More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Such is the case with parents who spoil their children by interpreting faults as virtues, license as liberty, and anarchy as progressiveness.
It loves the other, not because of attractiveness, or talents, or sympathy, but because of God. To the Christian, a person is one for whom I must sacrifice myself, not one who must exist for my sake.
The vocation to marriage is a vocation to happiness, which comes through holiness and sanctity. Unity of two in one flesh is not something that God tolerates but something that He wills. Because He wills it, He sanctifies the couple through its use. Instead of diminishing in any way the union of their spirits with one another, it contributes to their ascension in love. The union of two in one flesh is the symbol of the union of their souls, and both in turn are a symbol of the union of Christ and His Church.
As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God’s love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life’s mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other’s inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God;
The pure in heart shall see God, because they always do His will. Purity does not begin in the body but in the will. From there it flows outward, cleansing thought, imagination, and, finally, the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure.
The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest.
Mary is the supreme instance of one assuming the social responsibilities of marriage without asking God for the recompense of personal love.
Impurity is the concentration on the individual without regard for the universal.
Impurity is a distraction from the cosmic and the universal, the affirmation of the non-eternal, the isolation of one part of self from the totality of life, and hence it is a deformation of life.
Purity is reverent inwardness not biological intactness.
Purity is a consciousness that each possesses a gift that can be given only once, and can be received only once. In the unity of flesh he makes her a woman; she makes him a man. They may enjoy the gift many times, but once given it can never be taken back, either in man or in woman.
Once that border line is crossed, neither belongs wholly to self. Their reciprocity has created dependence; the riddle has been solved, the mystery has been revealed; the dual have become a unity, either sanctioned by God or in defiance of His will.
She reveals that it is possible to have love without lust, or what Thompson calls “a passionless passion, a wild tranquillity.
But to do this, they must have a love higher than their own will and pleasure. Since there is another life beyond the natural, and higher love than the human,
SEX is a function of the whole personality and not of the body alone, much less of the sex organs alone.
Plato and his followers bequeathed the false idea to history that man is primarily spirit, or a rational being who, unfortunately, has a body. The soul, according to him, is in the body as a man rowing is in the boat. As there is no intrinsic connection between the two, so neither is there an intrinsic bond between body and soul.
If sex were only a physiological phenomenon restricted to a certain area, it would not have much repercussion on the psychic life of individuals.
Precisely because it is essentially bound up with the body–soul unity of a human, it affects him mentally, morally, and socially.
The cult of the body is best served by the cult of the soul. It is a by-product, not a goal; it is a fruit, not
he who does not spiritualize the flesh will carnalize his spirit.
hrm
There is no such thing as a choice between the flesh and the soul, because there is never flesh without the spirit and never spirit without the flesh.
Free and promiscuous marital relationships are the training ground for treating humans first flippantly, then cruelly.
As the encyclical on marriage expresses it: “This mutual inward moulding of husband and wife, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof.”
We say we no longer love one another, when we mean that the exchange of selfish pleasure is no longer satisfying.
What is called “love” today is often nothing more than a confused mixture of sentimental pathos, disguised egotism, Freudian complexes, frustrated living, and weakness of character.
Because marriage is knowledge, it follows that its unity is one that demands fidelity.
So, too, when man and woman come to the knowledge of another person; when they, as rational creatures, establish a unity in the flesh that before they never knew; they can go on enjoying that knowledge, but they never can reacquire it. So long as time endures, he gave to her the knowledge of man, and she gave to him the knowledge of woman. And they gave knowledge because they gave unity, not of object and mind, but of flesh and flesh. Others can repeat the knowledge, even unlawfully, but there was always someone who was the first to unfold the mystery of life.
Thus, the union between husband and wife is not an experience that may be forgotten. It is a knowledge or an identity that has permanence about it.
But making love in public is vulgar because, by its very nature, it is personal. It exists between two persons and only two, and therefore resents intrusion or vulgarity. Their love is spoiled when others know it, and so marriage is spoiled when a third knows its secret.
The woman can never return again to virginity; the man can never return again to ignorance. Something has happened to make them one, and from that oneness comes fidelity, so long as either has a body.
This outward expression of love in the home demands not only mutual help but must go further; it must have as its primary purpose that man and wife help each other day by day in forming and perfecting themselves in the interior life, so that through their partnership in life they may advance ever more and more in virtue, and above all that they may grow in true love towards God and their neighbor, on which indeed “dependeth the whole Law and the Prophets.”
But when love leaves, equality in the strict sense takes its place.
Such narrow rules assume the primacy of sex and not the bond of love, which is really the heart of the matter.
winning the other by honor and sanctification.
love is not a fusion but a communion.
The passing of time wears out bodies, but nothing can make a soul vanish or can diminish its eternal value.
Souls fall in love first, and then they are united in mind, and then there is a union in flesh.
The will not to prolong life is a confession that one lacks life. When the spirit has become sterile, then even human life seems worthless. And if one cannot bear the ennui and boredom of his own life, there is no urge to give life to others. The denial of the offspring is a sign of the deadening of the spirit. But the begetting of new life is a sign that the heart is so full of happiness and love that it will die unless it overflows.
They who bear the mystery of eternity in their hearts cannot bear the thought of time killing that mystery.
In marriages where the fruit of love is deliberately refused, not only is the incarnation of love denied but love itself is killed. There happens then in that trinity of human love a rupture, caused by the rejection of the living seal to their love. The love they now may profess to have for each other is only love of self in the other, a self-centered, self-feeding, self-destroying, and death-giving love, which is worse than hatred. Both partners in crime are cut off from each other through the death of love. In their separation, they become two isolated beings, a duality instead of a trinity.
A woman is capable of more sustained sacrifice than man. Man is more apt to be the hero in one great, passionate outburst of courage. But a woman is heroic through the years, months, and even seconds of daily life, the very repetition of her toils giving them the semblance of the commonplace. Not only her days but her nights, not only her mind but her body, must share in the Calvary of mothering.
A woman is most a woman when she is a Christian. A wife is most a spouse when she is a mother.
Children have a messianic character in the family. First of all, they represent the conquest of Love over the insatiable ego; they symbolize defeat of selfishness and the victory of charity.
He can give supremacy to the flesh or to the spirit, but one must “suffer” at the cost of the other. Love’s greatest luxury is to spend itself on others.
The intelligentsia, who are educated beyond their intelligence, stay away from children for the same reason that they stay away from God.
