"Real intimacy is a sacred experience…[it] is of the soul, and the soul is reserved." – John O'Donohue – from Anam Cara
What does it mean to be truly intimate with another? What happens to you when you open your heart so widely that you find you have exposed your deepest self to another?
Love invites us to take the risks involved in true intimacy. In fact, it is only through this commitment to intimacy that we may know Love.
Intimacy's initiation ceremony can be heart-rending.
We may have taken previous steps toward intimacy and have felt misled. Hurt, we jumped back to what looked like safe ground and have never tried again. In so doing, we have cut off the best Love has to offer.
It is hard. Imagine, as a caregiver, that you approach an intimate experience of sharing with a severly ill patient. You feel the patient opening his soul. With compassion and empathy, you decide to open yours to welcome him.
The depth of the exchange may be unexpected. You see both your own life and your own death in the fading life of your patient. A bond is created. You forget that this patient may be on the precipice.
Then, it happens. Your patient dies. Your open and fragile heart may die a death of its own.
Vulnerability opens a pair of pathways. Along one path lies the deep Love we all seek. We get a glimpse and find ourselves fascinated, enchanted, enraptured.
But the feeling is fleeting. Everyday life yanks us from the poetic back to the prosaic. Where did God's Love go? Have we been abandoned? Did we really touch the hem of ecstasy?
Something within us says that the answer is Yes. Yes, we touched the hem. Yes, we felt unparalleld rapture. Yes, we will seek the sacred once again. We will remain loyal to Love's holy promise.
Along a parallel path to intimacy, we find thorns that rip our heart to shreds. The intimacy we trusted was only a mean mirage.
The patient dies (abandons us). The music we thought was coming from our hearts was nothing more than a trick. The love expressed to us was a bitter betrayal.
Mid-path, we turn back, never again to journey forth. Now, our heart says No.The rapture was fake. No, we will never travel this way again. We have fallen into the land of the cynic.
As caregivers, as children of Love, do we really want to decline Love's Light? In fact, this is what most of us do. It's too hard, painful and risky to plunge all the way into a place where a hard-headed analysis warns that agony may outweigh joy.
What is joy worth to us? We can't know unless we risk everything and then let go. Joy lives in the place of letting go. Joy lives at the heart of intimacy.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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