People talk about "unconditional love" all the time. It's in nearly every movie and book and song we come across, hitting us like a slap to the face if our own lives are lacking in this so-called "unconditional love" department, and we buy into the idea of it because it sounds so nice and as people we're hardwired for eternity--we want to believe in permanence. In forever. That's why we write, and paint, and compose music, and build skyscrapers--because we're incredibly aware of our own mortality, and as such we yearn to leave behind something that will last. A legacy. OUR legacy.
The greatest legacy? Being loved unconditionally. Knowing that, even if we perish, we live on in another's love...they'll never forget our smile, the way the sun turned our dark eyes golden, that time we cried and cried and they just held us in silence because no words could suffice. It's true, isn't it? I mean, that's why it's called UNCONDITIONAL love. It's independent of everything. Once it's ours it's irrevocable; we can say all the wrong things, put our worst foot forward, wake up in the morning looking like hell frozen over except we somehow look worse--and it doesn't matter. We're loved IN SPITE of everything that's wrong with us. Maybe we're even loved FOR it. We're loved without any merit, without any shiny gold badges, without titles or plaques or first-place ribbons.
It's supposed to last forever. Empires can fall and great civilizations can perish and the apocalypse can hit unexpectedly and turn us all into raging, blood-lusting zombies--but love is still unconditional. It's so strong that even if we all DO morph into the walking dead, love can still pierce our cold, dead hearts; the death of our humanity is not, if we're to believe the recent slew of monster-human love stories that have proliferated as of late (Twilight anyone? How about "Warm Bodies"?)--I repeat, the loss of everything that makes us human is NOT utterly hopeless if we can still feel love. What, after all, can be more "unconditional" than a vampire falling in love with a human whose blood he constantly thirsts for? Isn't love unconditional when it's what a young woman feels toward the zombie who brutally ATE her former boyfriend? Talk about a love that transcends all!
Let's consider the final scene in the film "Titanic" for a moment. A 90-something year old Rose Dawson has just died in her bed, old and wrinkly and WARM (just like Jack predicted as he was dying of hypothermia in the Atlantic Ocean...how romantic...). In the scene that follows, Rose is young and beautiful again and she's in Titanic heaven with the love of her life waiting to welcome her...home at long last. She's finally in that place--that realm or dimension or world or whatever you want to call it--where the full glory of Love can be unleashed, and where those who were lucky enough to experience it once can experience it eternally. This scene epitomizes, perhaps like no other, the idea that unconditional love can be interrupted but never truly thwarted, never fully annihilated. It might change forms; it might require fifty or a hundred years to come to full fruition; it might even mean loving someone else for a season (like Rose loved the father of her children)...until that fateful, inevitable day when you close your eyes and open them again only to find yourself aboard the Titanic, ascending a staircase as a Tuxedo-clad Leonardo DiCaprio extends a gloved hand to you...
Love, then, in its purest, truest, most elemental form, is SUPPOSED to be the thing that saves us, our one-way ticket to a lifetime of bliss. The crazy thing? It's true. Love IS that which redeems us. That which validates us. That which transcends and thereby defeats the biggest marker of our frail humanity: death. In being loved we ARE immortal. The catch? Love at that level, at such a profound, soul-saving depth, cannot be found, cannot be achieved or earned or experienced, in any of our ordinary human interactions. In this respect the movies and books that champion human-monster love have the right idea (though only superficially): the kind of love that can transcend every limitation, including death, requires a supernatural source. It's as black-and-white as that. No human being--not even Leo DiCaprio in his prime--is capable of loving us into a state of eternity because he or she is himself/herself very much vulnerable to, bound and defined by, the garment of our mortality as human beings. How then can one person's love be deemed "unconditional" if his or her very life is SO conditional, contingent upon people and circumstances and mechanisms over which that person ultimately has no control?
The truth is that no one's love is unconditional. Think about it. Think about the love you've freely given and then freely withdrawn when your feelings changed; when you met someone else; when he did what to you was unforgivable or when she said the one thing that could cause your heart to close forever.
I know it's happened to me. I've loved a lot of people in my lifetime, in a lot of different ways--my love has been a steady, warm flame; it's been a volatile and petulant spark; it's been a furnace that sometimes glows hot but that at other times is cold and lackluster because there's nothing to feed it. I've sworn to forever love friends who moved away the following year and then I never spoke to them again; most of the people I loved when I was 12 are not the same people I love now at 23. I've looked someone in the eye and said "I love you" and meant it in that instant with every fiber of my being, and the next day my heart was quiet, sated--that love couldn't be sustained.
I've loved passionately and I've loved fiercely and I've maybe even loved faithfully, but I've never, ever loved unconditionally. There's always a condition. Always some line that can't be crossed without the veil falling away and our eyes being opened to the truth behind love's brilliant facade: that our capacity for love is minute, shallow; that our DESIRE for love sometimes outweighs our love itself; that where and when love ends CHOICE must begin--we must CHOOSE to love (even if we no longer LOVE) our wife, our husband, the friend who let us down, the mother who made all the wrong choices.
So if we as people are incapable--and often unwilling--to love one another unconditionally, why are we so obsessed with finding it, with keeping it, with reinventing it over and over and over again in nearly every form of popular media?
It goes back, I think, to the way we're hardwired. Just as we fight aging with botox and life-threatening diseases with surgery and radiation and an assortment of pills and powders and liquids, we also fight--or ATTEMPT to fight--death with love. Except we fail. We fail because the battle was only won ONCE. It was won by one man--the only one with both the ability and desire to love us (ALL of us) without condition. It was won at the Cross.
And there it is. Our society's great epiphany--we've been in search of something that we've already been granted. We've looked for it in Dad. We've squealed with delight because we thought we found it in Boyfriend #4. We've nipped and tucked and starved and dyed and pierced, hoping all the while that in the process we've somehow managed to make ourselves worthy of the love we can't live without. But for all our efforts these irrefutable, immutable truths remain: we want to be loved unconditionally. We are inherently unworthy of this, and no amount of "self-improvement" can alter this fact. And, more importantly than everything else, our unworthiness is not held against us: we're already loved. We're already loved unconditionally. We're already loved into salvation, into eternity, into inmortality. We're loved by God.
God is our true supernatural source. He's Edward Cullen and the cute zombie from that movie and "the one who got away" and every other man or woman we've ever demanded love from all rolled into one. If love has ever disappointed or confused or evaded us it's okay because that's the nature of ordinary human love: it's messy; it's fickle; it's transient; it's not always patient, it's not always kind; it can't always bear or endure all things; it can't always hope during hopeless times. Most of all, though, the love we've experienced at the hands of others has ultimately failed us because it was SUPPOSED to...it was supposed to cause us to look out, to look up, to look beyond ourselves and toward the One who loved to the point of death.
