Let me explain to each and everyone!! The main reason is
our Contents
1. The Differences Between Sex and Love
2. Our Vital Energies
3. What Love Is
4. The Three Tensions of Love
5. It Takes Three to Make Love
6. Love is Triune
7. Unfolding the Mystery
8. Purity: Reverence for Mystery
9. The Dignity of the Body
10. Marriage and the Spirit
11. The Great Mystery
12. The Unbreakable Bond
13. Generation
14. Paternity
15. Motherhood
16. The Role of Children
17. Mary, Motherhood, and the Home
18. The Dark Night of the Body
19. For Better or For Worse
20. Love's Reaction to Loss
21. Love Endureth Forever
1. The Differences Between Sex and Love
Love is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands.
The
will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The
pleasure
associated with love, or what is today called "sex," is the
frosting
on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore
it.
The greatest illusion of lovers is to believe that the intensity
of
their sexual attraction is the guarantee of the perpetuity of
their
love. It is because of this failure to distinguish between
the
glandular and spiritual--or between sex which we have in
common
with animals, and love which we have in common with God--that
marriages are so full of deception. What some people love is not
a
person, but the experience of being in love. The first is
irreplaceable; the second is not. As soon as the glands cease
to
react with their pristine force, couples who identified
emotionalism and love claim they no longer love one another.
If
such is the case they never loved the other person in the
first
place; they only loved being loved, which is the highest form
of
egotism. Marriage founded on sex passion alone lasts only as
long
as the animal passion lasts. Within two years the animal
attraction
for the other may die, and when it does, law comes to its rescue
to
justify the divorce with the meaningless words
"incompatibility,"
or "mental torture." Animals never have recourse to law
courts,
because they have no will to love; but man, having reason,
feels
the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does
wrong.
There are two reasons for the primacy of sex over love in a
decadent civilization. One is the decline of reason. As humans
give
up reason, they resort to their imaginations. That is why
motion
pictures and picture magazines enjoy such popularity. As
thinking
fades, unrestrained desires come to the fore. Since physical
and
erotic desires are among the easiest to dwell upon, because
they
require no effort and because they are powerfully aided by
bodily
passions, sex begins to be all-important. It is by no
historical
accident that an age of anti-intellectualism and irrationalism,
such
as our own, is also an age of carnal license.
The second factor is egotism. As belief in a Divine Judgment,
a
future life, heaven and hell, a moral order, is increasingly
rejected,
the ego becomes more and more firmly enthroned as the source
of
its morality. Each person becomes a judge in his own case.
With
this increase of selfishness, the demands for
self-satisfaction
become more and more imperious, and the interests of the
community and the rights of others have less and less appeal.
All
sin is self-centeredness, as love is otherness and relatedness.
Sin
is the infidelity of man to the image of what he ought to be in
his
eternal vocation as an adopted son of God: the image God sees
in
Himself when He contemplates His Word.
There are two extremes to be avoided in discussing married
love:
one is the refusal to recognize sexual love, the other is the
giving
of primacy to sexual attraction. The first error was Victorian;
the
second is Freudian. To the Christian, sex is inseparable from
the
person, and to reduce the person to sex is as silly as to
reduce
personality to lungs or a thorax. Certain Victorians in their
education practically denied sex as a function of
personality;
certain sexophiles of modern times deny personality and make
a
god of sex. The male animal is attracted to the female animal,
but
a human personality is attracted to another human
personality.
The attraction of beast to beast is physiological; the attraction
of
human to human is physiological, psychological, and
spiritual.
The human spirit has a thirst for the infinite which the
quadruped
has not. This infinite is really God. But man can pervert that
thirst,
which the animal cannot because it has no concept of the
infinite.
Infidelity in married life is basically the substitution for
an
infinite of a succession of finite carnal experiences. The
false
infinity of succession takes the place of the Infinity of
Destiny,
which is God. The beast is promiscuous for an entirely
different
reason than man. The false pleasure given by new conquests in
the
realm of sex is the ersatz for the conquest of the Spirit in
the
Sacrament! The sense of emptiness, melancholy, and frustration
is
a consequence of the failure to find infinite satisfaction in what
is
carnal and limited. Despair is disappointed hedonism The most
depressed spirits are those who seek God in a false god!
If love does not climb, it falls. If, like the flame, it does not
burn
upward to the sun, it burns downward to destroy. If sex does
not
mount to heaven, it descends into hell. There is no such thing
as
giving the body without giving the soul. Those who think they
can
be faithful in soul to one another, but unfaithful in body,
forget
that the two are inseparable. Sex in isolation from personality
does
not exist! An arm living and gesticulating apart from the
living
organism is an impossibility. Man has no organic functions
isolated from his soul. There is involvement of the whole
personality. Nothing is more psychosomatic than the union of
two
in one flesh; nothing so much alters a mind, a will, for better or
for
worse. The separation of soul and body is death. Those who
separate sex and spirit are rehearsing for death. The enjoyment
of
the other's personality through one's own personality, is love.
