Salesian Literature

Chapter 13  :  Love wounds the heart

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All the terms I am using to describe love are derived from the similarity that exists between our spiritual emotions and our physical passions.

 

Sorrow, fear, hope, hate and the rest of the soul’s emotions, only enter the heart on the heels of love, tied to love.  We hate present evil only because it is opposed to the good we love; we fear future evil only because it will deprive us of the good we love.  However bad evil may be, we hate it only to the extent that we dearly love the good to which it is opposed.  The man who has no great love for his country shows little concern if it goes to the bad; the man who has only a meagre love for God has no less meagre hatred of sin.  Love is the first, the origin and source, of all the passions; so love is the first to find its way into the heart.

 

Love, since it penetrates and pierces right to the central point, the very apex of the will, where it has its throne, is said to wound the heart.  Of course, the other emotions go in too; but only after love has blazed the trail, pierced the heart, opened up the way.  The arrow’s point it is that wounds; the rest of the arrow serves only to enlarge the wound already made, to increase the pain.  Now it follows that, if love wounds, it also causes pain.

 

Love, however, comes to birth through gratification, so you may wonder how it can wound, how it can cause pain.  Absence of the loved one is often the reason; for then love wounds the heart by exciting desire.  It is this desire, when it cannot be gratified, which causes the mind such acute distress.

 

Most assuredly, love is gratifying; and so it is most delightful as long as it does not leave the sting of desire in our hearts.  If it does, it leaves an intense pain as well – a pain that has its origin in love, and so is pleasurably painful.

 

Love wounds the pains in several ways … The very first stirrings of love are called wounds; for the heart that seemed self-contained, whole and entire, before it began to love, now breaks in two, to give itself to what it loves; and this division means pain, for what is pain but the tearing of living things apart.  Desire, as I have already said, if it is present in a heart, stings and wounds it unceasingly.

 

When we come to charity, to the active love of God, God himself sometimes wounds in a way the soul he intends to raise to great perfection.  He gives it a wonderful awareness of his supreme goodness, an attraction towards it beyond compare, as though urging, entreating it to love him.  Then the soul strains as if to soar up higher still towards the divinity it loves, but falls ever short; its love is not commensurate with its desire.  Heaven knows, the pain it experiences is quite without parallel!

 

When the human heart in love with God wants to love him infinitely, it discovers that neither its desire nor its love are sufficient.  Such unavailing desire is like a thorn in the side of a man endowed with nobility of soul.  For all that, its pain is welcome; the man who deeply desires to love, also deeply loves to desire.  He would consider himself the most contemptible man alive, were he not continually desiring to love what is supremely worth loving.  His desire to love God brings him pain; his love of that desire, however, affords him pleasure.

 

God, therefore, if I may be forgiven the metaphor, is ever drawing arrows from the quiver of his infinite beauty, to wound the souls of those who love him, to bring it home to them that their love for him is nowhere near the love that he deserves.  Any man in this world, who knows no longing to love God more than he does already, is not loving God enough.  No man can set a measure to his performance in the practice of charity.  He can never sit back, never say: “I have done enough.”

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