Without Seeing You

We ended our class this semester with Jean Luc Marion by drawing a sketch about what love really is, he said that love is “a visible jubilation of invisibles without any visible objects, yet in balance, though the crossing of aims…”

Two weeks ago, I attended a wake mass for my friend’s grandmother. During the wake, my friend and I talked about death, my own thoughts about death. I remembered my loved ones whom no longer with us today. This summer I lost my Lolo due to complications of diabetes, two years ago I lost my beloved cousin due to Lupus, and a dearly beloved, whom I lost a long time ago.

This reason makes it possible for us to no longer see at our beloved but in a way still seeing her, and being with her. Seeing without seeing, it shows how lovers need not see each other face to face. Graham Greene in his novel “The End of the Affair” shows this kind of love, as Sarah Miles said to Maurice Bendrix "love doesn't end. Just because we don’t see each other... people go on loving God, don’t they? All their life with out seeing Him. I believe there is no other kind." As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said “love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction.”

When someone you love dies, what care would you have for all that still is, for all that still exists in Being. As Jean Luc Marion said “what marvel can still be found in the fact that being in general is – when the one you love is no more, and when this itself (the loved one) could not be expressed by the name being? What could be marvelous, wonderful and astounding in the fact that ‘being is in Being’ when the only being that matters is no longer being? When the only meaning is lost forever?”

But I wish to I wish to believe that all is not lost. All cannot be lost, and if we remember what Gabriel Marcel was trying to show us that when we say to a person that "I love you", it is in a way of saying "you will not die." Na kapag tayo ay nagmamahal, at sinasabi natin sa isang tao na "mininamahal kita" ay para na rin nating sinasabi na "hindi ka kailanman mamamatay" We don't stop loving beacause he/she will die in the end. But we love more all reasons in spite of death that may prevent us, because we decided to believe that love is stronger, and it even triumph over death. Love is more powerful than death itself.

As Marion would put it, “our love is invisible to the world, as Being is invisible to the world. It is indifferent to time and space and it even transcends through time and space. This imperceptible love that is seen and shared by two mortal beings that transcends their finitude and surpasses over death, it passes over to the real invisible real of the infinite, where we both only hope in an infinite and Invisible God who will sustain this love. And this is why we can love in faith and hope: faith in a God who will receive our love, and hope in him that he will not fail us.

What does this loving without seeing our loved one means? To further describe this one, Thornton Wilder in “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” said: but soon we shall die and all memory (of those we love) will have left the earth and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and then forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love, there is a land of living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.