Encounters

There are a few personal encounters in one’s life that seem fated and are so significant that they transcend time, space, history, place, and a single lifespan. They can happen on any random date–say, 19 December, 9 January, 21 June, 31 October or 26 December–and that date acquires a significance that seems destined and lasts beyond a lifetime.

During my recent stay in Costa Rica, I watched two of my favorite films that play on this theme. One evening, I set up my personal cinema, in my apartment in San José, and watched Der Himmel über Berlin or The Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders: Germany, 1987). In it, the angel Damiel admires Marion, an artistic woman searching for love, and chooses to leave equanimous eternity to become a passionate, sensual mortal, and to love Marion. That’s an encounter between eternity and finite time that chooses finitude, mortality, passion, and love that will end but will fill time with significance. It is also an encounter where two lovers make a decision–a choice–to be together, as they drink from the same cup at a bar. Marion’s red dress is unforgettable–how could Damiel ever want to leave?

Another evening, I poured myself a Danish pilsener and watched Café de Flore (Québec: Jean-Marc Vallée, 2011). Early in the film, there is one of the hottest, most erotic, albeit brief, scenes I have watched in cinema: Antoine and Rose make love, with all the passion of the budding relationship; she has a strikingly beautiful tattoo of a vine that grows along the side of her body. Who are Antoine and Rose? What is their relationship to Carole? How did this trio cross paths? And what is their relationship to Laurent, Veronique, and Jacqueline? The intersecting lives of these two trios thread a story of souls that are intertwined and enmeshed, sometimes in tragic ways. They are knotted with each other across time. Is there a way out of the knot? The film tells one beautiful story, gives one interesting view, on this issue.

I am thinking of these matters and these films because of my meditative reading, this morning, of Richard Wagamese’s Embers. It rained all night, into the early morning, in New York City, and I awoke in a reflective and tranquil mood. As I drank my first cup of café, I read this passage:

Time is an ocean, present and eternal. We are adrift on that ocean of possibility, you and I, and the miracle is that we find each other at all. Maybe it’s age that keeps me scanning the horizon, looking for you, waving, bobbing in that sustaining current, because I want to hold eternal moments closer now. We move through time and space separately, and the mystery of our meeting is time’s gift to us. Swim with me now. We have no other chance.

I share with Wagamese the appreciation, the deep valuing, of genuine encounter–of an eternal moment experienced by two people in the ocean of life, a moment that becomes an invitation to swim together, now and onward. Such an encounter is extremely rare–so much so, that its probability across space and time is nearly null. When it comes, one must be ready to recognize it, to cherish and nourish it, eroagapically. I don’t agree, however, that we “move through time and space separately.” We move together, related, interconnected, though mysteriously and, often, unconsciously. The difficulty is for that joint movement to be free, deliberate, chosen once and again, rather than obligated, forced, routine, accepted as a deadly fate rather than a enthralling destiny.

May we be awake to recognize genuine encounter and wisely passionate to enjoy it.