One day, during our courtship, my wife and I were walking along the shores of Lake Michigan – headed back from a weekend in Chicago. It was a gorgeous fall day – empty beach, but still sunny and warm. And as we walked hand in hand, the lapping waves at our feet, we turned to each other and I said to her for the first, but not the last time, “Honey, you’re my soul mate.”

This is often considered a more powerful comment than simply ‘I love you’ because it implies is a depth of oneness that could only have been achieved after a monumental separation. It is a way of expressing a depth of love based on a reunion, of sorts, in which souls knitted together at one point, separated, but then found one another once again. Paul Tillich famously said that love is the drive toward the unity of the separated – or as the country singer riffs, ‘how can I miss you if you never go away?’

And this aspect of love is an operating theme in this Sunday’s Bible passage from John’s Gospel. In it, Jesus is trying to reassure a skittish and anxious band of followers – that He is leaving, but has gone ahead of them to prepare a place, to send His Spirit, and that their forthcoming separation bodes well for them – as love manifests its greatest power by overcoming its greatest separation.

In other words, when you and I walk in the commandments of God, in word and deed, continuing in our faith that love is at the core of the universe, we stay faithful to this separation knowing that, the estranged strive for reunion, that one day that day will come, our eternal oneness will be fulfilled, and everything we do in love, in the meantime, will only make that blessed reunion sweeter.


Reading
Love, Power and Justice – Paul Tillich
Tattoos on the Heart – Gregory Boyle
How They Did It – Robert Jordan