Anatomy of a Dress

It seems that a voluntary celibate makes her body into the place where nothing but light is falling and cells are breathing. Her senses experience emptiness and silence as indicators of what is not present in the sense of too present. To the voluntary celibate emptiness and silence are welcome, they travel alongside and await you. Unlike things that you put on for a short time, then leave “behind” in time and place–things that acquire histories based in their tragicallly illuminated surfaces–emptiness and silence are liberations from saddening matter. In Carmel they acquire a shape and a presence that form a reverse prototype of marriage; in Carmel one is wedded to Christ. While there are no loving looks or touches in this situation, there is apparently a freedom and a transparency to being alone. The body becomes an easy channel for the invisible. You may be lonely but are not empty.

One could say that the concealment of certain women in history has been a willed action. In other words, rather than reading silence as repression, you can read it as a means of liberation. Stein herself wrote that “for the accomplishment of great things for the Church, the Lord preferred to choose women who forgot themselves completely: for example, St. Brigid, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Teresa, the mighty reformer at the time of the great apostasy.”

A turning inside out of physical perception is the hope behind voluntary celibacy. What we think of as being a metaphor–a correspondence between the images of the world and the feelings they inspire in us–seems to be reversed for the long-term solitary. Unlike the body of a beloved lover whose arms and legs enfold you, give you joy, then part and depart, the air and your own senses of hearing, seeing, feeling become your companions and spiritual oxygen. They stay with you. The visible world is soon emblematic of the intentions of the invisible. Invisible, as in Amor, comes first…and then there are buildings, walls, streets on which you find yourself walking, objects that rise out of a timeless ahead and seem to have been waiting for you.

Where else, accoding to John, but in the senses (the “illuminated surface”) is the mystic supposed to experience rapture? The Carmelites, who have housed several spectacular poets and mystics, are committed celibates married to Christ. They have a ceremony with bridal dresses and rings. They encourage a relationship between the body’s parts and its perceptions in the reverse order. One is not so much running from object to object as receiving the future, which is empty. The wedding dress marks the start of a period of waiting. William Blake, a solitary who was not celibate, saw himself coming to meet himself.

From “Immanence”, The Wedding Dress, Fanny Howe