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One of the greatest mistakes the human heart can make is to seek pleasure as a goal of life. Pleasure is a by-product of the fulfillment of duty; it is a bridesmaid, not a bride; it is something which attends and waits on man when he does that which he ought. To go through life with the idea of always having a good time is not to have a good time. A boy does not eat ice cream to have pleasure; he has a pleasure because he eats ice cream. The satisfaction of the appetite of hunger gives pleasure, but one does not eat just to have pleasure. One does not marry to enjoy pleasures of the flesh; one enjoys the pleasures of marriage because one fulfills to the utmost the functions and obligations of the married state. A good husband wants to love and to have a happy life; a wicked husband wants to be loved and to enjoy himself. The good man seeks a woman to complement his imperfection and to work toward mutual enrichment. The evil man wants to immolate a woman in order to enjoy himself. The happiness of marriage is in a certain sense a prepayment of God for its trials. Because its burdens are many, its pleasures are meant to be many. The honeymoon precedes the labors of birth, and is a credit God extends in advance because of the responsibilities involved.
The greatest joys of life are purchased at the cost of some sacrifice. No one ever enjoys good reading, good music, or good art without a certain amount of study and effort. Neither can one enjoy love without a certain amount of self-denial. It is not that love by its nature demands suffering, for there is no suffering in Divine Love. But whenever love is imperfect, or whenever a body is associated with a soul, there must be suffering, for such is the cost of love's purification. One cannot grow from ignorance to love of poetry without discipline. Neither can one mount from one level of love to another without a certain amount of purification. The Blessed Virgin passed from one level of love, which was for her Divine Son, to the higher level of a love for all whom He would redeem, by willing His Passion and Death at the Marriage Feast of Cana.
All love craves a cross by the very fact that love is forgetful of self for others. But even in the midst of sacrifice, it can say: "Suffering is in me, but I am not in it." The joy which is seen forthcoming as the result of the trial makes one in some way independent of it. A marriage which is entered into solely for the sake of pleasure lacks this essential element of love. Seeking pleasure alone, husband and wife live on the surface of life instead of in its depths; there is sex, but no love; there is an epidermal contact, but no communion of spirit. A family without the spirit of sacrifice is only an agglomeration of separate atoms; they sit in a common refectory, sleep in a common dormitory, but lack all internal relations which are the condition of family love. The husband and wife and children are held together like a business organization. Each member of the family feels himself imprisoned by the collectivity, as the citizens of a totalitarian state do on a larger scale. Crushed by hostile forces, external to himself, each one wonders why the yearning of love within him cannot be satisfied. Each tries to compensate for this desire of unity through love, by some external activity which amounts to busybody-ism. The wife forms a bridge club or a Society for the Elimination of Theater Queues, and the husband becomes a "go-getter." The value of life is judged not in terms of being, but in terms of not-being, or having. Instead of being drawn toward self-perfection and fulfillment, they are full rather of emptiness and frustration. They are always wanting something, but what that something is, they know not. They think that by increasing activity, they will fill up the void; whereas happiness lies in the discipline of the ego and not in its satisfaction. John the Baptist, on seeing Our Lord, said: "He must become more and more, I must become less and less." Their motto is: "I must become more and more; He must become less and less."
One of the most insidious influences in modern society comes from those who develop a social conscience without an individual conscience, or who separate love of neighbor from love of God, or who feel that by transferring their inner sense of guilt to others whom their social conscience derides, they can thereby escape the inner sense of guilt to which their personal consciences bears witness. By reforming others, they acknowledge the need of regeneration, but not in their own hearts. Many disillusioned married people practice escapism in their mature lives to avoid the need of the reformation of their own family. Because their egotism has become social, they think that they have become loving; when really the last thing they want to do is to immolate their egotism. They give themselves to others, but in the way they have chosen to give themselves, and not in the way their human nature, under God, dictates. They are actually increasing their egotism at the moment when they feel least selfish. But this expansive feeling is really only an excrescence, like a boil on the neck of their egotism.
