A Face toward One We Love

What does it mean to grow close to someone in a healthy way? Is it a merging of souls, a fusing of identities? Do we not instead grow closer, perhaps intensely and intimately so, but still remain distinct?

Tackling the question in the sphere of human relationships helps me make sense of what it means to grow into intimacy with God.

Here’s what I mean: Growing up in a family that loved me and kept me close (sometimes too close), my maturing hinged on my growing into my own person. It’s the same with romance, with the closeness I would find with my wife. I’m struck by a love letter penned by philosopher Martin Heidegger to his beloved Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp?” He gives his own answer: “Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”

The idea of being swept away, yet remaining ourselves, is what strikes me. I think it’s true in how we relate to God. Because human intimacy never means that we forfeit our individuality, I question some spiritualities that argue that our goal is to lose our very self in the Divine Other, a merging into the infinite vastness of the universe, a droplet of water joining an ocean to become an indistinguishable part of the whole. While we long for closeness with God, to speak of union with God sometimes seems to suggest a loss of identity, a submerging of self and unique humanness, not a meeting with Another. Rather than union or absorption, a better image is that of relation—relating.

This is one reason I remember the biblical imagery that speaks of the face of God, and the attendant suggestion that we seek his face. The Hebrew Scriptures describe Moses as nothing less than speaking to God face-to-face. What an intimate portrait! But the very mention of a face before a face says that we still retain something of our own self. And so we speak of living in the presence of God, and the presence of God living in us. But it’s encountering, not obliterating.

In a photo from decades ago I came across recently, sorting boxes in the attic, I’m lying in our yard in rural Virginia, my back on the grass, holding high up, as far as my arms can reach, then-two-year-old Abram, our first-born. We are face to face, delighting in our play, some of his spittle, I suspect, dripping down while he laughs. Afternoon sunshine bathes the scene.

Our unself-conscious delight points to some of what it meant for me to be in relation with a vibrant center of kindness and love, and my son relating to me. Our primary language in that scene of play was delight in the presence of another. We were together, yet growing, as we both did, as we both will for all the time we live, into distinct persons, fully close, and yet abundantly ourselves. A part of one another’s lives, and yet apart.

Heidigger, in his letter to his dear Hannah knew this, when he said we remain ourselves. Because of some dimension of us that does not fully merge or fuse, the relationship is all the richer, for, as he concluded, “We want to thank the beloved, but find nothing that suffices. We can only thank with our selves.”