It Changes Everything, 2

Kate responded to my last post by saying something about herself that is also true for me: that her love for her daughters is the most (the only?) unconditional love she's ever known. Her comment made me think more about what I had written, because for certain my love of Allison Clare is unconditional, and I've been thinking about whether my love for anyone else is unconditional as well.  

I might say that my love for my parents is unconditional, but I'm not sure that counts--I'm not sure I'd have loved them the same way if they'd been abusive or crazy my whole life, instead of endlessly supportive and loving, so perhaps my "unconditional" love is really just that I'm so deeply indebted.  Likewise with my sister: growing up with someone, sharing the same family and points of reference and sense of humor (though she's much funnier) has created a bond that has shaped my world so wholly that I can't imagine not having it, much less think of rejecting it on the basis of some kind of misdeed or offense.  My love for them is unconditional because it would be unimaginable not to exist within it.

Maybe my love for JS is the most unconditional because we've kind of grown up together, and we've both commented many times on the uniqueness of the bonds you make at the age we met (in college).  Case in point: when I visit JS or she visits me and our husbands are not around, we often climb into each other's beds to sit around and chat.  It seems totally normal to us because we went to college together and inhabited dorm rooms where the bed was virtually the only furniture.  But it would be totally weird if I climbed into the bed of one of my work friends, no matter how close we seem to be.  Both JS and I are too busy, too lazy, and too old at this point to put in the time to recreate such a bond with another person, so our love is unconditional by default.

And my love for Sam, oddly enough, is perhaps the most conditional of all.  Not in the sense that there are conditions going forward, but that our love is a product of certain conditions: the values that brought us together, our respect and affection for each other, and our shared commitment to the life we are building together.

Which brings me back to my love for Allison Clare.  It's true, what Kate said: it's unconditional in that I could never stop loving her.  And I would change any condition in my life to allow for my love of her; apart from the constraints of being obedient to God, I would do anything for her, without thinking twice about it.  In that sense, my love for her is indeed different from my love of others.

But what I've realized about that unconditional love is that in part, it's unconditional because it's so very self-centered.  My love for her is such a part of me that loving her is inseparable from loving myself.  In that sense, I feel somewhat different from parents who say that their love for their children has made them more unselfish, more giving.  I think that my love for Allison Clare has made me less selfish only to the extent that I give more to her; it has made me more selfish in that I would give the world to protect her, my child.

God's love, I think, is somehow able to inhabit both of these forms; it's specific and universal at the same time.  The parable tells us that he leaves the 99 sheep to go after the one that is lost, and yet he loves all 100 the same; he counts them all.  It's this paradox, this mystery, that I can't contain within myself; I prefer Allison Clare.  Not to prefer her would be a sin, I think, a kind of crime against nature; and yet, to prefer her to the detriment of others is its own failing as well in that I think the largest spirits are those who can love everyone as much as their own children: Mother Theresa, Harry Holt (who founded my adoption agency) . . .  

This is the paradox that made Melville mad, the thing that his erstwhile friend Hawthorne meant when he said that Melville "could neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief," that he was too honest to pretend to anything other than the uncertainty wrought by two equal, irreconcilable truths.  All of this may be why my favorite of the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick is the one where Melville wonders if the positions of the whale's eyes, on either side of its head, mean that its brain is capable of processing two separate images, two distinct realities, whereas ours can only hold a single one at once.  I've written about this before; I'm about to start teaching the book again, so my favorite parts are on my mind I guess.