I went to the pub on Tuesday with my daughter Esther, known in the family as Eddie. She’s back from university for about 45 seconds before she heads off again for the summer.
Eddie is excellent company. She’s smart. She knows about maths and physics. And she’s at least as argumentative as I am, which makes her a great drinking partner. On Tuesday we fought over politics in the way that only people who really love each other can without resorting to actual violence. It was magic. Now that she’s away, I miss her terribly.
The pain of being separated from those we love is something we all experience at one time or another. Our lives are full of friends, family and lovers we cannot see. Our culture is full of people who couldn’t be together, from Romeo and Juliet to Batman and Rachel Dawes. Our news is laden with images and stories of people parted by accidents of war, economics, geography and timing.
The bible tells a story of two friends, David and Jonathan, who found themselves on opposite sides of a political and military conflict, having to meet in secret and in fear of their lives. It’s a story of sadness and loss, of the memory of love and the tears we weep.
Confusingly (considering it’s the Bible), God isn’t really in the story. Perhaps that’s significant.
The German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew about missing – he was imprisoned and then executed during the Second World War. He wrote about missing in a letter from prison to his friends Renate and Eberhard Bethge on Christmas Eve, 1943. What he said about absence and loss sounds truly bleak, but I reckon it’s worth hearing:
There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. Furthermore, the more beautiful the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms memory into silent joy. We carry what was lovely in the past as a precious gift, a hidden treasure of which we can always be certain.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, letter no.89, p.238 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009)
So when I miss Eddie this summer, I won’t look to God for comfort for once. Instead I’ll remember Tuesday and a hundred other occasions and let them be my silent joy, my precious gift, my hidden treasure, and maybe then I’ll miss her a little less.