Salesian Literature

Chapter 1  :  What is meant by gratifying love

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Love, as I have said[1], is simply the movement or outpouring of the heart towards what seems good, because it is satisfying.  This means that satisfaction is the chief motive-cause of love, just as love is the main impulse following upon satisfaction.

 

When it comes to loving God, we are moved in this way … Faith teaches us that the godhead is an inexhaustible mine of every perfection – a goodness that is supremely infinite, infinitely supreme.

 

In our meditations we carefully reflect on this truth, and tell over to ourselves the unending tale of God’s perfections.  Either we think of them as a whole, or we take them one by one – as, for example, his power, his wisdom, his goodness, his eternity, his infinity.

 

Once our minds are brought to bear on the endless perfections to be found in God, we cannot avoid a feeling of satisfaction in our wills.  Then we use our freedom, our authority, to stimulate ourselves to echo, to intensify that initial satisfaction by acts of assent and joy.

 

When we approve of the perfection that we see in God, and are delighted at it, we are practising what is called gratifying love; we find so very much more pleasure in God’s delight than in our own.  Gratifying love means that we delight in the perfections to be found in God; thus he is the inheritance in which we find all our happiness, all our peace.  When we know gratifying love, the perfections of God become food and drink to the soul’ we make them our own, imprint them on our hearts.

 

Only think, Theotimus, how happy we shall be in heaven when we have sight our heart’s love – an ocean of perfection, of goodness that knows no shore!  A deer, when the chase has been long and hard, regains its freshness by plunging into running water (cf. Ps. 41:1).  The human heart too, safely come at last to the potent, living well-spring of the godhead (for which it has pined, of which it has dreamed so long), will drink deep and gratifyingly of the perfections it finds there, enjoying the perfect happiness all this gives, satiating itself with undying delights.

 

This is how our Lord will consummate the nuptials of heaven, to share with us his everlasting joys.  He gave us his word on it (cf. Jn. 14:23): if we keep his law of love, he will come and make his abode with us.  Love larceny – there you have it; a gentle and a noble thing: love colours the lover with the beloved’s perfections, but leaves them intact; it causes the lover to don on the beloved’s robes, yet leave his attire undisturbed; it takes everything the beloved has, yet deprives him of nothing; it enriches the lover with all the beloved’s wealth, but he is never impoverished.  After all, the air is ever taking light, but it does not lessen the source of brightness in the sun; if the mirror holds a face that is fair, it does not diminish the beauty of the beholder.

 

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[1]  Book 1, Chapter 7.

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