Longfellow

' thou hast taken up your lamp and gone to bed I stay a little longer as one stays to cover up the embers that still burn'

Sorrow comfort pain and loss life's inevitable cocktail Longfellows poem catches them beautifully. How many times have I stayed behind at night gazing at the embers of a dying fire anticipating the warmth comfort and companionship that await me upstairs but trapped like a moth to the light I linger. Death a path back to loved ones departed the road home to a place of peace that our souls long to return to. Love gives us so much when it is alive and vibrant its loss leaves a void of longing. As CS Lewis observed ' that's the deal' but it's a very hard one.

William Faulkner wrote that given the choice between grief and nothing he would choose grief. It's tough sometimes when you have something that you love very much taken from you the inevitable thought arises ' wouldn't I have been better off without it in the first place?'. No love no pain like the hero in L' Etranger better to observe than participate in life's cruel dance. Except that's not the way the world works we still want to rest by the fire rather than head for the stairs. To deny love brings us more pain different but who is to say not as intense or worse? The feeling of things being incomplete of loneliness hell is sharing ourselves with ourselves. Love makes life whole in a way that nothing else can. But is love simply the last bottle of champagne? the one too many a terrible hangover but at least a happy time to look back on.

We try to believe that death is a momentary pause to an inevitable and endless reunion but often a promise is not enough we want our love back here and now. They have vanished like a sunset and we wait for a dawn that we cannot be sure of. But if we could call back the sunset how special would it be? We live in a world based on all things being perishable we strive to live as if we will never die to rail against the ' dying of the light' yet we know life's charade has but one ending.

The bible seems to me to be as much about what God finds necessary as against what man believes he needs. God needs us to love him and he has constructed a world that reflects this truth an existence where he are only complete in him. God has fashioned things so that we need to love him in the way that every father looks towards the love of their children and isn't that what's needed to make the circle of love complete? I can envisage a world built otherwise but not one constructed by a God of love ' in the very temple of delight , veil'd melancholy has her so ran shrine'.