Finding unconditional love

Sat, May 10, 2008

Years ago, I presided over the wedding of a petite young woman and a man quite a bit older than her. The marriage sailed along just fine; but after a while he was no longer satisfied with her slim figure, so he forced her to get silicone breast implants.

His love for her was conditional love, not unconditional love.

When Jesus commanded us to love others, as well as ourselves, and when he invited us to love him, he is talking about unconditional love.

God's love for us is different than our love for each other. God looks into the depths of the human heart; he looks for compassion, kindness, tenderness, our moral sense.

We do that, too, but imperfectly. We too often hide our hearts from others, or we fail to see into the hearts of those we are close to. We get caught up in their looks, their aura of power, what they are wearing or how much money they have.

We too often put conditions upon our love, whereas God loves us unconditionally. However, God does look for those things in the human heart which enable us to love unconditionally ourselves.

Here is a parable about conditional love whose core idea I am indebted to from a story of Edgar Allen Poe's that I read many years ago, "The Oval Portrait."

Once upon a time an artist married a beautiful young girl. They lived in a castle, and his studio was in one of the towers. After a while, her few imperfections began to bug him. So he decided to paint the perfect portrait of his less-than-perfect bride.

She did not want to sit there day after day, but he forced her. She wanted to be in the sunshine, she wanted to go to the beach and enjoy her friends — but he made her sit there for weeks while he worked on his masterpiece, which he hoped would make him world famous.

As he was painting her, he failed to notice that she was getting paler and paler each day, as if the life-blood were being drained out of her by his conditional love.

Finally, he finished the painting, the last brush stroke was applied, and he stood back to gaze at his masterpiece. He cried out, "The painting is alive. She is alive! She is perfect!"

Then he looked over at his beautiful young bride. She was white as flour and quite dead. He had drained her blood and the life out of her in his quest for perfection on the canvas, not finding perfection in his bride.

The artist's love for his bride was conditional love, not unconditional love. In the eyes of God, he valued the wrong things.

Our culture does not accept imperfections very well because we do not love unconditionally very well. We do not accept our own imperfections, nor those of others. So we go to plastic surgeons, or we spend lavishly on ourselves in the futile attempt to find perfection.

Jesus shows us another way, the way to unconditional love.