If we’re tentative about comparing our yearning prayers for God to our romantic yearning for others, this is because we’re working the metaphor backwards. It isn’t that true communion with God resembles the physical closeness of a lover; it’s that divine communion is so incomprehensibly fulfilling—and so presently out of our grasp—that we must use a variety of earthly experiences to even come close to understanding it. One way of bridging that gap is to evoke the experience of unrequited love.
