Love’s Hold

Ariadne in Naxos, Evelyn De Morgan, 1877. Public Domain

I cry your mercy—pity—love! Aye, love!

- John Keats

Our steps are tenuous and uncertain on this tilted planet, a pitching deck beneath our feet. Our hearts long to find anchor against its rising tides. They steer toward love as to a safe harbor. No matter that every love will end broken on the reefs or in death, we can’t resist its pull. Our hearts seek love, to borrow a phrase from Job, as sparks fly upward.

We long to be united with another. As Keats puts it in his poem “To Fanny”:

Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all, 
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,

Keats died before he and Fanny Brawne could marry. Fanny wore black for six years in her grief. She later married, and after the death of her husband, she entrusted Keats’ letters to her children. Her mourning and her careful preservation of his letters show just a hint of the devastation losing him caused her. Should we expect to love and not be undone?

The romantic love Keats envisions, that holds fast in every part, is just one type of love we long to keep unbroken. Alexander Maclaren, a pastor of the late 19th century, addresses this longing when he speaks of the certainty of loss in his commentary on Job. Maclaren tells us, “all our dearest ties are knit but for a time, and sure to be snapped. They go, and then after a while we go.” Without flinching he tells us, “God is the sole cause of all.” Maclaren lived to be 84 years old. He no doubt experienced the pain of loss through those years. And what loss he didn’t experience personally, he witnessed in the lives of those he pastored during nearly 60 years of ministry. Job knew that all his losses were from God’s hand: his children, wealth, property, and friendships. Despite that knowledge, deeply distraught, he not only wanted to end his life, he wished he had never been born. Yet, he landed on bedrock that survived the flames. He summarized it succinctly when he said, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.” Then he spoke in his anguish what Maclaren is convinced we can speak in ours, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Job saw his loss draw him near to God and cause him to long more for heaven. Through loss, the Holy Spirit moves us to cling to God.

When we hold fast to God in our sorrow, Maclaren says we gain “a loftier love, a hallowing of all the past.” Our past is hallowed by God’s tender mercy. Christ not only begins to redeem and transfigure regrets, but the shattering of that earthly bond moves us to need and love Him more. God is glorified as He moves through our anguish in these ways.

Like Job’s friends, witnesses to our suffering are refined by our fire. Through God’s work on our behalf, they grow in knowing Him for who He really is, rather than the one we sometimes make Him out to be.

We will experience the severing pain of loss. Maclaren has the steady insight to call it what it is, a blessing that “anticipates the future when we shall know all and bless Him for all.” The Spirit will anchor us through the pain of loss as He anchored Job.

Keats says of love:

One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, 
Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot!

Keats’ vision of a steadfast, perfect love points to God’s love that will fulfill our heart’s longing. It will guide us through this world’s night like a beacon to the abiding love we’ll know in heaven.