Through the varied experiences of budding love, each partner gradually comes to realize that, prior to meeting the person he or she loves, he or she was an incomplete being, but suffered little for it. He lived as if he were self-sufficient. However, he felt the need to increase his assets in order to complete himself. In reality, he lacked a complementary being. Not someone to help him fill his gaps, or to provide him with some additional being or having, but someone to bring him what he could never have on his own: the other half of the world.

This other half of the world - whether male or female - is not received like a commodity that you come into possession of once and for all. A thing is acquired, but a person is received, in the measure of the gift you make of yourself; and as soon as you close your arms to appropriate her, she escapes you or leaves you nothing to embrace but a thing, the thing she has become by abdicating her freedom.

The discovery of one’s incompleteness in relation to the other sex is an important spiritual event, because it’s the realization of a radical, indisputable poverty. It’s true that most people make this discovery in love: they learn of their poverty while being delivered from it. Delivered, yes, but on condition that the spouse remains present, given.

No one is exempt from reacting to the discovery of this incompleteness. Consent or revolt: the only alternative. The only explanation for so much behavior, not only sexual behavior but also social behavior, is the rejection of this poverty. Psychologists have stressed how important it is to accept one’s sex; have they sufficiently pointed out that it is no less important to be only one of the two sexes, and therefore to consent to the incompleteness and poverty that follow?

And also to dependence, because the poor are necessarily dependent. Rejecting this dependence is the reaction of a shy adolescent. In his case, it’s understandable: he doesn’t want to sacrifice his autonomy, and in a way he’s right. Later, but only later, he will discover that in love, human beings can become dependent without this dependence being “alienation”, an abdication of their human dignity. The adult, in fact, finds in this consensual dependence the maturing of his personality, the exaltation of his freedom.

In following me, you’ve no doubt already caught a glimpse of how God uses this awareness of man’s and woman’s incompleteness in relation to each other to His own ends. He wants to lead them to discover a much more fundamental incompleteness, and to consent to it. “Indeed, the love of God appeals in us to the same faculty as that of creatures, to the feeling that we alone are not complete, and that the Supreme Good in which we will reach completeness is someone outside of us.” It’s ridiculous for man to pretend to be self-sufficient and to ignore the other half of the world; but it’s even more grotesque and tragic to pretend to do without God. In fact, this is the primordial sin: “You will be like gods”, Satan whispered in Eve’s ear, autonomous, independent, sovereignly free!

In relation to God, man’s poverty is absolute: this is the basic truth to which your catechumens must accede. Without God, man has neither beginning nor end, so to speak. Indeed, he exists only through God’s intervention. This “I”, master of itself, which affirms: I am, I will, I do, has not brought itself into existence: it is of God, it has been given to itself by God. But there’s more: man receives his being from God at every moment. Just as the spot of light on my bedroom wall derives all its reality from the sunbeam filtering through the shutters, so my being has consistency and duration only through the creative word that brought me into existence and keeps me there.

But there’s a more dramatic kind of poverty: the poverty of existing and not being able to reach out and embrace that for which we were made, that in which we would find fullness of being and happiness. And so it is with man in relation to God. Deprived of God’s friendship, he is the living dead, for he is made for God, to know him, to love him, to possess him, just as the eye is made to see, the intellect to understand, the heart to love, the man for the woman and the woman for the man.

If the experience of human love can lead us to understand and accept this fundamental poverty with regard to God, it must also reassure the man who, having reached the threshold of faith, is panic-stricken at the thought of consenting to God, of throwing himself into the abyss of total dependence on him. He fears sacrificing his human greatness. In a way, it’s a respectable sentiment: a just idea of his nobility; but from whom does he derive this nobility, if not from God? God is even more jealous of it than he is of himself; he cannot ask man to deny it. The experience of love is very enlightening: giving oneself, making oneself dependent out of love, does not make us fall into the possession of another, like a slave, that thing in the hands of the master, but on the contrary brings out our personality in all its splendor. Difficult to grasp by reason, it’s an obvious truth for the one who loves.

But it has to be said: just as the union of two beings requires that the love between them remain alive, otherwise it will resemble the bondage of two convicts, so faith in God imperiously requires, to be lived in all its truth, a love of God that is fervent, alive, each day new and each day truer. Because they have this experience, mystics sing enthusiastically of their joy at having discovered radical poverty and absolute dependence on God. They are the free beings.

A man who suddenly realizes that he’s been waiting for a woman all his life, that without her he’s incomplete and can’t accomplish his work, first steps forward as a conqueror. But he soon realizes his mistake.