The
pleasure of animal function through another's animal function
is
sex separated from love.
Sex is one of the means God has instituted for the enrichment
of
personality. It is a basic principle of philosophy that there
is
nothing in the mind which was not previously in the senses.
All
our knowledge comes from the body. We have a body, St. Thomas
tells us, because of the weakness of our intellect. Just as
the
enrichment of the mind comes from the body and its senses, so
the enrichment of love comes through the body and its sex. As
one
can see a universe mirrored in a tear on a cheek, so in sex can
be
seen mirrored that wider world of love. Love in monogamous
marriage includes sex; but sex, in the contemporary use of
the
term, does not imply either marriage or monogamy.
Every woman instinctively realizes the difference between the
two,
but man comes to understand it more slowly through reason and
prayer. Man is driven by pleasure; woman by the meaning of
pleasure. She sees pleasure more as a means to an end,
namely,
the prolongation of love both in herself and in her child. Like
Mary
at the Annunciation, she accepts the love which is presented to
her
by another. In Mary, it came directly from God through an angel;
in
marriage, it comes indirectly from God through a man. But in
both
instances, there is an acceptance, a surrender, a Fiat: "Let it
be
unto me according to thy word." (Luke 1:2
The pagan woman who
has not consciously thought of God is actually half woman and
half dream; the woman who sees love as a reflection of the
Trinity
is half woman and half Spirit, and she waits upon the creative
work
of God within her body. Patience thus becomes bound up with
her
acceptance. Woman accepts the exigencies of love, as the
farmer
accepts the exigencies of nature, and waits, after the sowing of
the
seed, the harvest of autumn.
But when sex is divorced from love there is a feeling that one
has
been stopped at the vestibule of the castle of pleasure; that
the
heart has been denied the city after crossing the bridge.
Sadness
and melancholy result from such a frustration of destiny, for it
is
the nature of man to be sad when he is pulled outside himself,
or
exteriorized without getting any nearer his goal. There is a
closer
correlation between mental instability and the animal view of
sex
than many suspect. Happiness consists in interiority of the
spirit,
namely, the development of personality in relationship to a
heavenly destiny. He who has no purpose in life is unhappy;
he
who exteriorizes his life and is dominated, or subjugated, by
what
is outside himself, or spends his energy on the external
without
understanding its mystery, is unhappy to the point of
melancholy.
There is the feeling of being hungry after having eaten, or of
being
disgusted with food, because it has nourished not the body, in
the
case of an individual, or another body, in the case of marriage.
In
the woman, this sadness is due to the humiliation of realizing
that
where marriage is only sex, her role could be fulfilled by any
other
woman; there is nothing personal, incommunicable, and
therefore
nothing dignified. Summoned by her God-implanted nature to be
ushered into the mysteries of life which have their source in
God,
she is condemned to remain on the threshold as a tool or an
instrument of pleasure alone, and not as a companion of love.
Two
glasses that are empty cannot fill up one another. There must be
a
fountain of water outside the glasses, in order that they may
have
communion with one another. It takes three to make love.
Every person is what he loves. Love becomes like unto that
which
it loves. If it loves heaven, it becomes heavenly; if it loves
the
carnal as a god, it becomes corruptible. The kind of
immortality
we have depends on the kind of loves we have. Putting it
negatively, he who tells you what he does not love, also tells
what
he is. "Amor pondus meum: Love is my gravitation," said St.
Augustine. This slow conversion of a subject into an object, of
a
lover into the beloved, of the miser into his gold, of the saint
into
his God, discloses the importance of loving the right things.
The
nobler our loves, the nobler our character. To love what is
below
the human, is degradation; to love what is human for the sake
of
the human, is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of
the
Divine, is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is
sanctity.
Love is trinity; sex is duality. But there are many other
differences
between the two. Sex rationalizes; love does not. Sex has to
justify
itself with Kinsey Reports, "But Freud told us," or "No one
believes
that today"; love needs no reasons. Sex asks science to defend
it;
love never asks "Why?" It says, "I love you." Love is its own
reason.
"God is love." Satan asked a "Why?" of God's love in the Garden
of
Paradise. Every rationalization is farfetched and never
discloses
the real reason. He who breaks the Divine Law and finds
himself
outside of Christ's Mystical Body in a second marriage, will
often
justify himself by saying: "I could not accept the Doctrine
of
Transubstantiation." What he means is that he can no longer
accept the Sixth Commandment. Milton wrote an abstract and
apparently a philosophical treatise on "Doctrine and Discipline
of
Divorce," in which he justified the divorce on the grounds of
incompatibility. But the real reason was not what he set down
in
the book; it was to be found in the fact that he wished to
marry
someone else while his wife was living. What is important is
not
what people say, but why they say it. Too many assume that
the
reason people do not come to God is because they are ignorant;
it
is more generally true that the reason people do not come to
God
is because of their behavior. Our Lord said: "Rejection lies in
this,
that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness
to
light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who
acts
shamefully hates the light." (John 3:19, 20) It is not always
doubt
that has to be overcome, but evil habits.
