Flesh and Spirit

Flesh and SpiritThe Mystery of Intimate RelationshipBy Jack Zimmerman and Jacquelyn McCandlessBramble Books, 1998Reviewed by John D. LawryJournal of Family Life, Vol. 5, No. 4 2000Ever since my divorce in the early 70s, I have been a relationship-book junkie. After all, I failed at marriage as much as my spouse did; maybe I didn't know it all about relationship and marriage in spite of a Ph.D. in psychology. And so I read Creative Divorce and Learning to Love Again by Met Krantzler, Pairing by Richard Bach, The Shared Heart by Barry and Joyce Vissell, Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix, Journey of the Heart by John Welwood, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy by Margo Anand, and yes, even Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray, and a host of other titles that are no longer memorable. Imagine my delight when I discovered Flesh and Spirit: The Mystery of Intimate Relationship. I had just finished reading and reviewing Zimmerman's other recent book, The Way of Council, and received a flyer about the new book from The Ojai Foundation in Southern California where Zimmerman is the director. Having read his other book with great appreciation, I just knew Flesh and Spirit was going to be worthwhile and I was not disappointed. The theme of the book is captured by the cover photograph of "The Lovers," a piece created by Beatrice Wood, the celebrated potter. Zimmerman, educational consultant and councilor, and McCandless, his wife and a board-certified psychiatrist, go a long way in helping us to understand the "force" of sexuality in love and relationship. The authors state at the beginning that this book "is written primarily for committed, spiritually oriented, mature couples," with emphasis on the "spiritually oriented." As they say in the preface, "together we discovered the ancient wisdom that opening the heart allows spirit to inhabit the flesh." It is this emphasis that makes the book so radical and so precious to me. Nowhere have I read such wisdom about what the authors call "sexual communion," which is light years beyond what we call "chemistry"; in fact, it is a "transformation" of chemistry. The book is the interweaving of the authors' personal stories of how two divorced, courageous people came together in their early forties and explored the "mystery of eros" honestly and sometimes painfully, and how they discovered "an unseen (third) presence...who guided, confronted, nurtured, and inspired us to describe the unlimited possibilities of two people loving each other." This "third presence" is defined as "an expanded state of consciousness that is co-created by two partners together with something unconditional and ultimately mysterious that is not of the ordinary world." Who has been in relationship for an extended period of time and not experienced this presence, which the authors liken to a "later-in-life version of birthing a child"? Much of the book is about acknowledging, cultivating and "harvesting" this third presence on