What is really at the bottom of such a peculiar type of social interest is a hatred of self, which others might overcome and try to forget in alcoholism, but which they try to forget in a kind of altruism. The escapes are means of overcoming a sense of absolute sterility and futility. Their egotism is concealed under the language of humanitarianism and philanthropy, but there is no love, because there is no sacrifice of the ego. There is ceaseless activity, but no joy; there is philanthropy, but no inner peace; there is a social conscience, but no individual conscience. There is communism in the social order because there is first atheism in the human heart. The great natural necessities of the soul, the deepest aspirations of the human heart, are abolished for the sake of the triumphant ego. The result is that there is a terrific inner dislocation of self, for as life ceases to be unified, it becomes like a body devoid of a soul; it disintegrates into its component elements. An ego without sacrifice is closed to itself and impenetrable to others. Hence the impression that selfish couples give, that they are living in another world; each has his or her own planet; they hardly ever come in contact except to collide and quarrel. They may be two in one flesh, but they are not two in one mind, or heart, or ideal. Like the modern atom, such partners are so fissioned and rent as to make a Hiroshima of a home and a marriage.
There are many egotists who boast of the sacrifice that they have made toward a person or a cause, and indeed the Communist can point to "sacrifices" which he made for world revolution. From the point of view of quantity alone, his "sacrifice" surpasses that of an individual Christian. But there is a world of difference between the "sacrifice" of a Communist for revolution, and that of a devoted husband for a sick wife, or of a wife for an alcoholic husband. In the egotist, the object of the sacrifice is what his ego has chosen for itself; in love the sacrifice is for what God has chosen. The sacrifices of a husband for his second wife, while his first wife is living, are not to be put in the same category as the sacrifices of a husband for even an unfaithful first wife. In the first instance, there is the freedom of license; in the second there is freedom within the law. The second wife is a self-gratification the ego chose in violation of God's law. The difficult wife is the one whom God imposes on the man after his initial act of freedom: "I choose thee until death do us part." The sacrifices of the egotist have no eternal value; they have value only for him. The sacrifices of the lover under God are directed to the absolute, to a loyalty and devotion greater than and beyond self.
True love has its infallible watermark: the immolation of self in the face of the Eternal. Of those who sacrifice to satisfy their ego in contradiction to the law of God, Our Lord said: "They have their reward already." (Matt. 6:2) You did it to please yourself, and you got exactly what you wanted. But the other group did not make the sacrifices to please themselves; they made them for the sake of the Absolute Love, i.e., for the Divine Thou which binds two hearts together. Sacrifice is not made for the sake of self but for the expropriation of self through an act of freedom, in order that nothing may keep one back from union with Love Divine.
Love at the beginning is a paradise. Its foundation is a dream that each one has found to be something unique and a happiness which is eternal. That is why all love songs of the theater sing of "how happy we shall be." Love songs treat what is in prospect, not what is in retrospect. This is because there is a kind of infinity about imagining what will happen, while there is only reality about what has already happened. The young still dream dreams of the future; the old, like Horace, look back to the "glorious past." This is not in any way to minimize the value of paradisal future, but merely to place love in its ontological setting. Every great thing begins with a dream, whether it be that of the engineer who plans a bridge, or of the heart that plans a home. The soul draws upon its infinity and colors it with the gold of paradise. No one ever climbs to the heavens without passing through the clouds, and at the beginning every lover has his head in the clouds. This foretaste of heaven is good, and even heaven-sent. It is the advance agent of heaven, telling the heart of that real happiness which lies ahead. Actually, it is a bait, a blueprint, a John the Baptist, an announcer telling of the program yet to come. If God did not permit this preview of joy, who would venture in beyond the vestibule?
