I have a confession to make. I cried today. Unrequited love–life’s great theme seen in our literature, arts, and song. It gets you every time, this “loving someone and that love not returned in kind.”
I was listening to Jose Luis Perales and Alejandro Fernandez sing Perales’s “Por que’ esta soledad” (Why This Loneliness?). I was galloping with the country rock rhythm, at once soaring with the music and yet saddened by the lyrics. A rough translation of some of the words:
WHEN I SEE YOU LEAVE AT HIS SIDE/ Cuando te veo ir a su lado/
SMILING SO HAPPY, CARESSING HIM/ sonriendo tan feliz, acariciandolo,
HANGING SHAMELESSLY FROM HIS WAIST/ colgada sin pudor de su cintura…
AND ME, SO IN LOVE WITH YOU/ Y yo enamorado de ti
IN LOVE JUST LIKE THE FIRST DAY WHEN I DIDN’T KNOW THE MOST BITTER SIDE OF LOVE/ AND I ASK MYSELF, WHAT HAPPENED TO US? ALL THE TENDERNESS I GAVE YOU/
WHY THIS LONELINESS?/ Por que’ esta soledad?
And at that instant, I thought of the greatest of unrequited loves the world has ever known–God loving mankind, and it not returned in kind. And that’s what took the catharsis to the next level where my eyes got wet, the tears fell, and the heart broke.
These words came to mind. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not…He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not…(John 1-10-11; Isaiah 53:3).
I needed this type of catharsis. It hurts when our halting overtures of love are not returned in kind. If we will multiply that pain by one thousand, then perhaps we might get a glimpse into the heart of God, into the ultimate heartbreak. And that is a good place for us to be. Kenneth Wayne Hancock
.