How Can You Miss What You Already Have?
April 22, 2009
My beloved wife, best friend, and co-conspirator in mischief is at home in California while I’m in Oregon for a few days visiting my mom. I make this trip every six weeks or so and while I’m never gone for more than a few days at a time I start missing D before I’ve even pulled the car out of our driveway to catch my flight north, and with every passing day I become a little more like a pathetic sad-eyed puppy waiting in the pouring rain for his human to come home. My ears droop and my tail stopped wagging. I miss her so much I hurt. I whine incessantly. I get a purple rash on my forehead and my elbows go numb. Okay. I’m exaggerating. It’s not that bad.
Yet.
But it could happen.
So why do I miss her so much?
I miss her because I love her and she loves me. Love connects us. We’re not enmeshed in some co-dependent, pathological way but we’re knit and bound together in love, and so our spirits hunger to be in the presence of the other when distance and time separates us.
I miss her because I love being with her. Every activity is more fun, every place is more beautiful when she’s with me. When she goes with me on routine errands they become something I enjoy doing rather than something I endure doing. She provides me with laughter, comfort, and a sense of knowing someone is loving and cherishing me right there in the middle of the day.
I miss her because she’s such an incredible human being. D is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. That’s not romantically-induced hyperbole. It’s absolutely true. She’s like the perfect sunset falling behind the horizon, a front row seat at a James Taylor concert, the smell of a newborn baby fresh from the bath with a dusting of baby powder. I’d be a bone-head to not want to be in the presence of such beauty and a chucklehead to not miss it when it was gone, but as Stephanie recently said, “I’m a smart little whip.”
I miss her because I’m my best self when I’m with her. On our wedding day in 2002 our officiating pastor said, “D, Anita believes she’s become a better person because of you, and we as a church all agree.” And yes, the congregation laughed, not because it wasn’t true but because of just how true it was and continues to be. Being with D has changed me. Love will do that. When you know beyond question that you’re loved you can risk dropping your defenses. When you love someone with everything in you and desire to bring happiness to their life you want to live into your better self.
One of the great riches, the icing on the cake, the cherry on the top, insert metaphor of your choice here, of being in a loving human relationship is that there are treasured moments when glimpses of the divine-human relationship break through. Loving and being loved by D, enjoying the beauty of her presence, and striving to be a better Anita with her than when I’m without her are all what I cherish so deeply in my relationship with my God. I love sharing in an intimate relationship with God that just we two share, of basking in God’s presence, taking in God’s beauty, and desiring to live into the person God calls to me to be if for no other reason than for God’s good pleasure.
And oh, there are those agonizing times when I miss God so much my insides ache. I long more for God in those moments than I’ve ever longed for another soul and yes, even more than I’ve ever longed for my beloved when distance and time are between us. You see, my missing ache for God, that despairing longing for God to come near and nearer still doesn’t come to me when God seems far away but in those sacred moments when God seems the most close to me. Those are the times when I understand and feel the words of the Psalmist reverberate through my being…“As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God” (42:1).
I know it sounds strange to miss God when God seems the most near but I’ve come to see what perfect sense it makes, for in those times when my soul is most intimately bound up in the heart of God, a cry rises up in my spirit that yearns to break free of this mortal shell that holds the truest me and flee fully into the swell of God’s spirit. I love being flesh and blood. I love this life and this world. I have no interest in leaving it a nano-second earlier than mortality demands. But still, everything in me that’s spirit and soul and heart pants for full union with God. Not in the sweet by and by. Now. Right now. Others have written of it far better than I. Frederick Buechner called it a “longing for home” that will never be fulfilled until we stand face to face with God. Others have called it the furious longing, the unquenchable thirst, the insatiable hunger. When our souls get a taste of God they get greedy for more. When our souls sense God near, they want God nearer. The desire of our soul is to not only be nearer to God but one with God, consumed and taken up in God.
And so we must contend to live with this bittersweet longing for God; bitter that it will remain unfulfilled in this life but all the more sweet because the love of God is so great, God’s goodness so grand, God’s presence so enveloping, that we have such a longing in the first place.
But at least by tomorrow my longing for D will be satisfied when the plane takes me home. My tail is already wagging at the thought.
Posted in Grace Meditations, Storytelling
Sweet Hope Cookies
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
That is just so beautiful, Anita…I so long for the sweet union that you and D share. You two truly are soulmates. Ya know, there’s a Greek legend that tells about a primordial state in which there were three sexes, not two, and each person was two beings together — either male/male, male/female, or female/female. “The reason for the existence of three sexes and for their being of such a nature is that originally the male sprung from the sun and the female from the earth, while the sex which was both male and female came from the moon, which partakes of the nature of both the sun and the earth.” Because of the great strength of these units, Zeus decided to separate each of them, saying “I will cut each of them in two; in this way they will be weaker.”
Aristophanes goes on to describe the results of the operation saying, “Man’s original body having been thus cut in two, each half yearned for the half from which it had been severed. When they met they threw their arms around one another and embraced, in their longing to grow together again… Each of us then, is the mere broken tally of a man, the result of a bisection which has reduced us to a condition like that of a flat fish, and each of us is perpertually in search of his corresponding tally…Women who are halves of a female whole direct their affections towards women and pay little attention to men; Lesbians belong to this category…”
“Whenever [such a woman has] the good fortune to encounter [her] own actual other half, affection and kinship and love combine and inspire in [her] an emotion which is quite overwhelming, and such a pair practically refuse ever to be separated even for a moment. It is people like these who form lifelong partnerships, although they would find if difficulty to say what they hope to gain from one another’s society. No one can suppose that it is mere physical enjoyment which causes the other to take such delight in the company of the other. It is clear that the soul of each has some other longing which it cannot express, but only surmise and obscurely hint at.”
I thought this legend was beautiful when I first heard it…This entry also reminded me of one of my favorite Skillet songs. Skillet’s songs are really neat in that they can either be interpreted as romantic songs (from human-to-human) or divine songs (from human-to-God or God-to-human). This song is called “A Little More”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt9NHPVcFTw
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I so feel these things for my love, my wife. I feel so blessed to have her!
And I am letting the rest you shared soak in. I have often challenged myself with the thought… do I long after my Lord like I do after my earthly loves?
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Amanda –> I enjoyed the song and I LOVED the Greek legend. I’m totally enthralled by Greek mythology and how we humans have spent all of history trying to creatively explain why things are as they are. It’s such fascinating and engaging stuff and I really appreciate you taking the time to add it here.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:18 am
I’m late on reading this.
Just wanted to say this was really sweet. I relate so much with what you have shared, good stuff.