The Happiness of the beloved - If one is ever to mount to a higher love, there must now intervene sacrifice for the sake of the beloved. Both Husband and wife are suffering from mediocrity; it is the stage which God condemns: 'Thou art neither hot nor cold; therefore I will vomit thee from my mouth.' No one ever escapes out of dulness or mediocrity without sacrifice, or the purification of ego. To repeat, both now suffer from mediocrity. Spiritualization consists not in reforming the other, but in reforming self. All attempts to reform the other deepens one's own egotism, for they are based on the assumption that the reformer needs no reformation. One's partner must never be an instrument of one's will; rather, in marriage, the partner is a limit to one's will. The other person is not to be regarded as being like a subjugated colony, in which one may suppress governments and customs by one's own will. This is egotism, and egotism in marriage is assassination. Purification is not to be had just by silence, for silence is egotism. The taking of love's stronghold comes after the siege of self, in which individuality and selfishness are crushed.
Love now means not to own and to possess, but to be owned and to be possessed. It measures life, not like a wine to be drunk, but like a wine to be poured out; its greatest jealousy is the fear of being outdone by the cherished rival in the least advantage of self-giving; its greatest joy is to serve; and its noblest symbol is that of the Cross which has arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.
There begins to be an interpenetration, more spiritual than physical, once each ego is killed; one lives for the other; there is an indwelling, a fusion of two, which is closer and less intermittent than any physical unity. Victor Hugo wrote a poem in which Boaz spoke about the death of the woman he loved:
How long it is since she with whom I lay
O Lord, has left for thine my widowed bed;
Yet still our spirits mingle, as our clay,
And she half living yet, and I half dead.
Very few married people understand that life is a criss-cross pattern; the threads of the fabric go awry early in marriage, and during the second crisis they cross in the opposite direction. In the beginning of love, in the sex period, it is dinners, dances, rides, parties and cocktail hours, which prove the cement of love. Now in the second stage the cement is totally different but it is equally real, namely, misfortunes, children, sickness, sorrow, trials, and bereavements. Pleasures do not unite people as much as pain and sorrow can. Soldiers on a battle field are more closely united than people viewing a scene in a movie theatre.
Purification leads to a de-egotization of self which has proceeded through these stages:
I seek my happiness through another.
I seek my happiness with another.
I wish the happiness of the other.
I suffer with the other.
I rejoice with the other.
My happiness is in the other.
With the Holy Father in Rome
2 weeks ago
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