Until then, he felt he could acquire everything through money or conquer everything through intellectual, moral or physical force. When he failed, he blamed himself, his lack of money or strength. But now he’s discovered another world, where wealth and strength are disqualified: the world of love. He would be laughed at if he claimed to obtain love for money! As the Song of Songs put it some twenty-five centuries ago: “Were one to offer all the wealth of his house for love, he would be utterly despised. “ (Ct 8, 7) And if he resorted to force, he would prove to be a brute.

In this other world, the world of love, the world of the person, of the mystery of the person, the person is not a thing to be seized, but a freedom to be given. And this gift of love is a kind of miracle, unpredictable and always free. But how do we get it? There are only two ways. Or seduce, in the true sense of the word, i.e. to love, to love with such a love that it brings out love in the heart of the other person. Or sigh. The word sounds ridiculous, yet it covers a great reality: the humility of a being who both confesses his love and acknowledges that he in no way deserves this priceless gift: the love of the one he loves.

So when the two lovers, having called each other, respond, it is in an attitude of amazed gratitude that each opens to the gift of the other:

“Get down on your knees and I’ll get down on my knees!
And consider my soul and, marvelling, I’ll take yours in reverence
In my arms, having knelt, for it is God’s creation,
And I will protect it, holding it close to my heart.”

Those who have received this priceless gift should not imagine that they have acquired it for ever. Every day we must wait with humble reverence for the gift of the beloved, every day we must welcome with the wonder and gratitude of the first day a gift that is new every day. Woe to anyone who indulges in a possession mentality, who excludes himself from the world of love.

This experience of gratitude casts an admirable light on man’s relationship with his God. Through it, the Lord wants us to be led to an understanding of the world of grace. Grace and gratitude are the same word.

Even more monstrous than the ambition to buy human love, the Song of Songs stigmatizes the pretension of obtaining God’s gifts for money. Such a claim aroused the Apostle Peter to violent anger: “ When Simon saw that the Spirit was conferred by the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money and said, “Give me this power too, so that anyone upon whom I lay my hands may receive the holy Spirit.” But Peter said to him, “May your money perish with you, because you thought that you could buy the gift of God with money.“” (Acts 8:18-20)

Less crude, but of the same order, is the error of all those who expect salvation from their observance of a law, their moral prowess, their merits. They too ignore the grace and transcendence of Christian salvation. If salvation were a kind of paradise on earth, they’d be excusable, but the salvation God offers us is something quite different: it’s Him, known, loved, possessed by a possession of love. As we have seen, the gift of love cannot be bought or deserved. All the more so in the case of God.

And so, before God, man must understand that God’s gift can only be pure divine initiative. If there is one point of dogma that theology has long pondered and fiercely defended, it is the absolute gift of grace. All man has to do is accept it, and this act of opening himself to God’s gift is itself a great gift from God.

So we have to give up trying to conquer God the hard way. But how then can we obtain his love, which we have discovered is more precious to us than anything else? Between man and woman, I was talking about seduction; here, it’s out of the question: who could love God enough to wrest love from his heart? Then all that’s left is to become a “suitor”. This is the profound meaning of prayer. And we need to understand that prayer is not pressure on God, but an expectation, a hope, a breach in our being, through which God will invade us.

When, for his part, God wants to conquer man and unite him in love, he can only respect the great law of love that he himself promulgated and that I defined above: “Man is not a thing to be taken but a freedom to be given.” It remains for him to seduce man. And it is in this light that we must understand all of Holy History. Through his miracles, his great works and his confessions of love, God first won over a people, one of the poorest and smallest, just as a man conquers the heart of a woman. He spoke to her like an enamored husband: “And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you. “ (Is 62, 5) And when, like an adulteress, Israel betrays the man who called himself her husband, he, each time, sets out to win her over anew: “Therefore, I will allure her now; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak persuasively to her.” (Hos 2, 10)

Finally, the hour came for God to make the supreme attempt at seduction, to win over not just the hearts of one of the peoples of the universe, but the whole of humanity. And the Son of God became flesh, and dwelt among us, and gave mankind the most indisputable proof of love: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”. (John 15:13)

But the vast majority of people don’t understand the language of love! Nevertheless, over the last twenty centuries, millions of people have let themselves be seduced, given themselves to Christ, opened themselves up to the gift of Christ. And they remain in him, and he in them.

