mirrorballs

In each life, a different facet of God’s love becomes visible

I opened a link from my family group chat and cozied up to Whitney Houston’s 1991 rendition of the national anthem. The soft glow of my phone light made everything look smaller than it deserved to be.

Before she even hit the chorus, I felt a lump in my throat. My eyes filled up with tears in a way that felt wildly disproportionate to the fact that I was just sitting there watching a video that technically has existed for decades.

And still, I started to cry.

There is something disarming about watching someone at the height of their aliveness when you know how the story ends. The performance becomes almost fragile. You’re witnessing a moment in history that cannot be retrieved. And what overwhelmed me was the clarity of that loss.

The world had this particular light, this particular arrangement of strength and vulnerability and brilliance, and now it doesn’t.

I feel the same way when I watch Sister Clare Crockett in those grainy retreat videos or I stumble on an old black-and-white clip of Fulton Sheen speaking straight into a camera like he knows I’m on the other side of history. Or when I see Carlo Acutis goofing off and sticking his tongue out.

Watching Elvis Presley sing during his last performance with his voice frayed, body heavier, but still reaching for something like glory. When Michael Jackson moves. When Prince sings. When Kobe Bryant locks into that terrifying focus and monastic intensity. When Tatjana Patitz walks a runway. When Anna Nicole Smith arrives on stage for her iconic appearance at the Billboard Awards, the world witnesses both fragility and an almost unbearable radiance.

Old videos of anyone I love who has passed.

The glory is not theirs by nature. It passes through them. In each life, a different facet of God’s love becomes visible — joy here, brilliance there, longing, discipline, tenderness, radiance. The source is One. The refractions are irrepeatably personal.

If God is not an abstract force but living love, then He isn’t distributing Himself like bulk rice. He’s not vague. He’s not ambient. Love doesn’t hover over the earth like pleasant weather. It goes somewhere. It takes a shape. It borrows a nervous system.

I think about how light works — how it looks invisible until it hits something. A window. A mirror. A mirrorball at a middle school dance. Suddenly, you see color you didn’t know was there. Not because the light changed, but because the surface did.

If God is love, then we are the surfaces. And love doesn’t just pass through us unchanged. It refracts. It bends. It becomes particular.

Through one person, you encounter divine steadiness — the kind that feels like a hand at the small of your back when you’re about to walk into something terrifying. Through another, you encounter mercy so quick and uncalculated it feels almost reckless. Through someone else, you meet a holy stubbornness, a refusal to let beauty die even when it would be easier to surrender. It’s the same source. It just doesn’t look the same.

And this is where I think we get confused. We imagine that if God is infinite, then the experience of Him should feel uniform. Clean. Theologically symmetrical. But that’s not how relationships work. You don’t experience your own mother the same way your sibling does. You don’t experience a city the same way someone who grew up there does. Infinity doesn’t flatten; it multiplies angles.

There are aspects of God’s love I will never know unless I meet them in you.

Not because you are divine in yourself. But because something of God has chosen to come into focus through your configuration — your history, your wounds, your laugh, your way of standing in a doorway. And if that configuration disappears, that particular angle of light disappears from my field of vision too.

It makes life feel less generic and more charged. Every person becomes a kind of theological event in the quiet sense that something eternal is being mediated through very ordinary matter. Through freckles and sarcasm and the way someone always brings snacks to a meeting.

God’s goodness may be infinite, but we encounter it in pieces. In fragments. In textures. In voices that vibrate on high notes. In friends who text at the exact right time. In strangers who hold the door with an attention that feels almost reverent.

And maybe that’s why we ache so deeply when someone is gone. It’s not only that we miss them. It’s that we miss the way God looked through them.

And when they are gone, it isn’t just that their talent stops. It’s that the particular way God’s strength, or tenderness, or beauty, or defiance came into focus through that body and that biography — that is finished in its earthly form. We can replay the footage. We can stream the sermons. We can hang the posters. But the living exchange — the second-person electricity of I-and-you — has altered.

There’s a way we try to soften it. We say, she lives on through the music. Or he lives on through the legacy. And I understand why we say that. We don’t know what to do with the clean finality of a life ending. We want continuity. We want a loophole.

But the song is not the singer. The footage is not the person. The photographs do not look back at you.

Art remains. Influence remains. Memory remains. And those things matter. They are real. But they are not the same as the living configuration of a soul — the specific pattern of consciousness that could turn toward you and say “I.” The particular way someone’s presence altered a room. The way their mind met yours in real time.

There will never be another version. Not because history lacks talent. Not because God runs out of creativity. We are not interchangeable containers of grace. We are configurations. The matter matters — our brains, our nervous systems, our histories — but what makes you you is the particular pattern of loving and remembering and willing that no one else can occupy.

The way hydrogen and oxygen become water in one precise arrangement — that arrangement matters. Rearrange it, and it’s something else. What made that person that person was not a vibe. It was a once-and-never-again pattern of love and memory and will.

Which means that when someone dies, what leaves is not only biological activity. What leaves is a distinct way God’s beauty moved through the world. A certain face of divine love is no longer visible in the same way. That does not diminish God. It alters our access.

That is why the footage makes me cry. I am mourning a revelation. A once-and-never-again expression of divine love mediated through a body that will not walk into a room again while we are still here in ours.

And here is the part that feels both unbearable and magnificent: it is astonishing to be alive at the same time as anyone. To overlap with a singular configuration of being. To have breathed the same air as someone through whom God bent the light in a way you needed.

The grief makes sense. It is proportionate to the uniqueness. The ache is not a failure of faith; it is evidence that something real passed through our world.

They will not be here in the same way again. And while we are still here, we will miss them.

But this also means something almost terrifyingly beautiful: there are ways others are meeting God through you right now that will never occur again once you are gone. Your particular strength. Your particular tenderness. Your strange, luminous defiance. The way you love.

God’s Love arrives as you.

And for a brief, miraculous overlap in history, we get to witness one another refract it.

We are given for a moment. A bounded, embodied, unrepeatable moment. The finitude is not a flaw; it is part of the intensity. And if it were permanent, it would not feel so bright.