Love Dreams
Fulton J. Sheen
EVERY PERSON carries within his heart a blueprint of
the one he loves. What seems to be "love at first
sight" is actually the fulfillment of desire, the
realization of a dream. Plato, sensing this, said that
all knowledge is recollection from a previous
existence. This is not true as he states it, but it
<is> true if one understands it to mean that we
already have an ideal in us�one which is made by our
thinking, our habits, our experiences, and our desire.
Otherwise how would we know immediately, on seeing
persons or things, that we loved them? Before meeting
certain people we already have a pattern and mold of
what we like and what we do not like, certain persons
fit into that pattern, others do not.
When we hear music for the first time, we either like
or dislike it. We judge it by the music we already
have heard in our own hearts. Jittery minds which
cannot long repose in one object of thought or in
continuity of an idea love music which is distracting,
excited, and jittery. Calm minds like calm music: the
heart has its own secret melody, and one day when the
score is played the heart answers, "This is it."
So it is with love. A tiny architect works inside the
human heart drawing sketches of the ideal love from
the people it sees, from the books it reads, from its
hopes and daydreams, in the fond hope that the eye may
one day see the ideal and the hand touch it. Life
becomes satisfying the moment the dream is seen
walking, and the person apt pears as the incarnation
of all that one loves. The liking is instantaneous�
because, actually, it has been there waiting for a
long time.
God, too, has within Himself blueprints of everything
in the universe. As the architect has in his mind a
plan of the house before the house is built, so God has
in His Mind an archetypal idea of every flower, bird,
tree, spring time, and melody. There never was a brush
touched to canvas nor a chisel to marble without some
great preexisting idea. So, too, every atom and every
rose is realization and concretion of an idea existing
in the Mind of God from all eternity. All creatures
below man correspond to the pattern God has in His
Mind. A tree is truly a tree because it corresponds to
God's idea of a tree.
In marriage too, love begins with a dream. As a French
author put it, "To know a woman at the hour of desire,
one must first respect her at the exquisite hour of
dream." Love then is an act of faith, a declaration of
the unseen as the real.
If ideals are not high, if the blueprints of love are
not beautiful, then the marriage itself will not be
beautiful. As some minds can listen to the barbaric
tom-tome of antimusic, so there are hearts that can be
satisfied with a body without a soul. Hence the need of
a moral preparation for marriage. St. Francis de Sales
once said that "in marriage, one takes a vow. But it
is the only instance where a vow is taken without a
novitiate. If it had a year of novitiate, how few
would enter into it." The novitiate of marriage must
necessarily embrace two elements: the spiritualization
of personal lives in order that the sublime
architectural blueprint of life's partner be formed
within, and a constant prayer that God Himself will
dispose historical conditions to make the dreams come
true.
With marriage and its ripening with the fruit of love,
there will dawn a new understanding that everyone
carries with him a blueprint of the one he loves, and
that One is God. The other partner then is seen as the
Lord's John the Baptist, preparing the way and making
straight His paths. God was just half seen through the
flesh, but thanks to life's companionship, one becomes
more and more attuned to the Divine Fork that gave the
original melody on the wedding day.
Love which began as Passion, then became an Act, and
now in the autumn of life becomes once again a Desire
born of Memory; the new "passionless passion" strains
at the leash of life to be one with Life, Truth and
Love. The words of Our Lord now repeatedly come to
their minds: "Those who are found worthy to attain that
other world, and resurrection from the dead, take
neither wife nor husband." That means that sex, which
reflected the animal kingdom, will not exist in
eternity, but love, which is a reflection of God's
unbodied essence, will remain their eternal ecstasy.
There will be no faith in Heaven, for we will already
see; there will be no hope in Heaven, for we will
already possess; but there will always be love. God is
Love!
Copyright (c) 1996 EWTN
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