But such primitive love does not continue with the same ecstasy. Because flesh is the medium of married love, it suffers the penalty of the flesh: it becomes used to affection. As life goes on, a greater stimulus is required to produce an equal reaction to sensation. The eye can soon become used to beauty, and the fingers to the touch of a friend. The intimacy which at first was so desirable, now becomes at times a burden. The "I-want-to be-alone feeling," and the "I-think-I-will-go-home-to-mother feeling" strip the eye of its rose-colored glasses. Bills coming into the kitchen make love fly out of the parlor. The very habit of love becomes boring, because it is a habit and not an adventure. Perhaps the yearning for a new partner accompanies a disgust with the old partner. The care of children, with their multiplying accidents and diseases, tends to bring love down from its vision in the clouds to periodical, realistic visitations to the nursery.
Sooner or later those living the affective life are brought face to face with this problem: Is love a snare and a delusion? Does it promise what it cannot give? I thought this would be complete and total happiness, and yet it has settled down to a routine sprinkled with an occasional faint recalling of what love was in the beginning. At this point, those who think that love is an evolution from the beasts and not a devolution from God, falsely believe that if they had another partner, he or she could supply what the other lacks. The fallacy here is that they forget that the indigence and emptiness comes not from the other partner, but from the very nature of life itself. The heart was made for the infinite, and only the infinite can satisfy it. That first ecstasy of love was given to remind the couple that their love came from heaven, and that only by working for heaven would they ever find the love they wanted in its infinity. Our Lord gave bread at Capharnaum to lead the souls of His listeners to the Eucharist, or the Bread of Everlasting Life, which is His very Self. The love of marriage is given in the same way, as a Divine "come-on," until one has learned to save his soul.
Those who think that by breaking the marriage vow and taking another partner they can satisfy the infinite, forget that they are now off the road and into a rut. Instead of following the ray of light to the sun, they will become like eccentric planets that run out of their orbit and burn in space. They try to satisfy the Infinite craving for love, not by a vertical line to God but by a horizontal line through a succession of finite stimulations. By the addition of zeros, they hope to make their infinite, only to find that they are most hungry where most they are satisfied.
As the violin needs tuning, as the block of marble needs cutting before it can make a statue, so the love of husband and wife needs purification before it can rise to new heights. The satiety and emptiness which come to the flesh are reminders that one has hit bottom; therefore, one must rise to new heights. But this is not done without a certain abnegation of the ego. The very fact that a certain satiety and fed-upness result from the first love is a proof that there was some egotism hidden in it. What one loved was the pleasure the other gave; what caused the disillusion was the misplaced Infinite, the error of expecting from a creature that which only the Creator can give.
There comes to every human, at one period or another, the discovery of his nothingness. The man who wanted a certain position eventually becomes dissatisfied with it, and wants something higher; he who has wealth does not have enough, not even with the first million. So in married love, there comes the crisis of not completely realizing the ideal. But this crisis of nothingness which comes to everyone, whether he is married or not, does not mean that life is to be mocked. One has not hit the bottom of life, but only the bottom of one's ego. One has not hit the bottom of his soul, but only of his instinct; not the bottom of his mind, but of his passions; not the bottom of his spirit, but of his sex. The aforementioned trials are merely so many contacts with reality which Almighty God sends into every life, for what we are describing here is common to every life. If life went on as dream without the shock of disillusionment, who would ever attain his final goal with God and perfect happiness? The majority of men would rest in mediocrity; acorns would be content to be saplings; some children would never grow up and nothing would mature.
Therefore, God had to keep something back, namely, Himself in eternity, otherwise we would never push forward. So He makes everyone run up against a stone wall every now and then in life; on such occasions they feel the crisis of nonentity and have an overwhelming sense of nothingness and loneliness, in order that they may see life not as a city but as a bridge to eternity. The crisis of nothingness is caused by the meeting of a fancied ideal and reality; of love as the ego thinks it is, and of love as it really is. These are the moments when adults burn their fingers on the matches of love, that they might realize the fires of love have Divinely ordained purposes, and one of them is not to play.
