Shadows of love

My daughter, who hates endings and separations, has a habit of insisting that "I love you" must be exchanged before any parting. Over time this has developed into a little game: one of us says "I love you" and the other responds, "I love you more!"

But it doesn't stop there: sometimes the first responds, triumphantly, "I love you MOST!" as if love were quantifiable, a contest one might win or lose. For a while that finished the exchange, but then, at some point, she took it one step further, with one last retort that definitively ends the game: "I love you MORE than most!"

At first glance that last statement looks like it trumps the previous one -- a joyful cannonball, a running leap off the diving board of love. But on closer examination it can also be interpreted as a step back from the precipice, a reluctance to go the distance and match the other's exuberant commitment: "that's nice, dear, that you love me so intensely -- um... I guess I love you more than most people do, or more than I love most of the rest of the people I know..." It's a classic approach/avoidance statement, as if, in the dance of love, someone got cold feet.

It seems to me that statement could easily capture what we know to be one of the tragedies of age and experience: the older we get and the more experience we have, the warier we become; the more we hold in reserve -- not just at the relationship level, but with regard to jobs, hobbies, exercise, our spiritual life -- we become less and less capable of whole-hearted commitment. Because we learn, over time, that the things of this life are rarely as good as they might seem to be at first glance; that everything, everyone, every experience is a mix of light and shadow. And that knowledge, in a way, becomes a major component of our own shadow.

Which for some reason takes me back to a song we used to sing in chapel: "In him there is no darkness at all; the night and the day are both alike." I used to think that meant that if I had God, that meant that God's light was so strong it could overpower the dark. But now I am coming to believe that if I am truly at one with the divine, in God as God is in me, that I will come to understand that it's not a matter of light taking away dark but of understanding that "nothing there is that is not God" -- that the dark is as much a part of God as the light, that it's all good.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard says this:

"That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation, It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of non-being, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode."

The beautiful Islamic saint, Rabia, calls us to embrace that imperfection:

"My body is covered with wounds this world made,
but I still longed to kiss Him,
even when God said,
"Could you also kiss the hand
that caused each scar?

For you will not find me until you do."

Ultimately we are called to embrace it all, both the darkness and the light.
Not surprisingly, most of us find it very hard to take that leap.