THREE TEMPTATIONS

Apprenticeship to Love: September 17, 2025

• Today’s questions: How are you being tempted? And more importantly: What is this temptation teaching you?
• Today's suggested practice: Feel the temptations in your life, fully, without doing anything to satisfy the thirst.

Rev. Hans Peter Meyer 
(Click on my name and join me in the fairly quiet space that is the Apprenticeship to Love Signal chat group. I’d love to hear about your experiences with this short desire practice.)

TODAY'S MEDITATION 

When I began to write these chapters my reason for writing was deeply personal: I *needed* to better understand what I knew about this thing called love; I needed to better understand the path to whatever it is that I know, the path of apprenticeship. I’ve invited “early readers” to watch me unravel whatever it is I know. I don’t write for your praise or comments. I do write as a way to better serve you, whenever I am blessed with your questions. Primarily, however, I do this because it helps me understand who I am, as a man, in this moment. 

That said, when you, dear readers, offer me words, they are an inspiration. Some of your comments bring me to tears. Your thoughts and commentary are another way into the rich dark underworld of feeling and being that I so often avoid. Thank you for that. 

I recently wrote about the changing seasons and how I experience them. One of you offered this in reply:

I am frustrated and feel lonely - deep into my bones. I miss touch and yearn for human connection.... I wonder how one forms and maintains relationships? Of any sorts ... I remain clueless about it and marvel at how others do it.

I too miss touch, and connection with the beloved.

This morning she leaves, again. She is taking our dog. I cannot stress how much this animal, this “furry angel,” means to me, and to her. So much affection and trust. Another way into the underground of unsayable things that can only be felt to be known. A little bit of heartbreak as these two leave, as I write this morning.

…

I am reading Christine Emba's book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. I see myself in her interviews, just as I see the dear reader who left the comment: vulnerable, wondering, perhaps even desperate for that trust-space that affords me the intimacy I crave —yes, me too, in my very bones. And, as Emba so powerfully describes, for many of us the promise of intimacy that sex seems to offer is almost never redeemed. But still, the temptation is strong.

...

There is a Japanese practice, Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi), which literally translates to "golden repair.” Mending broken pottery with gold. The broken object is transformed in the reparation. It becomes even more beautiful.

A rabbi I enjoy reading, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, references this practice in her writings on repentance and repair. Her words are a balm to this oft-broken heart. Here too, in heartbreak, beauty can be found. 

This is important. The world we’ve conjured with modernity is a world where we've turned ourselves away from heartbreak. We celebrate "no regrets,” even as our hearts ache. We enjoin each other to "move on." To “let go." As if it were possible for a human heart to not know the life- and love-affirming ache of regret, attachment, connection. 

Last night, I was again reading Emba's "provocation." Drawing on Aquinas, as he in turn draws on Aristotle, she says: the lineage is long for these thoughts. She exhumes and breathes life into an ancient idea, that we might truly only "love" when we are "willing the good of the other."

...

Sex is holy communion. I'm not just saying this because I'm now ordained and want to provoke you into thinking about your life and your body and your breath and all of everything, but especially your body, as sacred. I'm saying this because, for most of us, sex may be the closest we come to obliterating our egos and experiencing something larger. Something more.

…

I choose today to be careful —full of care—  with my sexual energy. My lust and taste for the "sugar rush" of my sexuality is real and true. But the ubiquity of the “thirst traps” and the “sugar rushes” in by this culture are as powerful and corrosive as the demand to “move on” and feel “no regret.” 

Reading Emba and Ruttenberg I wonder: Are we, as a culture, and after our season a "liberation," in a season of repentance? The technology of "the pill" has rippled through us. Has ripped through us. What is the consequence of our freedom from reproductive consequence? Are we ready, now, some of us, to acknowledge some responsibility that comes with this freedom from reproductive consequences? Are we, perhaps, ready for some repair? I see signs of it. Emba is a sign. So are the “involuntary celibate” men who feel they are denied the fruits of these freedoms. There is much anger and yearning, and much heartache.

Are we ready for some repair? Perhaps.

...

I was visited by three temptations recently. Mundane temptations, the stuff of everyday life in this culture. Still, I was drawn off my centre in a way that was familiar. 

The first temptation came via a woman I consider to be an important figure in my life. One of the witches who knows about the underground of feeling and desire. One who also yearns to be loved, known, revered. The story she shared was of being tempted herself, and struggling to feel all that is good and beautiful, and not have it swallowed by desire for the “sugar rush” of inconsequential sex. 

