Many years ago, Neil Young composed a song called "Only Love Can Break Your Heart." Anyone who has loved, or who has been loved, can relate. Not that love is the only thing that can break our heart, just that love, with its often overwhelming swirls of emotion and passion, tends to stir up feelings in us that nothing else can.  Whether we love deeply, or are loved deeply, or both, we will eventually encounter heartbreak. Experienced and gained, love inflames with joy; lost and gone, love can torment horribly.
     As we continue our Lenten journey, whether you believe in its foundations or not, consider the weight of love.  We cannot live without love, yet in a ironic and even tragic sense, we cannot live with it, either.  Love is one of the paradoxes of being human, part of being made in the image of a God who loves.  It's wonderful, it's exasperating and confusing.
     It is therefore good to remind ourselves that, love, God is no different.  So much does God love us, his human creation, he indeed broke his heart:  he watched his son Jesus die on a Roman cross. Because he loved us, God lost everything. 
     Yet it is in this horrific paradox, ours and God's, that we see what love, ours and God's, is most about:  a heart that must break to find love's deepest part.