True love, far from confiscating hearts, frees and expands them in extraordinary ways. I’d go even further: engaged couples and newlyweds experience a kind of state of grace, or at least openness to grace. From love to the Christian life, there is, in a sense, continuity, for “God is love”.

The experience of love is multifaceted, and we need to break it down into its essential elements, which I’ll arbitrarily boil down to five: happiness, the loving gaze, communication, “incompleteness” and grace. By analyzing each of these elements of the experience of love, we shall see how it is oriented towards the world of grace.

The emergence of happiness is the first experience of those who encounter love. A new, penetrating, insistent, pure, dilating, delectable happiness. A previously unknown happiness.

“It’s true that I’m happy.
In joy I fall asleep, and wake up, and go back to sleep in joy.
May I be full of more joy,
That I may bring more to the one I love!”

These words are from the young girl Violaine; they could be from anyone who discovers love. And we hear the young lovers speak of “salvation”. Yes, they suddenly understand that they were made for happiness and that happiness has just been granted to them. They are delivered from misfortune, from evil, saved. Saved from the absurd, from an existence devoid of meaning. They now know their vocation: happiness!

God is undoubtedly keen that every human being, in the course of his or her evolution, should experience happiness. For it is important to Him that man should have a taste for happiness; and not only that he should have a taste for it, but that, having experienced it, he should believe it to be possible. And therefore that he desires it, pursues it. It’s important to God, not only because this belief in happiness contributes greatly to the health of body and soul - to lose it is almost to die - but above all because it directs man towards Him.

When a non-believer encounters happiness in love, he begins to understand the word “paradise”, which used to make him smile. For him, paradise, the place of happiness, is perhaps something more than a myth. And the first paradise spoken of by Christians, and the final paradise to which they aspire, become less implausible in his eyes.

But then, how necessary it is that Christian morality not be presented to him in the guise of the morality of Obligation or Duty championed by Kant and adopted, more or less consciously, by so many Christians. After all, we mustn’t forget that Christ’s great preaching began with these words: “Happy… happy… happy… the poor, the meek, the pure of heart!” Oh, I’m well aware that one can read learned commentaries on the Beatitudes, which leave out no detail of the text, no nuance, but which conveniently neglect the word “happy”. And when he addresses his final words to his disciples at the last supper, what does he recommend to them, what does he bequeath to them, if not joy, the fullness of his joy - which they certainly risk losing, but which no one has the power to take away from them.

In a word, God’s life is happiness, and so the eternal life he proposes to man is happiness, and so the Christian life on earth is already a pre-approval of this happiness. But how could anyone commit to this religion of happiness who didn’t have a taste for happiness? It is the privilege of married love to bring out this aspiration - which in many people is no more than a firebrand under the ashes before the encounter with love - and through it, to set us on the road to God’s happiness. But how fragile is this experience of happiness! Ephemeral for many. Very few households agree with Orthodox Archbishop Innocent Borissov’s definition of marriage as “what remains of paradise on earth”. Nevertheless, even if it’s short-lived, it’s a vital experience. Fragile and ephemeral are not synonymous with deceptive.

There are many reasons for its precariousness. Some people confuse happiness with pleasure and, in pursuing the latter, lose the former, which they did, one day, discover. Some try to seize happiness with greed and covetousness, unaware that it is reserved for those in whom it finds a willingness to admire and offer. Others seek an absolute: in so doing, they destroy both happiness and the loved one, by demanding of them what they are quite incapable of providing.

The errors are serious. Particularly for those who deny their experience of happiness, who experience the irony, or simply imagine they’ve been the victims of an illusion. To lose faith in happiness is often to condemn oneself to not finding, or not keeping, faith in God.

But, fortunately, there are those for whom this experience remains the great experience. No doubt, as the years go by, it loses its initial vivacity and alacrity, but this is to the benefit of a lucidity, a depth, a solidity that love in its springtime could never have known. They know they have not received the absolute of happiness, but they have learned to see, in the happiness born of their love, the promise of another happiness, which they pursue together and of which they already know the foretaste.

