Reunion

I suppose it is because of some Facebook algorithm that has discerned that I am almost pathologically sentimental, but in my Facebook feed I regularly find videos of emotional reunions.  Most of them are reunions of soldiers returning home unexpectedly to surprise family and friends. The compilations of these reunions are calculated to tug at the heartstrings and draw salty water from the eyes—which they mostly do.

After watching scores of them one sees certain patterns repeating themselves—in particular the pattern of a ritual rush into the loved one’s arms, jumping up and wrapping the legs around the waist of the returning beloved (see image inset above).  It happens mostly with the young: children rushing into parent’s arms and young women leaping into their husband’s or boyfriend’s arms and wrapping their legs around them to be as close as is humanly and anatomically possible to the loved one.  Old people (such as surprised mothers) possibly would like to do the same, but (as I can sadly testify) old people find it hard to jump. Wrapping our legs around the loved one, though a lovely thought, is no longer a safe possibility.  We can shout, cry, and rattle our walkers, but the ritual of running, jumping and leg wrapping is not going to happen.

I would like to focus upon that ritual of leg wrapping.  It is emotionally spontaneous; no sane person would plan to do it. From the Facebook videos (comparative examples may be found here, here, and here) it is clear that the embrace using all four limbs is almost involuntary. It is as if love demands such a physical closeness, a determination to overcome the limits of separate bodies and separating anatomy and become one.  The union of the two people is already an abiding and accomplished fact in their souls, which is what makes the separation by distance so painful and its sudden reappearance at the moment of surprised reunion to be so overwhelming.

This, of course, is why the separation of death is so painful: when a loved one dies, the distance separating the two loved ones becomes (as far as life on earth is concerned) permanent.  The union—one might also say “the fusion”—of the two people remains in the soul, but can never again find expression in the body.  That is why one song writer revealed that he was willing to give up absolutely everything he owned if only he could have the loved one back one more time “just to touch you once again”.  (See here for the song.)

Such timeless sentiments and heartbroken desires are often the stuff of Christian hymnody.  One such song was “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story” and one of its verses went: “He will keep me ‘til the river rolls its waters at my feet.  Then He’ll bear me safely over where the loved ones I will meet.”  The river was of course the river of death and the loved ones were our family members now waiting for us in heaven.

       Okay: it’s cheesy and not tremendously deep and we will not be singing it in tone 6 at Liturgy any time soon.  But it does give classic expression to a staple of what we imagine and hope heaven will be like—not only place of rest and healing where we will meet the Lord, but also a place of reunion with our departed loved ones.

       That is why I think that the spontaneous and almost involuntary explosion of joy expressed in the attempted wrapping of all four limbs around the beloved has theological significance.  It witnesses to something deep in the human heart, the union that love creates in the soul, a union hurt and tested by death, but finally overcome by Christ in the Kingdom.  We find that the videos of reunion draw an emotional response from us because we too find in ourselves a union with those we love; we also experience the pain of separation and loss.  Their experience of reunion is timeless and universal.  Those videos in fact can become images (I almost said “icons”) of the Kingdom and of the joy that awaits us there when the pain of separation from those we loved is finally overcome.

       It is easy to laugh and scoff and write off the whole thing as emotionalism—and perhaps even manipulative emotionalism.  But the pain of separation from our loved ones is real nonetheless and its future healing should not be dismissed with such scoffing.  The Lord has promised to wipe away all the tears from our eyes in the Kingdom (Revelation 7:17, 21:4) and at least some of those tears are the painful tears that come with bereavement, the loss of loved ones. What better way could those tears be wiped away than with a joyful reunion?