From the heart: the freedom to love, to live, to choose, to cherish, to heal, to reach beyond marriage to enrich it; courageously seeking greater happiness, liberty, peace and joy in the world. At the threshold of civilization's last chance: the general welfare has become lost; humanity is hanging on a thread; economies are disintegrating; nuclear war is more immanent; and the next Ice Age is on the near horizon. The novel begins in simpler times, in Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, behind the communist wall that had imprisoned a part of a nation. Ironically, it is here where the protagonist, a junior American diplomat, discovers an oasis of amazing freedoms: freedoms to love; the challenge of universal love. Few people have dared to cross the borders of this challenge and traveled its landscape. Nevertheless, without the Principle of Universal Love we wouldn't have a civilization and may ultimately not survive. In the story, the diplomat, as a man, is the center. Diplomacy recedes into the background against wide-open dimension of responding with honesty to the heart, where love is the universal impetus and amazing experiences unfold by the touch of strangers on the same path, who don't remain strangers for long. Is it immoral or rotten for a man to fall in love with four different women in a month, each time for its own imperative, and remain so, deeply, and in a manner that uplifts the light of loving itself, universally? Or is it more honorable to cherish the darkness of isolation where love is kept small and the horizon narrowly focused? The novel aims to help un-tangle the paradox. The multiply-threaded romantic complex, which involves dimensions of science, economics, religion, and even some politics, is not a collection of fleeting love affairs, but sets up an enduring basis for building on further, and expanding it in numerous dimensions all the way through the epic series. 'The Lodging for the Rose.'