The experience of happiness we’ve just been reflecting on teaches us a lesson of vital importance: it’s from love that happiness springs. Happiness and love are inextricably linked. If man discovers that he was made for happiness, he also learns that he was made for love, and that he cannot hope to find fulfillment outside of love, the demands and riches of love.

The experience of love is a complex one. The dialogue of glances plays a vital role. Those who forego this dialogue for the more tangible benefits of embracing bodies have no idea what they are losing. Suddenly discovering oneself in the eyes of another, as in a mirror-where one sees oneself seen, as Lanza del Vasto put it, and discovering oneself worthy of being loved, is no small event. At last you know you have a reason for being, I was going to say you are. As long as a person hasn’t read in the eyes of another that he’s lovable, in the strong sense of the word, that he’s loved, he experiences the feeling of unloved or unloved children, which I found strongly expressed by a character in a novel: “I was outnumbered. I slept in a cage-bed that was randomly placed in a room and could be folded up at any time. When I left, I wouldn’t have left an empty space. But when love comes along, everything changes. You have a value, you have a place in the world, because you’re necessary to someone else. “He needs me to be happy”, we repeat to ourselves with joyful exaltation. Then you really do feel “justified”, in the sense of saying that something is justified. You don’t have to despise yourself, you can love and esteem yourself because someone loves and esteems you.

“I remember the thawing of my whole being under your gaze, those gushing emotions, those liberated sources”.

At last, you find yourself at peace with yourself.

Love begets love. Being loved leads to loving. A sense of wonder, gratitude and generosity emerges, impatient to be expressed, and unaware that its source lies within us. “It’s not funny to at the sight of this beautiful face, without my knowing how, something inside me began to sing, something so sad, so intoxicating, so bitter. A whole part of me that I thought didn’t exist, because I was busy elsewhere and wasn’t thinking about it. Oh God, it exists, it lives terribly”.

And now, through love and gift, we become like the one we had discovered in the mirror-where-we-see-ourselves, who was ourselves and not quite ourselves, for this mirror of a loving gaze has the property of presenting us with the image not so much of what we are today as of what we are capable of.

Is this experience of love without spiritual significance? To live it faithfully, even for those who have no faith or only an inchoate faith, is to sense that love is more than love, that the source of love may well be higher than the human heart. If happiness is to love what light is to flame, then anyone who has suspected the existence of another kind of happiness through human happiness will be led to believe that this other kind of happiness also presupposes another kind of love, and that he is made for this other kind of love as he is for this other kind of happiness.

If he meets a helping hand on his way to Christ, and feels the Lord’s gaze upon him, often evoked in the Gospels: “He looked at him and loved him”, then, for once, he will discover that he has a reason to exist, since he counts for Someone.

The mirror-where-you-see-yourself-is God’s own gaze. How could he despise himself, the one who discovers himself to be precious in the eyes of the Lord? So precious that God did not look at the price: “I shed so much blood for you”. When Pascal understood this, he was deeply moved. Long before him, Saint Paul had already said: “He loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20).

Discovering that you are loved is both exhilarating and terrible. If we give in to the call of love, we no longer belong to ourselves… That’s what faith is all about, saying yes to God. Perhaps days will come when we’ll reproach ourselves for this imprudent gesture, but it’ll be too late, and we’ll be glad it’s too late. As Jeremiah expresses it in unforgettable terms:

You seduced me, LORD, and I let myself be seduced
you were too strong for me, and you prevailed.
All day long I am an object of laughter;
everyone mocks me.

Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage I proclaim;
The word of the LORD has brought me
reproach and derision all day long.
I say I will not mention him,
I will no longer speak in his name.
But then it is as if fire is burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding back,
I cannot! (Jer 20:7-9)

The ultimate reason for existence of love between man and woman is to evoke another love and to lead to it. What is already true of any marriage is even more true of the union of married Christians, which the Church teaches is a sacrament: a human reality that not only symbolizes a divine reality, but leads to it. This Love, to which the spouses are drawn by their love, is now radically transformed in their union by a return shock. From now on, they love each other with a love that is an extension of God’s love.

If they open St John’s first epistle, they will be overjoyed to learn that their love for one another and God’s love are one and the same: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love… if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.” (1 Jn 4, 16, 12)

True love leads us to a kind of state of grace that can be summed up in five essential elements. In this chapter, we’ll look at the first two.