1: Incompleteness: the loving relationship reveals our radical poverty by making us aware of our incompleteness. This spiritual discovery shows that we depend on the other to achieve wholeness, and accepting this lack leads us to a personal maturity that makes us freer, while its denial leads us to dissatisfaction and unhappiness. As he does throughout this chapter, Father Henri Caffarel transposes this awareness of our lack in the relationship of love to our relationship with God. God gives us existence and wholeness, and understanding our absolute dependence on Him enables a more authentic relationship. Mystics celebrate this radical poverty by acknowledging their total dependence on God and the fullness He offers.

2: The grace of love: Love cannot be bought or obtained by merit, as the Song of Songs illustrates: “Were one to offer all the wealth of his house for love, he would be utterly despised.” The virtues that accompany it are humility, expectation, self-giving and selflessness. In the relationship with God, this means that His grace is a free gift that is not obtained by achievement or merit. This divine love is generous and abundant, and our task is to open ourselves to receive it.

All we can do is pray, meeting Him to give ourselves the opportunity to welcome His grace, generously poured out and which we often miss. Prayer is the language of our love for God, of our encounter with and receptivity to Him, who is always waiting for us.

We need to find a balance between the roles traditionally assigned to women, based on the “sacred” nature of their nature, and the rigid force of feminist ideology, which presents them as the pure and simple product of a macho “culture” that has nothing to do with their biology.

When we see young couples living together, we recognize that they are the heirs of this indisputable feminist struggle. Women have finally been recognized, at least in one part of the world, as equal to men in dignity, intelligence, organizational capacity and responsibilities, but all these external achievements must not cause them to lose their deep-rooted identity. Women can do the same things as men, but they do them differently.

Within the couple, this change in the woman’s role has been a great source of enrichment, but also of conflict. How do we manage work at home? How much time will each of them devote to the children? Will it always be the same person who gives up higher professional positions?

If young couples experience this as an ongoing struggle for equality, it will be difficult to achieve a climate of balance and peace. One thing is to reach a fair compromise between the two to share the burden of family and professional life, and another is to be aware of those differences in male/female approach that will nuance all their relationships. If they don’t accept that the different gendered condition of men and women is not limited to their biological organs, but affects all aspects of their lives, they won’t experience it as an asset, but as a perpetual cause of conflict.

If the balance we seek is based solely on justice and never on the gratitude of love-charity, it will always be in jeopardy. The goal of male-female union is to enter into the fullness of the male-female relationship, and above all to become more of a couple.

1: The love of our spouse makes us fully woman and fully man. Adam was the first to experience incompleteness, that feeling of sadness in the face of the reality of lack, of absence.Genesis 1:26-27: God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”; God created man in his own image, male and female he created them. Genesis 2:20: “So the man gave names to all the animals, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But he found no helper to match.” Genesis 2:22-23: With the rib he had taken from the man, he fashioned a woman and brought her to the man. The man said, “This time, this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” Are we each aware of our own incompleteness? At what point in our personal history did we realize it? How would we define it? What is this “other half of the world” that our partner brings to us?

2: “A thing is acquired, but a person is received, in the measure of the gift you give him of yourself…” What does this phrase inspire in us? We all experience the grace of God’s love, God’s gift. How does this inform the way we live married love? In our daily lives, how do we live out this reciprocal gift, this grace, through the various tasks at the service of the conjugal or family community?

3: To what extent does our married love make us aware of our poverty? Of our dependence on love? How do we live it? What would you say about Father Henri Caffarel’s idea that loving dependence sets us free? Let’s look together for concrete examples.

4: How and when did we discover our incompleteness in relation to God? To what extent has our incompleteness in relation to our spouse enabled us to discover and consent to a much deeper, more fundamental incompleteness? Let’s name these discoveries.

5: How do our marital poverty and our absolute poverty in relation to God illuminate each other? Are we convinced that we were made for God, that without God’s friendship we’d be dead and buried? How do we conquer and nurture conjugal love and God’s love, day after day?

The Lord God said: It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suited to him. So the Lord God formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each living creature was then its name. The man gave names to all the tame animals, all the birds of the air, and all the wild animals; but none proved to be a helper suited to the man. So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The Lord God then built the rib that he had taken from the man into a woman. When he brought her to the man, the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of man this one has been taken.”

1: What discoveries have we made, what confirmations have we received from reading these texts by Father Henri Caffarel? Both for our married love and for our personal relationship with God as a couple.

2: What fruits of the Sit Down could we share?

3: A gratuitous love of our spouse and of the Lord is built day by day. How is it a source of grace? Please explain.