It's A Question of Agony

Related Post: http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/07/miguel-de-unamunos-agony-of.html

To love something is, in part, to want to know it. It is the desire to truly know the other. To love is also to desire to be known. It is knowing and being known that true spiritual union takes place, and it is for that reason that 'know' has to meanings in the Bible- one intellectual and one sexual/physical. Any created being God creates will be finite, and so will be unable to fully understand Him. Thus God, loving His creation, knows the pain of loving that which cannot really understand you. Those created that love God know the pain of loving that which you cannot really understand.

In the Cross God tells us that we are fully understood, and so our love has one side complete. In that same Cross God fully understands, and so part of His love is made complete. Yet our desire to understand is not fulfilled, and God's desire to be understood is similarly not fulfilled, except in a very limited way. So the Cross stands as a complete fulfillment for one half of the equation for both sides, and only a partial (and a painfully partial) fulfillment of the other side of the equation, for both sides.

Which is the greater pain? This is Miguel De Unamuno's question. Is it worse to not be understood, or to not understand? Probably it is a moot question, as both kinds of incompleteness give birth to agony, according to Unamuno (and I would agree with him). But perhaps what is happening here is the creation of a need. God makes the world so that He needs something and so that something needs Him. We have in ourselves the need for God and the need to be needed by God. This fits well with my own theological axiom, oft-stated here and on Facebook: "sometimes we need God, sometimes God needs us, sometimes we need God to need us, sometimes God needs us to need Him." Wholeness is found when we join together with God. I can't say I am completely okay with this thought, but it is beautiful and worth pondering. Some thoughts are too beautiful not to be true. Is this an example? Something to think about.