Last June on the feast of the Sacred Heart, I kind of adapted Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso in one of my homilies. Here Alfredo tells Toto a story:
"Once...a king gave a feast for the loveliest princesses in the realm. Now, a soldier who was standing guard saw the king's daughter go by. She was the most beautiful of all and he fell instantly in love.But what is a simple soldier next to the daughter of a king? At last he succeeded in meeting her, and he told her he could no longer live without her. The princess was so taken by the depth of his feeling that she said to the soldier, "If you can wait for 100 days and 100 nights under my balcony, at the end of it I shall be yours." With that the soldier went and waited one day... two days... then ten... then twenty. Each evening the princess looked out, and he never moved! In rain, in wind, in snow, he was always there! Birds shat on his head, bees stung him- but he didn't budge. At the end of ninety nights he had become all dry, all white. Tears streamed from his eyes. He couldn't hold them back. He didn't even have the strength to sleep. And all that time, the princess watched him. At long last, it was the 99th night... and the soldier stood up, took his chair and left."
So why did the soldier leave? I personally think it's because the princess will marry (will love) him because he fulfilled the condition. In short, it was a conditional love. Perhaps when the soldier was asked why he left, he must have answered: "If I accept the offer of the princess, I know that she would love me because of the condition. Instead, by leaving I choose to love her unconditionally."
Ah, such is unconditional love... isn't this the same kind of love You have for me as expressed in Your Most Sacred Heart?