When you find yourself separated from your beloved, you find an enormous vacancy in your heart - a place of giving and receiving that is no longer filled.
Loving and being loved, knowing and being known, giving and receiving ... all those expressions of love that are no longer there make you painfully aware of that absence.
I think in a lot of ways, we can experience this as a death of love, or see a need to quiet our hearts or come to accept that emptiness - to settle for an existence without that love, or simply try to save ourselves from experiencing heartbreak by convincing ourselves our hopes or dreams or desires had been set too high.
From a Christian perspective ... this is a load of hooey.
We say that God is love, goodness, beauty. Any desires we have in this life are really an expression of a deeper desire for Him. We seek love - giving and receiving - because we were made by love, with love, for love. We are bearers of God's image, called to love deeply, intimately, with a purity and passionate fire.
Loss of love does not negate the existence of that love. It does not destroy that love. Surprisingly, an experience of longing coincides with an awakening of desire, and we might be tempted to look for substitute loves in a million places as we grasp for anything to plug up that hole - to stop the ache. We need friends and family to step in and support us as we recover ... but we should be careful not to turn them into replacements for what we have lost. They won't complete us either, and they will distract us from what we truly need. At a certain point we need to recognize that even the greatest of loves - whatever we have lost - couldn't in principal satisfy the longings of our hearts.
Longing is painful, a pain that is so tempting to quiet. But it speaks to that deeper reality - that deeper and greater love. We grieve the loss of a river we had come to know and love, one which we drank from and enjoyed and rested by ... and it is right to grieve. Loss is a death that must be experienced.
But it is also a call and an invitation to an ocean that is wider and deeper and fuller. An ocean that pre-existed what was lost; which fed that river; which now summons us to something more. A greater love.
But it's not so easy, my friends. Knowing there is an ocean is not the same thing as diving into it. When our hearts are still tied to your lost beloveds - to the past memories, to the future that cannot be, to a present that looks different from what your heart longs for - we are unable to receive from the fullness of what is on offer. We have to detach through separation and distance and a wandering in the desert.
We can't force that process without doing violence to ourselves. We have to honor with reverence the reality of where we are; our experiences, our longings, the truth of what we currently still want. This painful ordeal of letting go takes time, and above all it takes grace - this is holy work, best done through prayer and tears and honesty. Offering our hearts to God, precisely as our hearts currently exist. Asking that He fill them with Himself. Reconstruct them. Piece them back together. Expand them.
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Speaking for myself - I have a long way to go. I miss my best friend and my beloved terribly, and while I am trying to let go ... as I said, most of the hard work of detaching is done by God, not by us. I'm trying to be patient, giving God a lot of space to operate, and trying to not think of her. And - yes, I'm also grasping at a million things for some quick fix - but I've grieved before, and I know enough to know those things will only be temporary. But I think the biggest work I'm doing right now is in reflecting on all my desires and dreams and delights, asking Jesus to be the one to fulfill them instead.