During this crisis of nothingness, the thing that hearts are kicking and complaining against is not their destiny, nor their nature, but their limits, their weaknesses, their insufficiency. The human heart is not wrong in wanting love; it is wrong only in thinking that a human can completely supply it. What the soul yearns for in the crisis is the Light of love, which is God, and not the shadow. The crisis of nothingness is a summons to the Everything which is God. The abyss of one's own poverty cries out to the abyss of the infinite richness of Divine Love. Instead of thinking that the other partner is to blame for this emptiness, which is so common today, one ought to peer into his own soul. He wants the ocean, and he is drinking from a cup. If there is a thorn in the flesh at this moment of life, as Our Lord gave a thorn to the flesh of Paul for the purpose of purification, the thorn is a summons to climb to the Flame of Love which is God.
Purification of love saves love. It saves it by not blaming the partner as the cause of the crisis; it also saves faith in love itself by pursuing it to a higher level. Neither the lover nor the love are at fault in this dark night of the body. Those who do not purify their love generally resort at this moment to one of five false solutions: (a) They seek a new partner to satisfy their egotisms; (b) they decide to live apart; (c) the husband absorbs himself in business and the wife in bridge clubs; (d) they resort to alcohol in an attempt to drive the conscious problem into unconsciousness; (e) they consult a Freudian psychoanalyst, who tells them to divorce and remarry, or to repeat the problem all over again.
It must not be thought that the crisis of nothingness is peculiar to marriage. It can happen in the spiritual life, too. Those who have dedicated themselves to religion, as priests and nuns and contemplatives, reach a crisis in Divine Love Their prayers become dry, arid, and formal; they are now used to the spiritual realities which they touch. The priest no longer has the thrill of the ineffable presence of God on opening the tabernacle door, or in carrying the Blessed Sacrament to the sick. The nun, who regarded the children in her classroom as potential saints, now is apt to look upon her task as the fulfillment of a duty. Self-examination becomes irksome; there is a decreasing consciousness of the Presence of God; humility is harder to practice; it becomes more difficult to get up for meditation; and thanksgiving to God becomes shorter and shorter.
The problem created in this hour of mediocrity and tedium is often expressed as: "How can I pray better? Why do I not feel greater union with God? Why are sacrifices irksome now, which once were so pleasant? Why is my breviary read with distraction?" There is one answer to these questions. One is in a spiritual rut because one has not practiced mortification. In order to lift the love of the soul to new heights, one must begin to do some works of penance which have not been done before; there must be a rebirth of sacrifice; a fresh taming of the ego; a disciplining of the flesh; more fasting, almsgiving; and more self-denial for the sake of one's neighbor.
What the Dark Night of the Soul is to the spiritual life, the Dark Night of the Body is to marriage. Neither are permanent; both are occasions of purification for fresher insights into Love. If the fig tree of love is to bear fruit, it must be purged and dunged. Dryness in the spiritual life and in marriage are really actual graces. God's finger is stirring the waters of the soul, creating discontent, that new efforts may be put forth. As the mother eagle throws its young out of the nest, in order that they may fly, so now God is giving love its wings in place of its clay feet. This dryness, in either the spiritual or married life, can be either salvation or damnation, depending on how it is used or not used. There are two kinds of dryness: there is one which rots, which is the dryness of love without God; and there is also a dryness which ripens, and that is won when one grows through the fires and heat of sacrifice.
Aridity in love is not the defeat of love, but rather its challenge. If there were no love above the human, or if life were only sex, there is no reason to suppose that love would ever become dull. The major tragedies of life come from believing that love is like a child in a progressive school, and that if left to itself without any discipline, it will grow to perfection. Dryness, mediocrity, and tedium are danger signals! Love, too, has its price, and no one ever became a saint, or made a marriage a joy, without a fresh struggle against the ego.
