Love is for Life: Pastoral Letter of the Irish Bishops
PART I God's Plan For Love
(1.) LOVE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN:
THE PROMISE AND THE REALITY
1. There are few things in life more beautiful and more exalting
than the experience of love between man and woman. When a young man and
woman are attracted to each other, their love arouses the deepest emotions,
the highest expectations, they have ever known. For them, nothing seems
to matter but their love. Nothing seems impossible to their love. For each
of them, the other is "the only you there is".
2. Just to see a man and woman in love evokes happiness in others. Others
share in some sense the happiness of a boy and girl in the bliss of their
young love, when their whole world is irradiated by its glow and each of
them finds a new purpose and a new joy in living because of the other. Weddings
are among life's happiest experiences for all who are present. Even in an
age when marriage is the scene of much unhappiness and instability, people
never tire of looking at a bridal couple, bright with the promise of lifelong
happiness. Happiness is evoked in all by seeing a husband and wife in the
mature and settled happiness of the evening of their marriage, when they
have "grown into" one another's personalities to a point where,
as has been said, each one singly would be "much less than half of
what the two of them have become together".
3. Love in marriage and in a home and family is one of the most important
conditions for the initiation of young people into the knowledge of God.
It is one of the best assurances for children of attaining personal maturity
and growing into an adult faith. The circle of love which unites parents
with one another and with their children is as necessary for the health
and stability of children's personality as food and clothing are for their
bodily health. To be deprived of love is a form of malnutrition. Because
God Himself is Love, a lack of love in marriage and in the home can make
it difficult for children to form a deep relationship with God, our loving
Father.
4. In real life, alas, our need for love can bring disillusionment and heartbreak.
Even within marriage, love can turn sour and make life a misery. The danger
of this is all the greater because of romantic ideas about love and unrealistic
expectations held about it. Children who grow up in a loveless home and
a violent neighbourhood have difficulty in forming deep and stable love
relationships in their own lives. The conditions in which the poor are forced
to live are not favourable either to married love or to the love of parents
for children. Yet the poor can be rich in the things of the spirit and their
homes can be rich in love. There can be more spiritual poverty and more
starvation from want of love in homes where there is too much wealth than
in those where there is too little. The promises which love makes, therefore,
are often contradicted by reality. Love needs protection against human weakness
if it is to be true to its best self and realise its full potential.
5. It is necessary to examine the nature of love between men and
women more deeply in order to try and understand both its light and its
shadow. Especially we must turn to God's revelation and see what it teaches
us about the true nature of love. Above all, we must see how a Christian
community can help its members to discover the true grandeur of love as
it comes from God, and to realise that grandeur in their own relationships.
6. Christians are called today to fix their minds and hearts on the ideal
which God laid down for married love as it was "in the beginning".
The Church invites them to seek to identify the forces and pressures, the
allurements and deceptions, that masquerade as purveyors of the "good
life", and to see them for what they really are harbingers of disillusionment
and degradation of the person. Married happiness is so great a blessing
for humanity that it is worth all the effort needed to attain it. This Pastoral
Letter is an attempt by the Bishops of Ireland to reflect with their people
on the mystery and the grandeur and the beauty of human love and sexuality
and marriage. We invite our people to read it carefully and prayerfully
and to try to translate its ideals into practice in daily life and in society.
We begin this reflection in the name of God our Father, who "has let
us know the mystery of His purpose, the hidden plan He so kindly laid in
Christ from the beginning". (Ephesians 1:9)
Net publishing courtesy of the Newman Center at Caltech
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