From another point of view, sex seeks the part; love the
totality.
Sex is biological and physiological and has its definite zones
of
satisfaction. Love, on the contrary, includes all of these but
is
directed to the totality of the person loved, i.e., as a
creature
composed of body and soul and made to the image and likeness
of
God. Love seeks the clock and its purpose; sex concentrates on
the
mainspring and forgets its mission to keep time. Sex
eliminates
from the person who is loved everything that cannot adapt itself
to
its carnal libido. Those who give primacy to sex for that reason
are
anti-religious. Love, however, does not concentrate on a
function,
but on personality. An organ does not include the personality,
but
the personality includes the organ, which is another way of
repeating the theme: love includes sex, but sex does not
include
love.
Love concentrates on the object; sex concentrates on the
subject.
Love is directed to someone else for the sake of the other's
perfection; sex is directed to self for the sake of
se]f-satisfaction.
Sex flatters the object not because it is praiseworthy in itself,
but
rather as a solicitation. It knows how to make friends and
influence people. Most sound minds resent flattery because
they
see the egotism behind the screen of altruism. The ego in sex
pleads that it loves the alter ego, but what it loves is really
the
possibility of its own pleasure in the other ego. The other person
is
necessary for the return of the egotist upon himself. The
egotist
finds himself constantly being encircled by non-being,
purposelessness, meaninglessness; he has the feeling of being
exploited. Refusing to be related to anything else, he soon
sees
that nothing is for him: The whole world is against him! But
love,
which stresses the object, finds itself in constantly
enlarging
relationships. Love is so strong it surpasses narrowness by
devotedness and forgetfulness of self. In history, the only
causes
that die are those for which men refuse to die. The more love
grows, the more its eyes open to the needs of others, to the
miseries of men, and to compassion. The remedy for all the
sufferings of the modern brain lies in the enlargement of the
heart
through love, which forgets itself as the subject and begins to
love
the neighbor as the object. But he who lives for himself will
eventually find that nature, fellowman, and God are all
against
him. The so-called "persecution complex" is the result of
egotism.
The world seems against him who wants everything for himself.
Sex is moved by the desire to fill a moment between having
and
not having. It is an experience like looking at a sunset, or
twirling
one's thumbs to pass the time. It rests after one experience,
because glutted for the moment, and then waits for the
reappearance of a new craving or passion to be satisfied on a
totally different object. Love frowns upon this notion, for it sees
in
this nothing but the killing of the objects loved for the sake
of
self-satisfaction. Sex would give birds flight, but no nests;
hearts
emotions but no homes; throw the whole world into the
experience
of voyagers at sea, but with no ports. Instead of pursuing an
Infinite which is fixed, it substitutes the false infinity of
never
finding satisfaction. The infinite then becomes not the
possession
of love but the fruitless search for love, which is the basis of
so
many psychoses and neuroses. The infinite then becomes
restlessness, a merry-go-round of the heart which spins only
to
spin again. Real love, on the contrary, admits the need, the
thirst,
the passion, the craving, but it also admits an abiding
satisfaction
by adhesion to a value which transcends time and space. Love
unites itself to being and thus becomes perfect; sex unites itself
to
non-being and thus becomes irritation and anxiety. In love,
poverty becomes integrated into riches; need into
fulfillment;
yearning into joy; chase into capture. But sex is without the joy
of
offering. The wolf offers nothing when he kills the lamb. The
joy
of oblation is missing, for the egotist by his very nature
seeks
inflation. Love gives to receive. Sex receives so as not to give.
Love
is soul contact with another for the sake of perfection; sex is
body
contact with another for the sake of sublimation.
A body can exhaust itself, but it cannot nourish itself. If
man
needed only nourishment, he could devour love as he devours
food. But having a Spirit which needs the Divine Love as a
unitive
force, he can never be satisfied by devouring the love of
another
person. A potato has a nature; a man is a person. The former
can
be destroyed as a means to an end; the human may not. Sex
would
turn man into a vegetable and reduce a person to an animal.
Sex
makes hungry where most it satisfies, for the person needs
the
person, and a person is a person only when seen in an image
of
God.
Your cruellest pain is when you think of all
The honied treasure of your bodies spent
And no new life to show. O, then you feel
How people lift their hands against themselves,
And taste the bitterest of the punishment
Of those whom pleasure isolates. Sometimes
When darkness, silence, and the sleeping world
Give vision scope, you lie awake and see
The pale sad faces of the little ones
Who should have been your children, as they press
Their cheeks against your windows, looking in
With piteous wonder, homeless, famished babes,
Denied your wombs and bosoms.
