Staub(RNS) People often say that love is the solution to all our societal problems. They could learn a thing or two from Leo Tolstoy, who could write and say such wonderful things about love but was unable to love even his own wife.

The tragic story is well documented and retold in the recent film, “The Last Station.” In the final days of his life, Tolstoy renounced his wife Sophia’s rights to his literary legacy and secretly left her in the dead of night.

Days later, bedridden with a fatal case of pneumonia, he refused to see her. (She finally saw him in his dying moments as he slipped into a coma).

Is this any way to treat the woman who bore him 13 children (five died in childhood) and had read every word of “War and Peace,” copied the entire novel by hand seven times, edited it, improved it and helped him with character development and plot?

Tolstoy’s writing about love is eloquent. “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God. … All people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.”

How could a man know so much about love intellectually, and yet fail at it so miserably in his most intimate relationship?

Maybe Charlie Brown offers a clue. “I love mankind,” he once wailed. “It’s people I can’t stand.”

Love in the abstract is easy, but when love takes on specific flesh it can be a wholly different matter. As I write this, I am traveling to England and there is nothing like travel to squash love.

I love my daughter. She got me to the airport, and I’m grateful — but we left 20 minutes late because she needed to check her e-mail. We stopped at Starbucks and her order took extra time. She is the slowest eater in our family, so her chewing noise grated on me as she carefully chomped away en route to the airport.

I believe God’s image is imprinted on each human friend and stranger, so each of us possesses inestimable worth — except, evidently, when you cut in line at the boarding gate, or block the tram door with your luggage. Do any of these things and I see sprouting horns that are evidence of the devil’s progeny.

The fact that Jesus commanded us to love one another must mean he knew it wouldn’t come easily or naturally. As a matter of fact, based on my (and Tolstoy’s) miserable attempts and failures at love, I think it must be a supernatural act to love at all.

This is what contemporary author Douglas Coupland discovered.

“Now here is my secret,” he wrote in “Life After God.” “I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God — I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond able to love.”

The fact that Coupland, Tolstoy and I all need some divine assistance doesn’t let any of us off the hook. Tolstoy offers some advice that he perhaps neglected to take himself with his wife.

“We should learn how to love,” he said, “in the same way people learn how to play the violin.”

Few experiences are more unsettling on the ear than listening to a beginner violinist, but put that instrument in the hands of Itzhak Perlman and the violin ushers you into the presence of the divine.

All you need is divine love … and more than a little practice.

(Dick Staub is author of the just-released “About You: Fully Human and Fully Alive” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)