The modern solution in marriage is to find a new love; the Christian solution is to recapture an old love. Divorce with remarriage is a sign that one never loved a person in the first place, but only the pleasure which that person gave. The Christian attitude is that one must now love the same person, but on a higher level. To seek to overcome the depression by finding a new love is to intensify egotism, and make the other the victim of that egotism under the appearance of devotion and love. The Christian solution is to conquer egotism. Instead of discovering a new love, it discovers the same love. The modern solution is to chase new prey; the Christian solution is to bind up the wounds of the Divinely-sanctioned marriage.
Those who leave one thrill for another never really love, for no one loves who cannot love through disenchantment, disillusion, and deception. It is sex which seeks a new stimulus; but Christian love seeks a higher stimulus. Sex ignores eternity for the sake of passing experience; love tries to bring eternity more into love, and thus make it more lovable. Love, at the beginning, speaks the language of eternity. It says, "I will love you always." In the Crisis of Nothingness the idea of eternity cries to be reintroduced. There is this difference, however. In the days of romance, the eternal emphasis was on the ego's durability in love; in the Crisis of Nothingness, the eternal element is God, not the ego. Love now says, "I will love you always, for you are lovable through eternity for God's sake." He who courts and promises eternal love is actually appropriating to himself an attribute of God. During the Dark Night of the Body, he puts eternity where it rightly belongs, namely, in God.
Once purified, love returns. The partner is loved beyond all sensation, all desire, all concupiscence. The husband who began by loving the other for his own sake, and then for her sake, now begins to love for God's sake. He has touched the depths of a body, but now he discovers the soul of the other person. This is the new infinite taking the place of the body; this is the new "always," and it is closer to the true infinite because the soul is infinite and spiritual, whereas the body is not. The other partner ceases to be opaque and begins to be transparent, the glass through which God and His purposes are revealed. Less conscious of his own power to beget love in others, he sees his poverty and begins to depend on God to complement that poverty. Good Friday now passes into Easter Sunday with the Resurrection of Love.
Love, which once meant pleasure and self-satisfaction, changes into love for God's sake. The other person becomes less the necessary condition of passion and more the partner of the soul. Our Blessed Lord said that unless the seed fall to the ground and die, it will not spring forth into life. Nothing is reborn to a higher life without a death in the lower. The heart has its cycles as well as the planets, but the movement of the heart is an upward spiral, and not a circle which turns upon itself. The planetary circles are repetitious, the eternal return to a beginning.
There are some who say that their love lives on memories, but they know in their hearts that the memories are unsatisfying. The body that has lost an arm or a leg is not consoled by recalling the departed member. Life is progressive rather than reminiscent. If love does not grow, it becomes sterile and flat. The living on memories assumes that the heart, like the planets, travels in a circle and not in a spiral. He who loses his arm, and then utilizes the loss to incorporate himself more closely to the Will of God, has spiraled upwards in his love. He who takes the aridities and the ordinariness of love, and utilizes them to lift self and partner to new horizons, has proven that he belongs to the realm of life rather than to that of planets.
Progress begins with a dream, and progresses through the death of that dream. Marriage would never begin, if there were no dream of happiness. When finally the dream comes true, there will be no progress in joy unless one is prepared to die to that old dream and begin to dream new dreams. To live on the memory of a love is as unsatisfying as to live on the memory of food. The Crisis of Nothingness, which follows a dream come true, needs its purification and its Cross The Cross is not a roadblock on the way to happiness; it is a ladder up which one climbs to a heaven of love.
Another name for the purification of love is transfiguration, which means the use of a loss, or a pain, or a mediocrity, or a disillusionment, as a steppingstone to a new anointing of joy. When Peter saw the face of Our Lord, as bright as the sun and with His robes white as snow, he wanted to capture that ephemeral glory in a permanent form. But all the while, Our Lord was talking to Moses and Elias of His death. He was reminding Peter that there is no true glory without a Cross. This momentary glory is only an anticipation and a preshadowing of a glory that comes after a crucifixion. Transfiguration in marriage comes through an intensive retraining of the ego. The more one gives up the self, the more one possesses self. It is the ego that stands in the way of all fine social relationships. The egotist has no friends in the social order, and the egotistic spouse precludes the possession in joy of the other.
