MY mother used to celebrate Valentine’s Day by making heart-shaped cupcakes of vanilla cake with pink boiled icing. They were beautiful and ethereal, vanilla-scented clouds of sugar, butter, and flour. They were pillows of cake, the sort of thing angels would eat if they had tea parties and buffets.

Fortunately, these extremely evanescent manifestations of my mother’s love were larger than normal cupcakes. This was good because my six siblings and I seemed to suffer from infantile metabolic disorders. Like wolves, we prowled the Siberian steppes of our existence looking for any uneaten remnant of the things we considered edible. Without any tutoring from the others or any sharing of trade secrets, we each perfected the art of removing crumbs from the exterior of a cooling cake without leaving a trace. We employed stealth and cunning in our daily search for adequate nourishment. 

The good thing about cupcakes is that, even though there technically can never be enough of them, they usually do not create questions of fairness. They are all the same size. A single cake cut into pieces, on the other hand, can be outrageously unjust, with some pieces visibly larger and more filling than others. Cupcakes are conducive to world peace. 

From a child’s perspective, fairness is important. To a child, it is sometimes inconceivable that a mother or father can love each of his children the same, that each piece of cake can be equal. A child ponders this puzzle. It is one of the first philosophical issues he wrestles with, wondering how a parent can love him like no other and also love his brother or sister like no other. The child is usually wrong in doubting the capacity of his parents to love all their children equally and exclusively, but he is right in his dawning knowledge of a painful truth. Human love is finite. 

Most adults, except for academic philosophers who never think about the most important questions, wonder about the fairness of love too. Most reasonable people wonder how God could possibly love so many people. How could he know the names of billions of people, recognize their faces in a crowd, let alone love them all? Perhaps God has created billions of people the way factories in China manufacture plastic toys.

The infinite heart, when you think about it, is the only real convincing alternative to this assembly-line productivity. The divine heart may be an immense furnace, an infinitely burning star, flames igniting flames, its roaring, racing, roiling fires creating waves of sacred heat that could shatter planets and reduce oceans to wisps of steam. This ball of fire may produce so much love that billions of people are easily the objects of its exclusive affection. The infinite heart may be the source of the constant, secret combustion we feel in the deepest parts of our being the way an immense bonfire is the source of a single brief ember.

Even as children, we sense there is something off about human love, as exquisitely sweet as it is. Its finite nature is wrong and unfair. Even as children, we are famished for something no human heart can supply.

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