You passionately want this person you love to be fulfilled, to acquire all possible perfection, to live an ever more intense life. But as long as you confine yourself to giving him your devotion, to sharing with him only your material and moral goods, he will remain deprived of what is most necessary to him: the gift of yourself. He too could say to you, “It’s not the goods, it’s not the services, it’s you I want, not just something from you.” Loving is much more than giving, it’s giving yourself, dispossessing yourself for the benefit of the other, giving up your right to self-determination, joyfully consenting to dependence. Love means exodus and ecstasy. Exodus: leaving one’s father and mother, one’s home and possessions, and finally leaving oneself behind to reach the distant island of the other. Ecstasy: losing sight of oneself, being outside oneself, present to the other, given. A young scout once said, “To love is to camp in the heart of another. “

Does this mean that the humble gestures of love, the modest attentions, are superfluous and trivial? That would be to ignore our carnal condition and the laws of communication between human beings. A bouquet of violets on a birthday is a precious gift, because it’s a visible sign to the recipient of the profound self-giving of the giver. Like the bouquet of violets, the whole of married life should be charged with meaning. Cohabitation, sexual relations, gestures of tenderness lose all value if they are empty of soul, if they are not signs of a deep, mutual gift.

But I’m talking as if exchanges between spouses only have the value of a sign. Not only do they express the gift of self, they also renew and deepen it. In love, as in religion, rites and signs are necessary, because they are effective in updating and reactivating the soul’s fervor.

At the level of agape, to love is also to give oneself, to surrender one’s deepest self, but then it’s a reformed self, recreated, enriched by agape, henceforth capable of loving “as” Christ loves, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Better still, it’s giving way to God’s love:

I want to learn with God to reserve nothing, to be that all-good, all-given thing that reserves nothing and from whom everything is taken!
Take, Rodrigue, take my heart, take my love, take this God who fills me!
The force by which I love you is no different from the force by which you exist.
I am forever united to that thing which gives you eternal life“ (Le Soulier de Satin).

Each spouse should be able to say to the other, adapting Saint Paul’s phrase: I love you, but it is no longer I who love you, but Christ who loves you in me, who gives himself through me (cf. Gal 2:20).

Just as the ball thrown against the wall returns to the player, so the gift returns to the giver if it is not welcomed. Reciprocity in giving therefore requires reciprocity in receiving. I’ll never come out of myself if there’s no one to receive me.

The term “welcome” seems to imply passivity. But make no mistake: in love, welcoming is a very active attitude. It means always being ready to receive a confidence, a confession, a gift, a testimony of love - with respect, intelligence and gratitude. It’s about accepting the other person not as we’d like them to be, but as they are, with their inadequacies as well as their qualities, with their sinfulness as well as their grace. “You no longer have to be someone else for me to love you.

But don’t get me wrong: it’s not just at home or close to home, it’s within oneself, in the very depths of one’s spiritual being, that the loved one must be welcomed. A friend wrote to me: “Brigitte is more and more interior to me”; I understood from these words that her love was progressing.

Paradoxical as it may seem, I would say that welcoming must precede giving, in the sense that the other must always feel expected and desired. Welcoming is first and foremost greed, the greed of love, not to be confused with selfish covetousness. Greed that shows the loved one that he or she is needed to be happy, that he or she is capable of making others happy - an experience that I’m not far from thinking is indispensable, irreplaceable, for awakening one of the most secret fibres in the human heart.

It has been said that agape is a pure, rigorously selfless gift. Yes, in God, in the Father, in whom it has its source, it is a gushing fullness. In the Son, on the other hand, love is first and foremost acceptance of the Father’s gift, and the same is true of God’s children. So seeing your spouse as a “living sacrament” of the Lord, eagerly awaiting God’s gift and eagerly welcoming it, are all fundamental spiritual attitudes that agape commands.

Will you reproach me for having sacrificed too much to the psychology of married love? I don’t think I deserve it, so convinced am I that by playing the game of human love, honestly, daily, perseveringly, spouses allow agape to grow and permeate their whole being and their whole life, making of it an offering pleasing to God. Does this not echo the most authentic teaching on Christian marriage: the grace of the sacrament of marriage uses all the activities of married life to communicate itself? I am suspicious of those who, on the pretext of the supernatural, begin by neglecting the demanding laws of human love. (…)

It’s already true of human love that it achieves the unity of life; it’s even truer of agape. Insofar as it is love of God, it regulates, orders and unifies the inclinations, aspirations, wills and virtues of the spouses, all their varied activities - family, professional, social and religious - and directs them towards its own end: the glory of the Lord. Insofar as it is love of the spouse, it assumes, integrates and unifies in a single bundle, in a single impulse, all the components of conjugal love: attraction and physical impulse, testimonies of tenderness, and all their varied feelings of devotion, esteem, respect, generosity, gratitude, fidelity… It enlists them in its service, communicates their impulse to them - not, moreover, without healing them, refining them, elevating them, infusing them with purity, fervor, holiness.

