Revelations of Divine Love (of a kind)

I don't really expect many people to be interested in this, but don't really mind.

It was Ms Formerly Aldgate who introduced me, in its anime form, to xxxHolic, the story of Watanuki, the student who sees spirits and wants not to, and Yuuko Ichihara, the ‘transdimensional witch’ who promises to rid him of them if he’ll clean and cook for her. Over the course of many cases in which he assists her in dealing with people with supernatural problems, and encounters with the denizens of Japanese folklore, their relationship deepens. By the time, long after, that Yuuko-San is compelled to leave the ‘shop’ where she grants wishes – and, in doing so, this world – Watanuki knows he’s losing the central element of his life, his lodestone. The latest instalment of xxxHolic, only recently put online in its manga form, has him experiencing his loss of her all over again. It’s very tender.

Fans debate what sort of love it is that Watanuki and Yuuko-San share. Some want it desperately to be a romantic relationship; others insist that it’s more maternal-filial (in the manga, Watanuki has lost his own parents at a young age). The intimidatingly glamorous Yuuko-San does flirt with Watanuki, to his intense embarrassment, but it’s more than that; she does coach him and look out for him as much as he does for her, but it’s more than that as well. Their love has a blush of sexuality and a tint of familial bond, but isn’t defined by either; and it’s more intense than what we usually describe as ‘friendship’. It came to me that it might best be termed a divine love: the love Yuuko-San and Watanuki experience is closest to that between a god and a soul, and part of the peculiar appeal of xxxHolic is its power to make us feel that ache, the awareness of  desire both incommensurable and beyond consummation in this world.

Watanuki finds Yuuko-San enigmatic, gnomic, occasionally infuriating, and impossible to live without: she fills his consciousness and shapes the whole pattern of who he becomes. Without her, he takes over the wishing shop, smokes her pipe, and wears her clothes, waiting for her unattainable return. No relationship with an ordinary human being will ever compare to what he feels for her. In the scene where she departs, he can’t say the word ‘love’, only managing to tell her that she is ‘someone who is important to me’. For her part, we recognise the intense affection she feels for him, but she remains reticent, conscious of the existential distance between them. To be who she wants him to be and knows he can be, she has perpetually to hold something back, withdraw, allow him to find things out for himself. Those of us in love with a god know what this is like; and we may even glimpse elements of this kind of love in some of our relationships, though not necessarily the ones most central to us, which are of different stamps and sorts, as most of us will never encounter a transdimensional witch. 

Probably St Ailred of Rievaulx wrote something about this state of affairs, could I be bothered to read it.