As most of my current job description is driving my children to all the things, I have plenty of time to listen to alternate between praying and listening to music in the car. In this current season, I have been listening to Van Morrison’s greatest hits. When I get to Crazy Love, I inevitably tear up when I hear, “I can hear her heartbeat from a thousand miles.”

At first, I thought this somatic response strange. I certainly enjoy Van Morrison, but tears on cue at a particular phrase?

Then, I began slowly rereading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and found myself with tears pooling at something similar in Sonnet VI:

“…The widest land / Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine / With pulses that beat double. What I do / And what I dream include thee, as the wine / Must taste of its own grapes….”

As I mused on the big emotions that I welled up within me in these two very different pieces of art, I realized that both help explain what union with Christ feels like.

The Mystery of Union with Christ

I remember exactly where I was sitting when the reality of union with Christ first started to sink into my mind and then my soul decades ago—that is how significant this theological reality is to me. After years of trying to imitate Christ, I learned that, through the Spirit, I get to participate in the very life of Christ right now.

While I continue to treasure and explore the glorious reality of union with Christ, I still struggle to comprehend and receive such a soaring offer. How does it work that I am here on this dusty globe and yet simultaneously seated with Christ above (Colossians 3: 1–4). What bearing does that have on my daily duties and the moments of my mundane days? How can I be two places at once? How can he be there, seated at the right hand of the Father, and also hidden up in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of believers on earth at once?

Both Van Morrison and Barrett-Browning’s phrases about two heartbeats in sync even though thousands of miles apart (which were both clearly referring to his experience of human love) help me to get hints of what union with Christ might feel like and mean.

As a mother, I have hints of the solidarity and union resulting from love. Last week, while my son was at a significant and highly competitive track meet in Los Angeles, I felt that twinned heartbeat. A hundred plus miles away from him, my heart pounded with his in nervousness, adrenaline, and anticipation. It felt like I was on the starting line with him. My life is wrapped up with the life of my children: their joys become my joys, their sorrows, my sorrows. To a degree.

As a wife, I have moments of such deep connection with my husband. When he is out of town at a significant event, it is as if we are both attending said event. Love binds us to the beloved in such a way that distance does not diminish our connection or closeness. The stronger the love, the stronger the connection even when we are physically apart.

The Pain of Parting & The Joy of Reunion

Jesus knows the pain of parting and the joy of reunion with the beloved. In the Incarnation, he left the secure, immediate embrace of the Trinity to become a man. He who had known no physical distance and had never felt the strange separation of time stepped into time and space. Though he was deeply attached to the Father throughout his earthly life (Luke 2: 49; Mark 1:35; John 7: 16–19 and 11: 41–42), he longed to be back bodily present with his Father. We hear this longing in the high priestly prayer when Christ says, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (John 17: 4–5).

Jesus’s heart beat as if with that double pulse of love that Browning captures in her sonnet to her future husband.

Maybe more shocking than the double pulse Jesus felt with the Father is the double pulse he felt with his disciples. Jesus felt the pain of departing from his friends. We hear his sorrow amid his resoluteness to return home to the Father:

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14: 1–4).

As his followers who have not seen him, yet love him, we daily feel the distance from him whose presence is our true home (1 Peter 1:8 and 2:11). Yet, in union with Christ, we are invited into that mysterious double pulse that is nearness to God despite distance. Christ has attached himself in covenant love to us. He is with us in our sorrows, in our joys, and in everything in betwixt. He who has numbered both the hairs on our heads and the numbers of our days can hear out heartbeat from a thousand miles. Despite our distance from him, our hearts can beat with the double pulse of devoted love until we are fully and forever united in the New Heavens and the New Earth.