Pop’s Page

I have in front of me as I write two pictures of my beloved, taken about 30 years apart. In the first she is 28, or maybe 29, I’m not sure of the date. She is absolutely gorgeous in this picture, in the red dress she made herself and highlighted by a long string of white pearls. I was totally infatuated with her. I loved to just sit and look at her because she was so beautiful.

In the second, she is still beautiful. In fact I’ve never seen anyone 59 years old who could compare with her. But it’s clear in this picture that she’s no longer 29. Yet this picture captures a new beauty that has grown in her over the 30 intervening years. A certain maturity and peace that passes understanding.

Which Susan do I truly love? In some sense I can’t love both, because even though they are the same woman, they are also different. When she was still alive—just last year—there was no way for me to go back and kiss that 29 year old I see in that picture, or experience the emerging Susan that was to become the mature Susan that I loved even more.

I know that these words seem somewhat paradoxical and perhaps even contradictory. But they get to an element that was raised by C. S. Lewis in his own grief in the quotation I used in yesterday’s posting. Lewis wanted to have back that circle that touched his circle in yesterday’s life. I do too. But yet if you were to ask me a year ago if I would want to be transported back in time to live again with the 29 year old Susan, I would have had to say “no,” if it meant I couldn’t live with the 59 year old Susan. The latter Susan was more of the “real” Susan than the former one. Sanctification is real. I observed it day-by-day in my beloved. And so, in distinction from Lewis—immersed as he was at the time in his grief—it occurs to me that the future glorified (not just sanctified) Susan that I will someday know will likewise be one I would never want to leave. And so the longing that I shouted yesterday, I WANT HER BACK, is tempered by the sure knowledge that the glorified Susan—seen by, yes, the glorified John Dishman (as she would say it)—will be a far, far better thing. And so, I wait for it in hope.