One of the passages in the “Return of the King,” that resonates well with me is when, after returning home and restoring the Shire, Sam hesitates to move in to Bag End with Mr. Frodo because he is finally ready to marry Rose. He says that he feels torn in two. His heart is torn because he loves both of them and he does not want to have to choose between them.
In the last several years of my life I have often felt similarly torn in two. I have been blessed with many deep, loving relationships but several of those friends have moved far away and we have been challenged to maintain our friendship despite the physical distance. Additionally, living six hours away from my beloved nieces and nephews has deepened my sense of wanting to be in two places at once.
I experienced that feeling especially deeply at the beginning of this year. I rang in the New Year with my best family friends, who happen to live thirteen hundred miles away. I loved every moment of being with them, I felt peaceful, at home, known and loved. I had no desire to leave them and yet, in an equally deep way, I did want to return home. For here as well I am loved and known. My heart ached having to leave them but ached in precisely the same way at the thought of remaining too long away from those I love at home.
This sensation of being torn in two, though painful, is in truth a great joy. It is a joy, an honor, and a blessing that comes from an abundance of loving and being loved. In a world filled with loneliness, in which many suffer from isolation and want of real relationship, I am steeped in friendships so rich that my heart overflows. It is painful not be able to go for a walk with some of closest friends, not to hold my sweet goddaughter, not to cheer on my nieces and nephews at their various sporting activities, not to be able to sit and cry and pray with all the women who love me best when I am hurting and in need.
But that pain manifests the reality that I have take seriously the call to love well, and that I have been loved well in return. My heart is scattered but in allowing it to be so I have been brought to the place where sorrow and joy are joined together and together teach me the meaning of love.
Prose for the sake of Poetry 