Losing and Love

     The end of summer has always been bittersweet to me, with all my accumulated memories of last trips to the lake, last ballgames in the morning, and then the early walks to school, with all its small indignities and smaller pleasures, and mainly hours spent daydreaming or doodling or calculating the percentage of the school day left on the clock.  It remains so.  I'm returning to resume my part in the national swindle called higher education.  Some people I loved have retired.  Many are grayer and more stooped.  One, my close friend and mentor, I will not see again in this world.

     My son Davey, who is a high-performing autistic kid, takes these days pretty hard, because they mean returning from a summer in Canada, where we know a lot of people and see them all the time, to the crowded States, where aside from my job and our homeschooling group we don't know anybody.  It's hard for him to make friends -- unless you want to talk about computer systems, his areas of conversation are pretty limited -- and so he feels the loss of people who will talk to him most acutely.  In Canada, those people are mainly old folks, retired, often not in the best of health.  So Davey knows what the rest of us don't want to say openly, that there will come a day, and maybe soon, when we will say goodbye to the old fellow with the yard sale up the road, and that will be that.  The man's wife said as much to me this time, catching me by surprise: "I'll see you next summer," she said, with a sad kind of jest, "if I'm still here next summer."

     It's hard to explain to my son why he should be grateful for the blessing of things we must lose.  All he can think about, for a while anyway, is the loss, no more.  It makes me wonder what our lives would be like if medicine made the ultimate breakthrough, and could prolong our lives indefinitely, barring our stepping on a landmine or being crushed under a backhoe or something.  If the Father had allowed us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, to endure unending and pointless life as sinners, ungrateful, selfish, slack, backbiting, cowardly, easily roused and more easily bored, what would the long years be like?  Is there any wickedness imaginable that we would not pitch ourselves into, if only for the thrill, to ward off the terror of the same, the same, a loveless life under the film of familiarity, forever and ever?

     My favorite old materialist, the poet Lucretius, says that our wickedness is born of the fear of death, and that seems partly right to me.  To use his own example, it may be that a miser hoards up wealth as compensation for his fear, as a vain stay against the inevitable.  But it seems just as accurate to say that, such as we are, we mainly learn to love only those things we can lose.  People pull for the Cubs and the Red Sox not exactly despite their long haplessness, but because of it; they feel protective of them, even as they cuss them out for allowing a pop fly home run, or for leaving a young and exhausted starter in the game one batter too long.  No one, not even a Yankees fan, could love a team that could not lose.  People love the gentleness and vulnerability of children.  Look at your sleeping child -- the smooth chin, the wispy hair -- and your heart can ache; you would give anything, you would cast your own life away, to keep that frail being from loss. 

     Such as we are, we do not love what we have no fear of losing, in some fashion or another, and this applies even to our love of God.  I don't mean that we should lose our confidence in God's saving might, but that if God could make His existence manifest to us all -- not His Being, but the fact of His existence -- it is by no means clear that such proof would cause us to love Him the more ardently.  We might, such as we are, take Him for granted.  We might turn away in ingratitude and self-regard.  Satan knows that God exists, and hates it.

     But loss is a part of God's plan for us here; without it, we would grow hard of heart and would not love those beautiful but mutable things we should love.  With it, we can be moved to love, yet the loss teaches us that the final object of our love, the Selfsame, is not here.  We learn to love, and we learn to give away what we love.  We learn to die, and so learn to live.

     Christians, then, do not seek life interminable, but a different mode of life, what Jesus called life, and that in abundance.  Death is the enemy not simply because it puts an end to things in time, for to be in time is to change.  It is the enemy because it separates us from the fullness of love, for God and one another; and in this sense, if we could lengthen out our selfish lives for a thousand years, we would prolong a living death.  The words of Jesus ring true: he who would save his life must lose it.  We seek not a prolongation of this shadowy and often lonely life, but a new life, one whose permanence is both ancient and ever new, and that will fulfill our hearts, be the end or goal of our beings, because that life is love.  It is in God, and it is God.