We human beings are odd creatures. In Christian anthropology, we are composites of both the heavens and the earth, spirit and clay. Not mere angels enfleshed, but the very image of the Creator made into a creation. How mighty and sublime is our nature! How low and humble we choose to bring ourselves, destroying our own form!

Part of being subject to corruption and decay is that we do not always see things clearly. We tend to interpret the world around us in our own image. Other humans are always a mystery to us. We fill in the gaps with conjecture and misapprehension. From time to time, the speculation is correct. Most often, it is not and leads to expectations that will never be filled.

As painful as this process may be, I have to confess that I cannot help but find it humorous when I see it play out. That tragedy of errors that comes about as two persons come to know a bit about each other and try to fill in the gaps only to construct distorted and misshapen images that are not only not real, but bear little resemblance to reality. As a clever songwriter once wrote, ``there's something awful funny about a lot of sad things.''

The cardinal problem with relationships, then, to separate our perception through a dark glass from our understanding of the other person as a person. Their defects, their corruption, is part of who they are. We cannot overlook this. Yet we cannot focus it alone as if that is all of who they are. Even if people did not have the spark of the divine within their souls and spirits, their material being also has a measure of good. But there is also that spark of the divine.

And as we mature, hopefully we can see that in other people. Olivier Clemént observed this in his discussion of The Roots of Christian Mysticism:

Spiritual progress has no other test in the end, nor any better expression, than our ability to love. It has to be an unselfish love founded on respect, a service, a disinterested affection that does not ask to be paid in return, a `sympathy', indeed an `empathy' that takes us out ourselves enabling us to `feel with' the other person and indeed to `feel in' him or her. It give us the ability to discover in the other person an inward nature as mysterious and deep as our own, but different and willed to be so by God.

Part of this stepping out of ourselves, is the laying down of our misapprehensions and speculations of another person. It is the setting aside of who we want the other to be, who we expect the other to be, and allowing that person to be the person God intended. And then it is to have sympathy (from sym, with, and pathos, suffering, meaning ``to suffer with'') and to experience the other person in a real and mystical fashion.

Admittedly, we Christians believe that in this world, we can only have a taste of this sort of love. For the fullness of the experience of love, we have to wait until the last day when we will be joined ``into the perfect man''. Yet we can catch glimpses. We can not only see shadows of a true love, but we can experience a true love as we are mystical creatures with a spark of the divine within our very being.

And, as for me, I will keep longing for that which I will not have, that which I cannot have in this lifetime. This longing will never cease to hurt. But pain is not inherently a bad thing. So long as I keep my heart pure and so long as I keep my eyes gazing in the right direction, my pain will cleanse me and transform me. It will teach me to suffer with others. It will teach me something about the nature of the Creator in whose image I have been formed out of the mud of the earth.