The Most Important Thing
I Know About Love

by ECaP founder, Bernie Siegel, MD

I know that love is the most powerful, indestructible force and substance in the universe. For this reason, I call love the brick from which all of life is constructed. I also believe laughter is the mortar which holds the bricks together. If love weren’t a part of the creative, intelligent energy that many refer to as God, we would never have developed our ability to heal.

Why I call love a potent force or substance is because of what it can do when expressed. It is no accident we have sayings such as, “love is blind,” “kill ‘em with kindness” and “love thine enemies.” Enemies are obliterated by love and faults are not seen in loved ones. If the world were filled with lovers, there would be no wars or conflicts. In Doestoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, the prisoner is set free when in response to the cruelty of the Inquisitor who is going to burn and crucify him the next morning, he gives him a kiss on his aged lips. Read Corinthians I:13 for further details about love’s qualities.

Since love is also immortal, I want something that won’t wear out supporting it. In a Hindu story, a boy with his parents’ consent, volunteers to give his life to save others. He obtains their consent by telling them, “Consider this sooner or later, my body will perish at any rate, but if it perishes without love which the wise declare is the only thing of permanence, of what use will it have been?” We are here to serve, not be served, and each of us needs to express our love in our unique way.

Two of my favorite writers share the same thoughts. Thornton Wilder wrote in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, “And we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten but the love will have been enough. All those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love. The only survival the only meaning.”

William Saroyan in The Human Comedy wrote, “The best part of a good man stays. It stays forever, for love is immortal and makes all things immortal, but hate dies every minute.”

So the most important thing I know about love is that it heals all wounds, eliminates all enemies, heals the giver and the receiver, protects us from illness, cures afflictions and changes those who are loved.

My role models, as I struggle to be a lover, are Lassie and Don Quixote. I have seen what their love can do and when in difficult situations, I ask myself what they would do. Feel free to use your own role models and find your own way to serve and discover your immortality.

Work like you don’t need the money,
Dance like no one is watching
And love like you’ve never been hurt
- Lao Tzu