Father, I am a Black man who has been dating a white woman for about a year now. Sometimes, I could see myself marrying her—but other times, I worry our cultural differences may be too big for even love to bridge. Am I wrong for discounting her because of her race? Can love really conquer all?

Dearly beloved,

You are wise to be thinking seriously about racial difference. But serious thought doesn’t necessarily mean fatal thought. Nothing is too big for love to bridge because love always already is the bridge. As the first letter of John says with marvelous simplicity, “God [is] love.”

If John is right, then love – as God, God’s self – consummates all. And consummation is sexiest when the lights are low—when we’re feeling our way through a dazzling darkness. When, densely joined to loss with another, we dare to find ourselves in them and them in us.

So, let’s talk love and loss.  

Love is the immortal, invisible forcefield across which all existence is in perpetual transit. Upon love’s back, the things we adore and abhor comingle in a commons of reconciliation—a gathering place in our midst where otherwise reality calls out to us at a molecular level. 

Something in us is attuned to the call; indeed, is the call itself. (We are one with the force that keeps infinite difference in an infinite dance.) But coiled around the Eden of our hearts remain myriad serpents urging us to eat from the tree of the knowledge of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ And wasted on the bitter fruit of ego, fear, and greed, we bury ourselves in pits of certainty where the call of who we are is muted if not mortified.

The myth of Adam and Eve—as an allegory of the human condition—teaches us that we are all subject to deathly distractions. They ate the apple and were consumed by a new found knowledge of their nakedness. This was a nakedness not of the flesh – that’s too literal. This was the “nakedness” of a fortified, readied mind striped down to what could be seen, but not felt. No longer in that invisible flow of the force of all there was, their inner-vision became outwardly obsessed. And now bound by an obsession of sight, a garden once replete with abundance suddenly became a desert where the spirit of scarcity, envy, and ambition bore the murderous rage of Cain for his brother Abel. A story of family and clan; or, as the sub-heading in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible calls it: the “Beginnings of Civilization.” 

‘Race’ is as mythical as Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel. But, like them, there’s something basic about racial ideology that cannot be ignored. Its poison runs through us as though blood. And from this we cannot be free by mere proclamation or positive thinking. In fact, the opposite is true: the antidote to poisonous mythologies like that of racial ideology rests in having known and shared in loss—in being gripped by a tenderness tethered to the inner-vision of that otherwise flow that makes of all things an im/possible union. 

To be honest with you, beloved, your questions forced me to ask my friends James and Hershey – both married to white partners—how they make it work. Their answers were not romantic in the traditional sense. They had all known instability, illness, and loss—whether theirs or that of others. They could feel the ways in which the world lies. And in one another they found someone who could hold truth without escape. They refused to be bound by naked ideology. They found a depth the depth of which no poison could penetrate. They found a road back to Eden where the fact of abundance is waiting to fill the basket of scarcity’s false claim on life. 

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly do not mean to suggest that interracial relationships are the shovel to the head of the serpent. But I do want you to ask if the white woman you are dating can be, for you, with you, the dancer who dazzles in the dark. And I want you to ask yourself the same. 

Do either of you know, in your bones, an original and pervasive loss that exposes the lying ways of the world? And, together, can you hold the immensity of that loss with inner-eyes set on consummation? 

Go in Peace and Paradise, 

Father Paul