Between these two children of God who practice the new commandment, married life undergoes an admirable transfiguration. And to think that some households fear the intervention of agape for the integrity of their conjugal love!

Here, sketched out, is the ideal to which Christian spouses aspire under the impulse of agape. Once again, I’m afraid, some will accuse me of being an unrepentant idealist. But do Christian households want to understand their union in the light of Christ’s teachings? Do they want to play right into the hands of the one who came to make “all things new”? Would it be enough to present Christians with studies in marital psychology, more or less seasoned with Christian morality? For my part, I refuse to do so. Nothing seems more serious than half-truths that ease the conscience and, ultimately, dispense with any spiritual effort. If there are those who are discouraged by the ideal, isn’t it because they refuse to be condemned by it? Just as I, a priest, am condemned by the holiness of the Curé d’Ars. But if we accept this condemnation, the ideal becomes a force of attraction.

As we have seen, conjugal love aspires to reciprocity, but this reciprocity in knowledge, in care, in gift, is not the ultimate end to which the dynamism of love tends. Beyond the exchanges, the sharing, the back-and-forth of giving, there is communion. Remember our diagram: relationship, love, communion. Conjugal love postulates communion at every level: in the flesh as well as in feelings, in intellectual life as well as in moral life. Many people misunderstand the nature of this communion. They see it as passivity, as indulgence: love resting on desire in reciprocal possession, passive adherence to a shared ideal. It’s something else altogether: a shared activity, an ardent life.

Conjugal agape, too, tends towards a communion of its own, far more intimate, stronger and richer than any other. Agape unites the spouses at the level of their Christian selves, making them “one heart and one soul”, as it is said of the first disciples (Acts 4:32). Far from being passive, this communion through agape is an intense, shared activity, a synergy, the participation of two in the same vital act of knowing and loving God, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit who indwells the spouses. Saint John’s promise is verified for them: “God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us, that he has given us of his Spirit.” (1 Jn 4:16,13). “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “Abba, Father!” (Rom 8:14-15).

Such communion is not miraculously given one day, but is built up little by little through the multiform action of conjugal agape, of which it will be the masterpiece. If it’s true that any progress in mutual love strengthens it, it must also be directly pursued. And there are many ways to work towards it: it’s to seek, husband and wife together, the knowledge of God by reading and meditating on his Word, by sharing religious thoughts and feelings; it’s to give ourselves together to the Lord’s works: raising children, welcoming others, serving the Church; it’s also and above all to adore and praise God, to give him thanks and love him together.

Then, sometimes, after a long period “faithful to fraternal communion” (Acts 2:42), the spouses have a marvellous experience: they realize that the same Holy Spirit gives them both the same light, the same love, the same prayer, the same joy. St John’s verse suddenly becomes luminous for them: “We know, we experience, that we have passed from death to life, because we love one another”. Because they love each other, Life has arisen between them and in each of them.

St. Thomas uses some admirable expressions to describe the communion achieved by agape: “It is a sharing in the goods of eternal life”: “a common participation in the happiness of God”.

As we have seen, sacred authors have used the term koinônia to define this communion achieved through agape - between two or three Christians, as well as between all. This is none other than the “communion of saints” in which you profess to believe in the recitation of the creed, and which so many Christians equate with some “compensation fund” for merits, when in fact it is the prodigious reality of the union of hearts and souls, under the influence of a living agape, the great spiritual community that all God’s children form together.

But this communion is not only spiritual and invisible, it is also situated in space and time, it is “incarnate” and, in this respect, another Greek word is used to designate it: ecclesia, church. It designates the same reality as koinônia, but whereas koinônia emphasizes the inner, invisible aspect, ecclesia emphasizes the outer, institutional aspect.

Both terms are worth remembering when talking about the home founded by and on the sacrament of marriage. It is, as I have just shown, a spiritual community animated by agape; it is a koinônia, a reduced communion of saints; but it is also an ecclesia, a domestic ecclesia, a small church, a visible cell of the Church where the koinônia takes shape, where the mystery of the great Church is actualized and lived out, and all the more perfectly because agape is more alive there. These two notions of koinônia and ecclesia are like two windows opening onto the depth of the mystery of Christian marriage.

