God who loves us knows us. We long to be known, not only from the outside but from within. We feel that if others knew us as we really are, with our hopes, dreams and struggles to be whole, they would have a compassionate and tolerant love for us. Conversely, were we to live for an hour within the mind of another, even that of a social outcast, we would come away humbled and more understanding. We cannot know people from within, only from without and with difficulty despite our love. Not so with God. The Spirit of God has been poured out on us. God has made a home in us.
Real love is always difficult, as the German poet Rilke said, because "it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another, it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances." Eventually, love forces us to turn within. In the Symposium, his meditation on love, Plato called love a child of fullness and emptiness, suggesting that there is a kind of desolation built into every love. There comes a moment in the progress of most loves when lovers feel isolated and unfulfilled, because they have discovered that they cannot find real and enduring meaning by reaching outside themselves, clinging to their lover. . . They may see that it is only by daring to open to the silence at the center of themselves that they can begin to feel the presence of the One whom they have been searching for all along.