English
EspañolThe gaze of gazes! The face whose light overshadows others! The only voice I hear amongst other agents! The caress that touches my heart! The silence to express the ineffable or simply to contemplate ourselves! To love each other is to live a life that is truly alive. Those who love another know it to be true.
Text
In speaking of marriage, Jesus refers us to yet another page of Genesis, which, in its second chapter, paints a splendid and detailed portrait of the couple. First, we see the man, who anxiously seeks “a helper fit for him” (vv. 18, 20), capable of alleviating the solitude which he feels amid the animals and the world around him. The original Hebrew suggests a direct encounter, face to face, eye to eye, in a kind of silent dialogue, for where love is concerned, silence is always more eloquent than words. It is an encounter with a face, a “thou,” who reflects God’s own love and is man’s “best possession, a helper fit for him and a pillar of support,” in the words of the biblical sage (Sir 36:24). Or again, as the woman of the Song of Solomon will sing in a magnificent profession of love and mutual self-bestowal: “My beloved is mine, and I am his… I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” (2:16; 6:3). (The Joy of Love, n.12)
Commentary
The love between spouses requires constant communication. Through words, of course, spouses must tell each other that they care for one another, that they love one another. Love is not deaf or mute. It is not dull, foolish, or idiotic. It is intimate, lively, and fluid communication and the appropriate resources to achieve this. Love asks for its quiet times and necessary spaces. It is the song of songs—the most vivid life.
However, the most crucial dialogue is not carried out in words but in deeds. Love is actual, concrete acts, here and now. It is a verb meant to be conjugated for each other and together, in unison, agreement and consensus.
In every means of communication available for spouses to share their intimacies, they manifest the permanent search for the beloved’s good and embody self-forgetfulness, which are joyful abnegations made in favor of the beloved. The interest for our beloved´s wellbeing is so great that personal interest is hardly perceived. In other words, when loving, selfishness is dissipated. The one who loves is more attentive to his beloved than to himself.
And when this mutual predilection for the beloved spouse, charged with loving activity, is a reciprocal and faithful correspondence, a new and profound fecundity arises in conjugal love. What is this profound fecundity? The birth of a new intimacy, which transcends the singular you and I represented in “we.” It is impossible to be two “we”; the subject of “our union of love” is always one: “we.” Through love, we are no longer just you and me, a duality. Moreover, together we are the unity of “as one,” which refers to the union of love.
Within the “united we,” there are no longer two different views, two different ways of seeing the world and reacting to life’s events. Within “our union,” there is the experience of a single point of view, “ours.” It is no longer yours or mine, although it incorporates and brings them together. It is a very deep and intimate plus regarding duality. It is a plus of becoming as one.
The summit of conjugal love resides in both spouses giving life to such a union. Its genesis lasts a lifetime. Why? Because it is always possible to love more and better. One can always be more deeply united.
There is still time for such a fascinating adventure. It is never too late.
