it comes and never by entreat but more by pain, by sorrow, by suffering the Love affair that is life in this world always and evermore unfinished. It will come by grace in the darkest moment of the darkest hour. And it will annihilate: it will gladly rob you and me of the false self constructed over time to cover over need.
Each of us turning the heart toward originary Love one by one restores the heart of the world.9 But we resist as naïve the inner dimensions at the depths of being. We speak of the heart as if it is what we return home to after the good fight. We speak of Love as if it is folly. It is. That’s what makes it more potent than we can imagine.
Until we are touched by Love, we are marching through a desert staring at a mirage. Dear Friends, we are being called today to the wellspring of light.
. . .
Rilke said to God, Are you about to speak again? I do not want your third word.10 I was being eaten by God, and I had become my own inner struggle. Mercy came when I could fight no more. It came as a hard call from a close friend who said, You’re wrapped tight around this story, and you need some rest—neither of which I wanted to hear and all the same just what I needed. We ended the call. I lay flat on my back. Let go. Let be. Let come what may. These came like a metronome to carry me into the night.
I woke at half past two, bathed. I was stripped bare, naked heart on my chest, being washed in a sea of tenderness, being breathed, being enfolded into the inner flesh of Silence drinking me into it like a river cobbling stone.
To be eaten by God is to become God by fiat, by letting be. To be eaten by God is to be metabolized as the flesh and folds of the Sacred Heart of Love. To be eaten by God is to enter the labyrinthine entrails of divine becoming by turning the heart toward the inner empty still-point of being, by entering need. Helpless by what we bear, we suffer; we let ourselves be affected by; we submit to mercy, to a knowing not our own, to Love loved through us. This is what is meant by becoming fully human. It is the human heart turning toward Love, toward our divine nature, to the “birth of the Word in the soul.”11
Forthcoming:
Pathless Path Pilgrimage, May 2025
Abbey of our Lady of Guadalupe Pecos, New Mexico May 20–26, 2025
Guided by archival footage of Thomas Berry, inspired by reflections from Teilhard de Chardin, and giving ourselves over to a Universe- and Earth-specific evolutionary context, fragranced with fiat—with “let it be”—this pilgrimage promises to nourish and sustain the heart through these uniquely uncertain times.
Registration closes April 15.
All are welcome. Space is limited. Email Doreen Tanenbaum, Retreat Coordinator, for more information and to register: tanenbaumd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
Gatherings in Silence
We now gather twice monthly on the 1st and 3rd Sundays every month. These gatherings are free and all are welcome. Registration is required. DM or email me to register: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com. 1st Sunday: Half-hour meditation in Silence followed by reflective conversation: noon–1:30 pm ET 3rd Sunday: Half-hour meditation in Silence: noon–12:30 pm ET
Mentoring
I have opened more space in my calendar for one-on-one sessions. This is inner-life inquiry and reflective work at the consciousness level. To inquire, please reply to this email, and we will set a time for a complementary session.
Notes & References
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead, 1996), p. 103.
Jacob Boehme, The High and Deep Searching of the Threefold Life of Man According to the Three Principles, trans. John Sparrow (Gorlitz, 1620). https://www.jacobboehmeonline.com/assets/docs/Threefold_Life_of_Man_print.18693727.pdf
This image comes from Meister Eckhart in Eckhart and Maurice Walshe, The Complete Works of Meister Eckhart (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 2009). There is no better place, perhaps, to begin exploring Meister Eckhart than James Finley’s Meister Ekhart’s Living Wisdom: Indestructible Joy and the Path of Letting Go (Sounds True, 2015).
Rilke, Book of Hours, p. 103
Poiesis comes from Greek –poiēsis, meaning “creation,” or “a making,” from the verb poieîn, “to make.” The English word, poet, is derived from poieîn.
G. I. Gurdjieff spoke of unconscious and conscious or intentional suffering. I cannot claim to be a Gurdjieff devotee. Nor am I in “the work.” But I do subscribe to intentional suffering as described by Gurdjieff. See for example, G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1950), pp. 241–242. Struggle, as we are categorizing it here, would fall in line with Gurdjieff’s unconscious suffering. But I suspect he would not categorize struggle as we are here. Take, for example, this passage:
“To possess the right to the name of ‘man,’ one must be one.
“And to be such, one must first of all, with an indefatigable persistence and an unquenchable impulse of desire, issuing from all the separate independent parts constituting one’s entire common presence, that is to say, with a desire issuing simultaneously from thought, feeling, and organic instinct, work on an all-round knowledge of oneself—at the same time struggling unceasingly with one’s subjective weaknesses—and then afterwards, taking one’s stand upon the results thus obtained by one’s consciousness alone, concerning the defects in one’s established subjectivity as well as the elucidated means for the possibility of combatting them, strive for their eradication without mercy towards oneself” (Beezlebub’s Tales, p. 1209).
If you watch the video below, you will hear Vaughan-Lee refer to the Mystical Heart as distinct from the Spiritual Heart. I am invoking the Sacred Heart as the Mystical Heart borne of intentional suffering. In the Christian tradition, the heart of Jesus and the heart of Mary are often referred to as the “Sacred Heart.”
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Oneness and the Heart of the World,” an absolutely beautiful talk worth watching again and again.
Vaughan-Lee, “Oneness and the Heart of the World”
Rilke, Book of Hours, p. 103
Meister Eckhart, Complete Works.
Dear Renée,
Your writing is exquisite. There’s such luminous depth in your words—they invite me into a kind of meditative attention. I find myself slowing down, allowing something deeper to be felt and known. I actually feel myself inside of your experience, and somehow it takes me deeper into my own.
I’m especially touched by your invitation to let pain open perception. Rather than turning away, your words invite me to soften into it—to trust that the ache itself is the threshold. Your images—both visual and verbal—carry me to those liminal moments where awareness tips from the ordinary into the sacred. I love how the body—my body—is not bypassed but honored as a gateway. Aches, breath, and light become openings into revelation. Even now, in my morning candle and firelight, I am opened and held.
The intimacy of your writing allows me to hear your voice speaking directly to me, and I am no longer suffering alone. I don’t need to fix or explain—I can simply bear, as you are bearing. And in that bearing, there is a holiness of presence. You offer a living, breathing immediacy where I, too, can be vulnerable, raw, unguarded—where my heart can be open, even as it breaks. Your words are touchstones for inner companionship, cozying up to places in me that long to be met.
The way you weave the personal and the universal into a sacred ecology is stunning.
Thank you for showing that vulnerability is not weakness but the gateway to the divine. That need is not lack but opening. And that to be eaten by God is not destruction, but deepest communion.
I carry your words with me as a quiet light, speaking gently from within.
With gratitude and tenderness, Toni
Renée, this meditation is extraordinary. And I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but once again, our spirits are overlapping. I’ve been contemplating “longing” these past few weeks, especially the quality of longing that enlivens and thrums without need for a fulfillment of that longing. Simply, purely, the unselfing of longing.
And here you are, with the most profound insight. “It will kill you by intoxicating you with breath so sweet you plead it will end and pray it will not; this tender kiss that comes when it comes and never by entreat but more by pain, by sorrow, by suffering the Love affair that is life in this world always and evermore unfinished. It will come by grace in the darkest moment of the darkest hour. And it will annihilate: it will gladly rob you and me of the false self constructed over time to cover over need.”
As if to say, need and longing—our most intimate, embodied experience of the heart of the universe.