God's World and Our Place in It by Fulton J. Sheen

Author:Fulton J. Sheen [Sheen, Fulton J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2013-12-10T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Married couples help fill God’s world

Love seeks not only permanence, which accounts for the unbreakable bond of marriage, but also fruitfulness, which is the bearing of children. Married life should have a harvest, for all love should bear fruit. In order to understand the reasons for the fruitfulness of marriage, one must understand the meaning of love.

Love may be defined as mutual self-giving and self-outpouring, because love implies two persons who give themselves to one another. This is merely another way of saying that all love is sacrifice. Hence, the greatest joy in love is to throw oneself on the altar of the one loved. Its sweet feast is its own hunger and the wine of its own tears. Its richest banquet is to gird its loins and to serve. Its greatest jealousy is to be outdone by its cherished rival of the least advantage in self-giving, for without some spice of martyrdom, love’s tastes are tasteless, and without the arrow that wounds, its quivers are barren and vain.

Because love is a mutual self-emptying, husband and wife vie with one another in the sacrifice of self. The woman sacrifices the irreparable that God has given her, that which makes her a virgin, that, too, which possibly is the hidden reason for her power to love but only once. The man, in his turn, sacrifices the liberty and freedom of his youth, the power to devote himself entirely to that love which he finds at the beginning of the journey of life. These two cups, one filled with beauty and innocence, the other with devotion and courage, flow one into another, as two rivers that run their course to the great ocean of the absorbing Love which is God.

But love is not only mutual self-giving; if it were but this, there would be only surrender. Love is not only mutual self-outpouring; if it were but this, it would be barren as a desert and would fructify nothing.

That which is surrendered but can never be recovered is the source of the tearful agony of loss. If love were only dual selfishness, with perpetual change and barter, like commerce between two shipwrecked sailors on a desert isle, it would yield no profit to either, but only be the enkindling of a flame in which each would be consumed.

Hence, love, in addition to being a giving or an outpouring, must also be a recovery. The escape from mere mutuality, which is death, is in a reciprocity that vies to give all, but is ever defeated by receiving. In other words, love must increase and multiply; it must recover itself in a harvest; it must, like the love of earth and tree, be fruitful unto new love. Something must result from love, for all love seeks to externalize itself as a gift and thus reproduce itself. That is why all love tends toward an incarnation. The husband and wife must have some reward and recovery for this sacrifice.

But how can their mutual self-outpouring end

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