1: Happiness: we feel freed from sadness, saved by our spouse in a way that gives meaning and joy to our lives. And that’s what God wants for us: to be happy, because happiness brings us closer to Him.

2: The loving gaze: discovering that you are being looked at with love is one of life’s most beautiful experiences. Recognizing that we are loved in the eyes of others, without this love needing to be expressed in any other way, makes us feel valued, needed, expected… This gaze gives meaning to our lives. This experience of feeling loved leads us to love and express the best of ourselves in ways we could never have imagined. And in this gaze of love, we can recognize the gaze of God: those who love each other come to intuit that love, that wonderful source of happiness, must have a spiritual dimension that goes beyond the human heart. Feeling that God, who lives in each of us, is looking down on us with love drives us to evoke this perfect love and to desire to attain it:

“We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love… if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.” (1 Jn 4, 16, 12).

It is here that we, married Christians united by the sacrament of marriage, find what the Church defines as a sacrament: a human reality that symbolizes a divine reality and leads us to it.

If we think back to the early days of love, we perceive the memory of the other as enveloped in a kind of clarity because, in the beginning, there was always a dazzle. Something unique and miraculous was happening between us with the exchange of words, gestures and glances. Everything that the interplay between the two could give of itself was already there, in the immaculate precision of that which is initial. The world was filled with signs, and fragmented life regained its unity. Loneliness, insecurity, uncertainty about the future were gone, because someone had chosen us, loved us, given us the fragile consistency we needed to face life, to heal ourselves from the past. This prompted us to explore ourselves in depth, in search of all that we were and had been, with the desire to offer the other our authenticity. For his part, he offered us his time and his thoughts, and this coincidence of love seemed like an undeserved gift.

It’s an intuition, then, because there’s nothing calculated about it, because the mutual attraction can’t be reasoned out, because the whole relationship between the two is there in germ. But this intuition, so beautiful and poignant, needs to be qualified by the adjective “intelligent”. In spite of our youth and inexperience, we should also, in a way, make a lucid assessment of the other’s person; discover with joy the values we share and the obscure points that will be sources of suffering. If we are keen to get to know each other better in the various circumstances of life, and to communicate with each other in a true and profound way, we can discover whether it is possible for the two of us to create a common life project. Our starting point will be a spontaneous and considered yes.

Turn your gaze to the beginning of your love…

1: Let’s talk together about the emergence of happiness, new, penetrating, insistent… unknown until now. About this discovery that you, I, we, are made for happiness, for love.

Let’s try to remember what moved us in each other, what I admired in her, in him. Let’s immerse ourselves in that moment of discovery of each other, the outings, the discussions, the writings…

2: It’s from love that happiness springs: let’s share experiences from our married and family life that confirm this statement.

3: Our eyes on each other, for each other:

• Let’s remember our first glances, the first time I felt loved by you: what did it change in me, in you?
• And today: what do our eyes say?

4: Let’s go back to the moment when we understood, felt that this faith in happiness was pointing us towards God, towards God’s happiness, towards eternal life and eternal happiness.

5: Let’s remember the moment, the circumstances, God’s gaze on me, on our couple, on my partner. Let’s talk together about this search for God’s love, for happiness in God, which transcends our married love.

We finish our sitting assignment by spending a few seconds looking at each other as if for the first time. Now let’s hold hands tightly and look at each other as if it were the last time we were together.

We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him. In this is love brought to perfection among us, that we have confidence on the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. We love because he first loved us.

1: Recalling a period in our history allows us to relive some of the same emotions we experienced back then. During the Sit Down we took a journey back to the first moments of our love. Share about how we felt when we met and discovered each other.

2: Father Henri Caffarel speaks of emptiness, loneliness and a lack of meaning before this loving encounter. The other person confirms that I have a high value, that I finally exist for someone. What is our experience on this subject?

3: How did we become aware or feel that this human love was bringing us closer to God, or even being nourished by God’s love? We’ve joined Teams of Our Lady: we can talk about the decision we made together and the path we’ve travelled.

4: Marital love is a second chance for “healing” in our lives, and healing past wounds. What does this reflection inspire in us?