GARGANTUAN steps

This was a really tough book to stomach, both from the writing and the content. Love and responsibility, from a Christian perspective, written with a philosophical slant, translated into the English language from Polish. Recommended a long time ago by Fr Jude David, who was the priest who officiated at our wedding, I have stalled on reading it for the longest time till now. His other recommendation was 'Man and Woman He Created Them' by the same author, Pope John Paul II, though at twice the length of this one, I think it may be another decade before I pick that one up!

There were lots of insights into the Catholic demands of love and responsibility, focusing on topics such different types of love, as well as love in a Christian sense - that love is ultimately about self-giving, procreation as the first and ultimate goal of sexuality (which I found particularly unpalatable) but of which the necessity for chastity and abstinence branches out from, as well as parenting matters. 

On the topic of Christian love - firstly, man is a being unto his own and of self-determination. He cannot be owned (by anyone else other than God), nor can he be given out of his own free will. Hence, in love between a man and a woman that leads on to marriage, love is self-giving. It is the free will of the person, giving up himself or herself for the other person, and it is received and accepted with responsibility by the other person. And hence a Christian marriage maintains this two way passage of love and responsibility. A quote from the book about this - 

"By nature, due to what being he is, the person is a master of himself (sui iuris), and cannot be imparted to the other or substituted by the other (alteri incommunicabilis) when the participation of his own will and the commitment of his personal freedom are required. But love, so to speak, snatches the person from this natural inviolability and incommunicability. For love makes the person want precisely to give himself to another person - to the one he loves. He wants to, so to speak, to stop being his own exclusion possession and to become the possession of the other. It signifies a certain relinquishing of that sui iuris and of that alteri incommunicabilis. Love goes through such relinquishing, being guided, however, by the profound belief that this relinquishment leads not to diminishing and impoverishing the existence of the person, but on the contrary to its expansion and enrichment. That is, so to speak, the law of 'ecstasy', of going out of oneself in order to exist more fully in the other. In no other form of love is this law realised so clearly as in spousal love."

On the ultimate goal of a Christian marriage - 

"This is a 'divine' feature of love. Indeed, when he wants the good 'without limits' for her, then properly speaking he wants God for her: God alone is the objective fullness of the good, and only He can satisfy every man with this fullness. Man's love through its relation to happiness, that is, to the fullness of the good, in a sense passes as close to God as possible."

On the topic of sexuality - 

"The church teaches consistently that the primary end of marriage is procreatio, whereas the secondary end is what in the Latin terminology has been defined as mutuum adiutorium. Besides these, there is a tertiary end listed - remedium concupiscentiae. Objectively speaking, marriage is above all to serve existence, then the relationship between a man and a woman, and finally the correct direction of concupiscence. The ends of marriage ordered in this way oppose any subjectivistic interpretation of the sexual drive, and accordingly they demand from man as person objectivity in thinking about sexual themes and above all in conduct. This objectivity is the foundation of conjugal morality."

What I've found difficult in understanding is the ultimate goal of sexuality being that for procreation, and if that is not THE goal, then a sexual encounter should be avoided, even in a marriage. In essence, it is true and agreeable that if you are to have sexual intercourse with your spouse, there should be within it the possibility of having a child (at least mentally). This in practice explains why the use of barrier contraception is disallowed in the church - because it is unnatural, and it goes against the main goal of a sexual encounter. The use of natural planning is considered natural (and allowed by the church), and it fundamentally allows for the possibility of a child, though through timing, possibly avoided. This therefore doesn't adhere to procreation as THE goal of a sexual encounter, and this is what I find troubling and difficult to understand. The author does attempt to explain why it is allowed (natural planning), but yet having the ultimate goal not sidelined, though I have to admit, I'm still not convinced.

On parenting - 

"What God gives in the supernatural order, i.e., in the order of grace, also belongs to the whole of this material. For he does not leave the work of education, which is in a sense a continuous creation of personhood, entirely and exclusively to parents, but he himself personally takes part in it as well. Not only did love of the parents stand at the beginning of the new human person, as they were only co-creators, but the Creator's love decided about a person's coming to be in the womb of the mother. Grace is, so to speak, the further continuation of this work. God himself takes the highest part in creation of human personhood in the spiritual, moral, and strictly supernatural sphere. And parents, if they are not to forgo their proper role, the role of co-creators, also should help in this."

Finally, on the thoughts of chastity and abstinence - 

"How enormous and in effect how positive a role abstinence fulfils here, for it liberates from that attitude and from egoism, and thereby indirectly forms love. The love of a woman and a man cannot be built otherwise than through a certain sacrifice and denial of oneself. We find the formula for this denial in the Gospel, in the words of Christ: " Whoever wishes to come after me, let him deny himself". The Gospel teaches abstinence as a way of loving."

Labels: Books, Relationships, Religion