One Flesh Wonderings

[Written early June 2025]

“We never became one flesh,” he said, almost nonchalantly. I keep hearing him say it, these many days later.

I was walking with a spirit-friend who was kind enough to read my book in manuscript form, who wanted to talk with me about it before I left town on holiday. It had dawned on me several months ago that he was a perfect beta-reader, given he knows my paternal family ethos intimately yet is also beyond it, outside it, even as he is now part of it too. The tensions had been large in me about spirit-writing while ensconced in family-of-origin norms quite averse to spirit-writing. His receiving of the book was gift in itself, but hearing its impact upon him, his life, was that and more. Now that I have had a couple days of travel, driving up into the Scottish Highlands, I find myself curious about the impact of this observation on me.

He was speaking of his own life, but I was gifted with something for my own. I know of what he spoke, even as my own covenant of marriage blesses me so. The ancestral lineage in which I walk has a long-wounded history regarding the body, so naturally my soul hitched with a man who has a similar wounded history, if with origins distinct to his story. My newest book traces the path of abandonment and awakening to this wounded-embodied reality. Sensate but numb. Embodied but cognitively-imprisoned. Then awakened to divine desire, even as it blurts and hides in cognitive hamlets most familiar. My book apparently named something this spirit-friend lives with, into, even as it is not usual in largely Westernized cultural environments to speak openly of such things. We did, in covenantal form…he in his covenant, me in mine, me partly holding a covenantal container of having married the two of them well over a decade ago.

What does it mean that my embodied form felt a wave of relief, normalcy, wonder at his confession of celibacy? His wondering of moving toward a vow, for holy purpose? What does it mean to live within the covenant of marriage and feel led toward a vow of celibacy in companionship, embodied Prayer yet irreconcilable difference? 

This is his question more than my own, though it touches on the realities of my own companionship. I am soul-hitched to a man long-wounded in his own physical realities–being unmothered, dissociated in mind/body, knowing relationship only through protection/duty/ obligation–without conscious attention to or intention for healing any of these lineage wounds. He comes to me to ease his sadness, to escape more than connect (my experience, not his words for his awareness or intention). In my own vernacular, he is seeking being-mothered more than the soul-partnership and embodied play that I yearn for. And I unconsciously mothered him for years, which is part of the reason I never wanted children. I mothered my mother, my father, so to be secure as I was growing up. Nothing left in me for that kind of loving. I rarely feel him in intimate spaces, and am often sad and lonely afterward. So I do not pursue physical time with him. We live more celibate than not, making our peace with it in the ways each needs to. “We have never become one flesh” could describe what I experience with this man I yet love wholly, fully.

What if we were never supposed to become one flesh? What if such a thing were never possible, given the ancestral wounds so prevalent? What does one flesh even mean?

My complication here is that I have felt completely vulnerable, wholly seen, deeply received in my body-soul-mind-spirit, by another. A woman with whom I still feel intimately connected even if we rarely see one another today. Companionship with her healed this ancestral-wound part in me, at least as much as can be healed. Chaste, I yet knew energetic union felt deeply in my body somehow. I remember once wondering if I saw Jesus looking back at me, through her eyes, as my body responded fully. I felt Presence, anyway, more than I ever had known in another human being. One flesh, maybe. 

So I have this felt-sense, and I yearn for that sense of interconnectedness with my soul-hitched partner, I have also accepted that such union is unlikely with him. Nor is it perhaps even loving to expect or want from him what he is unable or unwilling to explore in himself. One flesh here becomes the never-ending mountain he needs to climb perceivedly for my sake, not his own. And he sees no need or benefit in climbing the deepening-mountain for his own sake. One flesh becomes this unattainable thing, an ever-present perceived failure he doesn’t know how to know how to want. How is it loving, then, for me to press him where he does not choose for himself to go?

Sadly, I think this is a much more common reality of marriage today than not. Intimacy is not for the faint of heart, says David Schnarch. No one is ready for marriage; marriage makes you ready for marriage. All of which means the soul-work required for passion shared, for the deepest intimacy a human being can know in divine desire, is too risky, too ego-less, cognitively surrendering…for either my soul-partner or me, most days today. 

My challenge is that I’ve known it in my flesh now, even if my soul-hitched partner seemingly has not, nor knows how to know how to want it. Except as Spirit nudges, invites…which is enough for me, for as long as I’m in this embodied form anyway. My own Spirit-invitation is into subtle energy work, Reiki for a day this month. I feel connection with those who are drawn to subtle-energy body learning, and that connection is enough for me, for now.