Transfiguration is based on the idea that love resides in the will, and not in the emotions. The emotions lose their thrill, but the will can become stronger with the years. Those who identify love and the glands feel their love decreasing as time goes on, despite the injection of hormones. Those who identify love and the will and admit the third which makes love, find that age never affects love. The will really can grow stronger as the body becomes weaker. One therefore always has it in his or her power to lift himself to new heights through a willed and deliberate sacrifice of the ego, even when the body-love has begun its decline.
George Bernard Shaw once said that it is a pity that youth has been wasted on the young. On the contrary, this is one of life's greatest blessings. If youth were not wasted on the young, if the tendency to equate love and sensation had not finally been overcome in youth through disillusionment, how few would find the love of God which they are really seeking. Only when some exhaust the substitutes and find them unworthy, do they ever begin to think of reality. It is possible to come to God through a series of disgusts, which the excesses of youth beget. The Psalmist asked God not to remember the sins of his youth. The maturity which age brings associates regret with the abuse of the wellsprings of life. Sublimation is the condition of sound thinking. God in His Mercy has made it easier for the young to make fools of themselves than for the old. The old fools who try to live as if human love had no Dark Night are, however, the greatest fools of all.
The Divine Law which forbids divorce and remarriage has also a sound psychological basis. The permission to alter one love for another, while the first partner is living, is to permit the suicide of character. Those who violate God's law run away whenever they encounter a difficulty. They are like an army that refuses to fight the opposition and win a victory. When they come to that moment in human love when they are given an opportunity to perfect their love in God and save their souls, they run to another human love and thus miss the chance of salvation. They are like flowers that identify love with blossom; just as soon as the strong winds or a storm come, they refuse to bear fruit and begin to wither and die. The world is full of people who "give up" instead of going forward in a marriage. Instead of being loyal and faithful to a word, they break their trust and substitute sensation for ideals and mediocrity for sacrifice. The very expressions that are used to justify such capitulation to dishonor, as "I must live my own life," and "I have a right to my happiness," indicate that their standard is the ego. The ego must be satisfied at all costs, even though it means trampling on another soul for the sake of a new thrill. The Christian doctrine on the unbreakable quality of marriage is aimed at character-making. It wants captains to stay on the deck during a storm and not to jump overboard. Too many now are deserting their ships. As the French proverb puts it: "Divorce is the sacrament of adultery."
There can be no happiness in the home without the sacrifice which transfigures love. No wound caused by quarrels can fester when the ego is willing to humble itself. The commonest events of daily life and the vulgarity of the smallest minute are made sacred through the delicate attention to the partner which sacrificial love engenders. No one should ever enter into marriage without promising to de-egotize, for marriage is communion! To read some modern books, one would think the biggest problem in marriage was that of being sexually adjusted. It is not sex that needs adjustment, it is the egotism, selfishness, and animality which want their own pleasure without regard to the other's.
The best physical adjustments science can make possible will go for naught unless there is a spiritual adjustment which sacrifice alone makes possible. It is in the interior world of the partner in which happiness lies, and not on the surface of the skin. What is pleasantness in the last analysis but a profound abrogation of one's own likes and tastes and preferences and fatigues, for the sake of being attentive to others? The real happiness of life begins to leave at the moment when the ego experiences its greatest pleasure, for no egotistical satisfaction is ever attained except at someone else's expense. Love without sacrifice diminishes the love. To demand pleasure without loving revolts the partner. To demand without patience, discourages. During the Dark Night of the Body one is closest to capturing the prize. One step beyond mediocrity, and we are saved.
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