Love and Loss

I'm speaking at a wedding in a couple of days. And I spoke at a funeral a couple of days ago. I can't help but have trouble processing these two events so close to each other. One event was a memorial for an unexpected death that tore apart a marriage of several decades. The other is the celebration of hope for a marriage to last decades. For the marriage I'm reading I Corinthians 13. It's the passage that tells us that love is patient and love is kind, it does not envy and does not boast. But near the end it says this:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. (vs12)

The word for "dimly" is actually the word "enigma." What we see now in the world when it comes to love is just an enigma. A riddle. A difficult question. A conundrum. It's like we are looking at love's reflection through foggy glass, and what we experience is the best we can see.

My difficulty is separating these two events in my mind: the funeral and the wedding. Unless the happy couple to be is as lucky as the old couple in Ovid's Metamorphosis, one of them will have to live without the other for some period of time. (The old couple in the tale was give one wish, and they wished to die at the same time.) Have I been a fool to miss this sad point of love for this long in my life? Or is it better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all?

I think the thing my mind is most drawn to is this longing for love in my life, and maybe a fear of losing it. Lewis did say that he was surprised that grief felt so much like fear. But I have a need to be loved and I have a need to give love. And it's a need. Maybe the answer to the Enigma is God himself. Maybe all the community, and family, and friends, and my wife are all ways that God is revealing my need for Love. And the funeral makes me realize that God himself will eventually have to be the source of love in all of these relationships, as his love replaces someone who is lost from the world, maybe me. Is God enough? Or do I have to outlive the world? I guess that wouldn't work either.