If we were able to take our need and longing for intimacy and split it, like an atom, I believe that what we’d discover beneath it is two distinct yearnings. One for union and another for communion.
Union with another is the experience of becoming one with someone, to (somehow) take a person into ourselves and to experience perfect oneness, peace and an end to our alienation and estrangement.
Communion on the other hand is the experience of beholding and being beheld by someone. In communing with someone we talk with, relate to, enjoy bread with and go on long walks with them.
If the goal of union is to snuff out our isolation by making physical or spiritual contact with someone, communion seeks instead to achieve peace by retaining our distinctiveness.
It's our hope that all of our close relationships provide us with some measure of union and communion and we call friendships and marriages 'good' to the degree that they deliver these things.
Communion
We experience levels of communion as we discover that we share things in common with someone else or when we do things together. As communion increases we become more comfortable in each another's company, we cooperate and we achieve goals together.
The height of communion occurs when we feel so at ease with someone that we forget ourselves and lose any awkward self-consciousness. Instead of second guessing ourselves we simply focus on the other, safe in the awareness that they're simultaneously at peace with us. We'll gladly ‘lose ourselves’ in rapt interest on another person, but only when we discern a reciprocity.
For full communion to be possible both individuals must issue signs of respect and affection to the other and then, as these cues get picked up, each moves further out of themselves and into relationship.
Union
Union with others begins when we discover we’re able to anticipate someone's reaction and even 'know' their mind. Perhaps when we feel safe enough to allow for extended physical contact with someone, we might hold hands or allow our knees to touch when we sit together, or maybe we find we’re not alarmed when our shoulders rest against each other.
I’m not describing romantic attraction but simply the strengthening bond of friendship. Union can also occur when we share a commitment or work as a group. A dance routine is a powerful experience of union as is harmony in music or belonging to a choir or sports team.
Our search for intimacy is a quest to experience personal unions and communions. It's in these moments that our natural feeling of vulnerability comes to an end.
Marriage is perhaps the fullest expression of these twin sides of intimacy that we know. In marriage our lives and names, our hopes and dreams and even, to some extent, our destinies become bound up together. In sexual union our bodies are literally joined together, and full communion is experienced by our mutual vulnerability. Frustration in our intimate relationships occurs when one or both of these expectations go unrequited.
When a husband doesn’t anticipate his wife’s need for comfort, or misreads the subtext in her communication the wife is hurt. In these moments it isn’t just the 'missing of each other' that hurts it's that the distance between them has become apparent. Their lack of complete union and communion has become apparent and sadness (often expressed as irritation or frustration) is the result.
When a wife doesn’t share her husband’s desire to have sex, or rebuffs his advances, it's a similar grief. Why are we not aligned? Why do we desire different things? What is wrong with us as a couple? I thought we were one, but apparently we’re not!
Song of Songs
At the heart of the book of all books is the song of all songs. A song that celebrates human intimacy and explores the twin expressions that are union and communion.
Recently I found myself moved to tears as I read this song aloud and aimed to inhabit its spiritual meaning. For years (owing to the early influence of a notorious North American pastor!) I’d reduced this book to being exclusively about sexual intimacy and the love between a husband and a wife. In doing so I’d thrown out any appreciation for its allegorical and symbolic meaning.
Stef Liston’s book ‘Gender Quality' recalibrated my imaginative tracking and now it's among one of my favourite books in the Bible.
Song of Songs is, stating the obvious, a song and therefore for it to be enjoyed the rules of its genre (poetry and symbol) need to be appreciated. It's a love song about the coming together of a husband and wife and is a text that, for most of church history, has also been read as an allegory of Christ and the church.
Thus as I read recently the husband saying “turn your eyes from me; they overwhelm me.” (6:8) and I dared to believe that Jesus is saying this over his church (which includes me) my floodgates broke. I found myself reaching for the bride's words to voice my own response “I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine” (6:3).
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
(1:2)
Charlie Cleverley writes about the above that “the kiss of God is a metaphor: a picture painting a thousand words. We should not think of kissing Jesus in a sexual way; this is entirely outside the boundaries of God’s will. Rather, think of Christ as the kiss of God to the world. Or think of God’s hand on our heart expanding our capacity to give ourselves to him and receive his love.”
And that’s exactly what God did to me as I read these words and whispered them back to him, he expanded my heart to receive more of his love. I touched union and communion. Christ reaches out in these words beyond the page and into every heart. He desires fellowship and connection, union and communion.
The romance in the song, the longing and the feeling thus swell to its culmination:
“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.” (8:7)
Christ’s passion for his bride, for me as part of his bride, broke over my soul when I read these words. Cleverley writes: “when a person is in this state of soul-resting in their love – of Union and Communion – they don’t want to be lifted out of it or have it interrupted.” He’s right, I didn’t. I still don’t.
Practical difference
In my marriage, I’m the needy one. If we argue it’s usually about my neediness and yet several months have now passed since I read the Song afresh and it's occurred to me that my marriage is better, that we're arguing less and that I'm less needy for my wife's affection. Amy's freer to be herself, to breathe and find her own way of reciprocating intimacy. I put it down to the Song of Songs.
Through the pages of this ancient book Christ’s ability to meet my need for union and communion became real and it’s become my go to read when I flick through scripture in search of God’s presence. I'm not saying that my soul is perfectly at rest, I'm well aware of sin’s allure and its ability to distract me from Love, but I can honestly say that my soul believes again that God is its true husband.
If our quest for intimacy looks like a desire for union and communion, then it is in Christ’s love for us that we can truly hope to find it.
The reason I love Augustine’s Confessions is for much the same reason. He writes as one in love with this Lover. He addresses God as ‘my love’ and ‘my sweetness’ and his opening words still speak truth to my heart - “you have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until it finds its rest in you.”
This is what we need, and this is what we're searching for in food and drink, in sex and in romance, friendship and art. We search for union and communion, we long for it, pine after it and are sick until we alight upon it.
Many of us of course don’t appear to pine for it, many of us have given up the chase and settled for less. We've ‘bedded down’ for the night having dropped our anchor in shallower waters. So often we distract ourselves with games and sports or the gossip of celebrity and the machinations of politics. We concern ourselves with the practical goings on of our daily activities, often refusing to chase after such silly and fanciful ideas as fullness and peace.
Yet it’s there for us who want it and who dare to believe that Christ is true to his word.
Jesus didn’t merely issue an invitation to rest from religious labour, he came to give it to us as well. He came to take us into himself and he came sharing all his Father’s business with us. He came to call us friends and brother and bride.
This is what he offers to us and not only to us as individuals but as a whole, as a church.
Charlie Cleverley puts it beautifully:
We are longing for the presence of the comforter upon the Church, for the banner over the Church to truly be that of Love. Usually the liturgy (whether formal or informal, traditional or free-flowing) moves on swiftly – so that if ever the presence did come, rare are the communities that would recognise it and change their programme accordingly. Instead, we have already moved swiftly on to something else . . . the announcements, perhaps. In times of true revival all this changes. Until such time, may our waiting be genuine, expectant – and may we learn to lean.
Amen. Let's learn to lean and to realise that he is what's creating the shadow of union and communion that we experience in marriage and friendship.