Sing Me a Love Song

Better, strangely, to have loved and lost than to have never risked loving at all. But that’s perceived callously, no matter how true it is, especially to the one still lost to love gone. Love and grief, it seems, have an antagonistic relationship with each other.

Love is about both object and subject. We pine to love and be loved—perhaps the latter more instinctively, but that’s not always the case.

Love, so far as people are concerned, has no better outcome than two people working together. Cooperation and unity are perfectly fitted to obey God in desire and willingness.

Love as a Twosome

The factor of two people in close proximity, each object and subject, creates enormous dynamic pressure on the fuselage of the relationship. Such a flight as love features many things that can go wrong, as are the number of things that potentially augment blessing.

Love as a twosome can be hard work as values diverge and actions taken polarise.

Perhaps the process to, and of, love could be described as a space shuttle adventure. We have already noted the forces implicit on both parties and the relationship as a whole as the shuttle launches. It takes about eight tremulous minutes for the vehicle to reach the safety of orbit. Likewise, love settles when both parties accept the companionate state of love. The only other foreseeable risk when love is in orbit is complacency on either or both parties; the systems on board the spacecraft of love not monitored or cared for.

The highest degree of love as a twosome is that one might say to the other, in the manner of their being together, “Sing me a Love Song”; to which they’d both break into song.

When Love Becomes One

So often in life love ends suddenly, unpredictably, and with much pain.

Times that decree that a twosome is broken down again to oneness are sharp and tantalising. Brutishness has become the nature of life; oneness sees to it that we are now broken in such a way that a demolition and rebuild are the only choices at hand—the soul’s outward identity to be reconstructed. This takes time and the full process of grief; none are saved from this, apart from their denial.

This is God’s will that we would grieve; believe that or not.

We may wonder what kind of God would take the love of our life away from us. The fact is love will not save us. Only God can do that. Love has a purpose—two people, object and subject—toward meaning for life. Otherwise, however, love is not necessary apart from God’s love.

To endure the losing of love seems pointless at the time; but God has a better design. As we lose, wisdom suggests we pray that we might look at this Lord all the more. Faith will show us why.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.