In this chapter, Father Henri Caffarel continues the development of his discourse on the three fundamental aspects of married love. After speaking in chapter 6 about knowing and caring for one another, he turns here to the theme of giving and receiving. It is probably in this chapter that Father Henri Caffarel’s demanding character is most apparent, for this concept of conjugal communion rests on the ideal of love that Christ has for each of us, as the ultimate goal of our conjugal love. No more, no less.

For loving is much more than giving ourselves to one another. Loving (at this level) means freeing my deepest self, perfected by spiritual love (agape), to love as Christ loves us, even to the point of self-sacrifice. This means giving way to God’s love. This ambitious goal can be read in the quote adapted from Galatians: “I love you, but it is no longer I who love you, but Christ who loves you in me, who gives himself to you through me”. (Gal 2:20)

And it all starts with giving ourselves to each other, and welcoming each other. Welcoming means accepting the other not as we would like them to be, but as they are, with all their faults and qualities. And the gift we give to the other must be an unreserved and unrequited gift. In agape, we find this characteristic of God’s overflowing, infinite love. This love should be our ideal. Sure, it’s demanding and difficult, but it’s a beautiful and attractive ideal, and for this reason it should also be a source of motivation for marriage.

The ultimate goal of married love lies not so much in the reciprocity of giving and receiving, but in communion at every level. This communion must be understood as a common activity, a common life inspired by the Spirit, which transcends the earthly and approaches the divine, as we understand the communion of saints.

Finally, we were able to recognize that this desire for the absolute, which inhabited the love of one for the other and was never fully satisfied, was a call for both of them to seek God together. We also discovered that this intimate and profound communion did not distance the couple from others, but opened them up to the world, that this gift of communion was not only a covenant between the two of them with Christ, but that it pushed them towards all those around them who expected them to be a visible sign, the sacrament of another Love, which they would not otherwise recognize.

1: Giving and receiving. This undoubtedly requires time during which the Lord will work on us. How do we put this into practice in our daily married life? What are the components of our gift to and acceptance of others, of our greed for love? What obstacles do we encounter? At the same time as we give ourselves to or welcome our spouse, do we give God to our spouse? And do we welcome Him through our spouse? And in what way?

2: Gestures of love are a visible sign our love for our partner. What are these gestures of love, these rituals that we practice with each other, that we’ve put in place and that have the power to express the gift of ourselves? Have we forgotten them? How can we renew them? How do these gestures, these rituals, bring us and our spouse closer to God?

3: The supremacy of agape. According to Father Henri Caffarel, agape “regulates, orders and unifies the inclinations, aspirations, wills and virtues of the spouses, as well as all their varied activities - family, professional, social and religious - and directs them towards its own end: the glory of the Lord”. Agape also gives human love its impetus, its fervour, its thirst for holiness, while at the same time healing it. In what circumstances have we observed this? How can we continue to implement a love that is more and more agape, that is, more and more in line with God’s love?

4: The supremacy of agape. According to Father Henri Caffarel, agape “regulates, orders and unifies the inclinations, aspirations, wills and virtues of the spouses, as well as all their varied activities - family, professional, social and religious - and directs them towards its own end: the glory of the Lord”. Agape also gives human love its impetus, its fervour, its thirst for holiness, while at the same time healing it. In what circumstances have we observed this? How can we continue to implement a love that is more and more agape, that is, more and more in line with God’s love?

Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth. [Now] this is how we shall know that we belong to the truth and reassure our hearts before him in whatever our hearts condemn, for God is greater than our hearts and knows everything. Beloved, if [our] hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And his commandment is this: we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us. Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit that he gave us.

1: Let’s share our understanding of agape love and how we live, or strive to live, day by day, progressively from this agape love?

2: Conjugal communion and the communion of saints. In what circumstances have we experienced being “one heart and one soul”? What can help us, personally and as a couple, to increase our knowledge of God, our love of God? Are we aware that participating together in the Lord’s worksWorks of the Lord: educating children, welcoming others, serving the Church. increases our love for each other and for God? Let’s give some examples. Have these attitudes made us “aware that the same Holy Spirit arouses in them both the same light, the same love, the same prayer, the same joy”? How do we live conjugal communion in the different aspects of our lives?

3: How does Father Henri Caffarel’s perspective on Christian marriage inspire us to think of it as both a communion of saints, a spiritual community animated by agape, and a domestic Church, the place where the mystery of the great Church is actualized and lived out?