Proof of Love

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.” 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke


When you think about those people who loved you:  your parents, your friends, your brothers and sisters, your girlfriends/boyfriends, your mentors and companions, those great spiritual leaders, all of them had a willingness to sacrifice something of themselves.  You see it clearly when you give someone or somebody you love your money ( as when you pay for a wedding), your time  ( as when you walk the dog), your organ ( as in a transplant or through donation of blood for a person you will never see or know).
   There are  nuns who took  care of AIDS patients even at risk to their own health and their faith, which forbade homosexuality. They put their love of others over their own needs.
   Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, writes about  a little girl named Mary Ann Long who developed a cancerous tumor of her face at age 3. It grew so big she was unable to eat. Here is an excerpt:

These nuns ran a free cancer home, where Mary Ann Long came to live at age 3. She had a cancerous tumor on her face; one eye had been removed. By the time she died, the tumor had grown so much that she couldn’t eat. She was only supposed to survive six months, but she lived to be twelve.
She must have been quite an extraordinary child. After her death, the nuns wrote an account of the little girl.

It’s an interesting book for several reasons, but what struck me most was the observation, “Apparently [Mary Ann] knew at that early age that the proof of real love is sacrifice.”
That sentence stopped me in my tracks. It’s another way of expressing one of my favorite happiness precepts – Reverdy’s “There is no love, there are only proofs of love” – but more blunt. I asked myself: am I showing my love through sacrifice?

   Another proof of  love is that it lasts for a thousand years or more, as Christina Perri sings in the song above.
  You will now see love in a new way. Those who have mastered this difficult task of  loving another person  demonstrate their ultimate love. This is the final proof.