I was happy for her, as I listened to her sweet agony. It is a beautiful thing to feel that confusion. To feel those juices flowing, perhaps overflowing, even dripping into the everyday of life. The madness of the yearning! Yes, happy for her. And, breathing with her as she holds herself through the yearning, happy that I could feel-into her longing and confusion and know it, and feel the temptation, but not be swept away by it.

The temptation is powerful. I could let myself be swept along with this flow of sexual yearning. I too want to know that confusion! I too want to know that edge that is about to swallow me and change me and blast me into a moment or two of bliss! If I really want only that flush of feeling, it’s not that hard to find… But, breathing, I listened through her story and the feelings in my body, and only felt glad as I felt that temptation subside.  

...

The second temptation came through the words of a dear friend. I call him my Devil's Advocate. He is always giving me the worst advice, when it comes to love and sex. Because he knows me well, it is advice I am often only too eager to follow. I too want to "move on." I too want to feel "no regrets." I too am ready to make my (too consequential pact with the devil of desire).

In a recent conversation he said to me, this mad marriage you’re imagining is really just a withdrawing from the fray. You love being in relationship. But this, he added, this isn't "real." Why not try something "real." 

By "real" he means something conventional. Something he’s familiar with (though, ironically, not something he’s entirely happy with). I've tried this convention several times. It hasn’t satisfied. Not the woman I’ve loved. Now, not my own knowing and craving for something deeper. 

There are others who challenge my apprenticeship. I see them suffering on the wheel of their misfortunes, repeatedly. They don’t seem to be progressing in their own path to love. They certainly are not happy. At least not beyond the serial moments of the "sugar rush."

I asked this devil, Why would I do something conventional when it is not what I want? Why would I do what so many are doing, what I have done, without any of us finding the treasure we seek? I'm happy, I said. I have found my path, my work. Every day of walking, it proves itself as my way, even when it is a path of heartbreak.

He shrugged. He had no reply. I’m pretty sure he’ll ask me again, at some time, about the futility of this path. To him the love I am experiencing and sharing is foolish. Without the sugar, certainly. And what kind of “love” is that?

...

The third temptation came by way of the one woman who seems able to shudder me to my roots. I don't think she means to undo me. It's just some animal energy. The polarity of who we are as man and woman. I hadn't seen her for years. Then, all of a sudden, seeing her, I was as if hit by lightning.

Who is she? I hardly know. But this spark, this I know. Powerfully. 

So I am careful around her. Careful with her. Careful with myself. 

Like my friend the witch, I am pulled to the edge of confusion and something unknown by this attraction. I know to breathe. To breathe and let myself feel it all, without needing to do anything. I feel my training. In the context of a sexual culture that is always pushing the sugar rush I stand, rooted. I breathe deeper. Deeper into the man I am, the man I love. But I can feel myself tempted into being, again, the man I who is not trustworthy.

…

Today I am ready, I believe, to know these temptations as my teachers. I feel my desire to surrender. But, today, I have the nervous system capacity to stand firm. Nevertheless, because my three temptations visited me within hours of each other, I take note: something is cooking...

Am I done with the search for the sugar rush? Have I transcended my culture? 

No. But I am a little more aware. A little more full of care for myself and those around me. Perhaps, a little more capable of "willing the good of the other," rather than willing the (momentary) pleasure of my self. 

...

Ah yes! I can taste it! To plunge into that fiery and juicy delight, that pool of oh so familiar delights. 

But things are changing. I am changing. More than succumbing I want to stand as I am, in this strange commitment, experiencing new and often troubling facts of love. Why would I give this up? For the familiar ejaculation of feelings, thoughts, sensations that have never been enough? 

...

Again, to the lessons of tango: we lead by following the follow. 

It’s not an easy thing to do: to feel into all of it, to begin to discern the way, with only my body-mind to trust. I feel the temptations. Sometimes severally, as in this past week. But there is a more artful way to be the man I am. There are conversations and ways of being together that I am only discovering as I practice my husbandry of this strange marriage, with this witch, a million miles away, and always alive in my heart.

I lead her, and I lead us, by following the trail she leaves for me.  

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀When our 'higher-self' recognizes our emotional body exists to serve us, we shift our perspective, we approach the full spectrum of emotions, from joy and love to grief and anger as valuable messengers from the depths of our being. (Guru Singh)

🌀We can never undo what we have done. We write history with our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.

You can never unbreak what you have broken.

But with the sincere and deep work of transformation, acts of repentance and repair have the potential to make something new. (Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair)

🌀Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved. (Soren Kierkegaard)

🌀I am beginning to trust the “no expectations.” (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren, my Muse)

SIGNAL CHAT

If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group.