The Greatest Thing

there's an old song i hear from time to time that always stops me in my tracks, like wind chimes on a summer night. it speaks across time. i think it's called "Nature Boy". the first time i heard it was on an old piece of vinyl by the Nat King Cole Trio that Robert, my first husband, had found in a used records store. the line that stands out is the very last one in the song..."the greatest thing you'll ever learn is how to love and be loved in return." isn't this just a pop music version of the two greatest commands in the Bible (to love God with all your soul and all your heart and all your mind and all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself)? remarkable that such a small, deceptively simple pair of statements can be the twin root of such hoped for joy (in their achievement) and such universal misery (in the failure to achieve them). i have an unfinished sewing project upstairs in my work basket, begun years ago when Robert and i were still married: a piece of rough linen with the words from that old song embroidered on it, surrounded by a field of daisies. about a third of the design is filled in with colored thread; the rest is still only sketched in pencil, waiting to come to life. it was intended to be a wedding gift for a couple who were then friends of ours...i never finished it; we ended up giving them something else more conventional like a serving dish or something...and a few years later their marriage crumbled, and all of our once intertwined lives blew away into futures that none of us could have predicted at the time. i still work on that forlorn needlepoint from time to time, still unfinished...as unfinished as the riddle printed on it.
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn..." and if you in fact really learn that thing, learn it and cling to it and make it not just a pretty footnote to your actual grimy life, but the very fabric of which your life is made...then everything else will flow from that. how do we do this? are we even capable of it? we, the willful, the vain, the corrupt, the stubborn, the selfish, the unforgiving species that we are? we, the little crown of creation, that thinks it is alright to tell God what His plans are? how is it that we think we can ever learn to love rightly? we can scarcely tie our own shoes without getting angry. we are deeply challenged to truly look anywhere beyond our own personal suffering, without the filter of our own experience and self-righteousness...how then are we capable of the polar opposite of what we are...love? it's a tall, tall order for a small small creature.
we are not expected to do it alone (because we can't), but i believe that we are expected to do it. we are expected to look beyond ourselves for the means. we are expected to ask for help, to seek God; but to seek Him humbly, not with an agenda. Love is only love if it comes without conditions. without any thought of what anyone may or may not deserve.
that's the bitter pill...but anything else is just a sales pitch. we humans love to envision ourselves as a highly evolved species, but what a crock that is! Unconditional love and true forgiveness are as intangible to our natures as that word from space we've never heard; the close encounter we've never had. we know in our hearts, in our cells, that we're not alone, but we are profoundly hard pressed to believe it.