Love, Grief and the Divine Love Embracing Both

Today is the feast day of St. Paul of the Cross.   Fr. Hoehn's homily moved me, particularly the idea (of St. Paul of the Cross) that love and grief are never far apart.  Here is the quote (I think) Fr. Dan read:

Love is a unifying virtue which takes upon itself the torments of its beloved Lord. It is a fire reaching through to the inmost soul. It transforms the lover into the one loved. More deeply, love intermingles with grief, and grief with love, and a certain blending of love and grief occurs. They become so united that we can no longer distinguish love from grief nor grief from love. Thus the loving heart rejoices in its sorrow and exults in its grieving love.

–St. Paul of the Cross, from a letter

As I understand this, love seeks unity and that unity includes all of the other's reality.  Jesus' perfect love for us encompasses our finitude, leading to His compassion, suffering, death, and resurrection.  Our love for others, if it is truly love, similarly includes our beloved's finitude, their (and our) limitations, fears, griefs and tears.  The result is loss, and the grief that loss provokes.  Our loss/grief is meaningful for us only if we place it on the altar of Christ's own offering of His passion to His Father, and its acceptance by the Father, revealed as Christ's resurrection and our redemption. In other words, love's sacrifice and its consequent grief is subsumed and "saved" in Christ's passion and resurrection.

I know that I yearn to enjoy love only as bliss and unity.  But Christ's (and our own) experience shows that love is not just joy and oneness.  Love includes loss and division, the reality of fallen humanity.  To love is to walk with our companion at some time or another in division and grief, as St. Paul of the Cross writes. 

Christ walks this "way of the cross" with me, enfolding my grief in His love.   This is the saving love I yearn for as a limited human creature, a love a mere human cannot give.   Offering my grief out of love into His love "transforms [me] the lover into the one loved," (St. Paul of the Cross).