The Burning Desire of a Young Mother and Earthly Limitations
By Jack Rigert
A beautiful and passionate young woman called to ask if I would meet her for dinner. A mother of three under the age of six, she was going through a rough patch in her marriage.
“My heart feels a passion for something more. My husband tries, he really does, he is a good man, but it’s not enough. And the kids…I just received a text from him that the four-year-old is not feeling well and just threw up all over our bed, maybe I should just go home.” Her voice cracked and she held back tears describing the tension she felt between a desire, a need perhaps, for something more while trying to fulfill the nitty gritty responsibilities of raising little human beings, and wondering how the flame seems to have gone cold in her marriage. It was wearing her down.
She went on to describe “a stirring in my heart when a man I work with asked me to join him for lunch and then, over dessert, told me that I was beautiful. I know what I should do, I should ignore this stirring and forget about him before I get myself in a lot of trouble.”
“Look,” I said, “basic attractions like these are not uncommon. They can be powerful and happen spontaneously, as when a man walking down the aisle at a store catches the eye of a woman passing by. Or in your case, a colleague at work goes out of his way to pay you a compliment and you find yourself attracted to him both emotionally and physically. There can arise a temptation, especially if one or both spouses are feeling stressed in the marriage, to believe that the solution might be to find another person who will finally satisfy that need for something more. But is that really the answer?”
John Paul II pointed out in his book, Love and Responsibility that there is a perennial attraction between masculinity and femininity. This physical attraction to the opposite sex is what he called sensuality, and it is meant to draw us toward personal communion, not simply to the physical body of the other. When ‘only’ sensuality is stirred, we experience the body of the other person as a potential object of enjoyment. Hence, sensuality by itself may very easily orient us to – use – and is not love. This is a great danger for us. It facilitates using one another, and so experiencing the body of the other person as “a potential object of enjoyment” divorced from love and responsibility. This, John Paul says, blinds you to the true value of the other person and in itself has a ‘consumer orientation’…it is directed primarily and immediately towards a ‘body’ to use rather than towards a person to love, and love demands a self-giving commitment.
“Dwell on this for a minute. Your husband, perhaps not as romantic as you would like, is at home cleaning up after your sick child. He made a commitment to you and your children. Yes, life is often messy, and self-sacrifice is not easy, but love is not afraid of these things, love is these things.”
“Yet, with that said, the key to finding what you are looking for is not found in suppressing your passions and desires for romance and adventure The great saints and mystics, full of passion and deep yearning burning desire, can be our guides and mentors here. They came to understand that there is nothing in this earthly life, no finite thing or person, that can ever fill the infinite desires of the human heart for that something more, no matter how hard we or they try…they were never supposed to! And it is only by opening the infinite desires of your heart to the One who placed them there that will you experience a taste of heaven on earth.”
Father Carrón, a Spanish Priest and professor, describes it this way, “the woman, with her limitation, awakens in the man, who is also limited, a desire for fullness out of proportion with her capacity to answer it. She awakens a thirst that she is unable to quench, a hunger she is unable to satisfy. This is what gives rise to the anger and the violence that married couples so often experience, and the delusion they feel if they do not understand the true nature of their relationship…If husband and wife do not encounter what the sign is pointing to, the place where they can find the fulfillment of the promise that the other has aroused, then they are condemned to be consumed by a pretension from which they cannot free themselves, and their desire for the infinite, which no one like the person loved arouses, is condemned to remain unsatisfied.”
The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, identified very keenly this drama in loving relationships, sensing that ending up in this spiral cannot be the only way out. “This is the paradox of love between man and woman: two infinites meet two limitations; two infinite needs to be loved meet two fragile and limited capacities to love. Only in the ambit of a greater love (God’s Love for them) do they not consume themselves in pretension and not resign themselves, but walk together, each towards a fullness of which they are a sign…If you do not love Christ, Beauty made flesh, more than the person you love, the latter relationship withers. Christ is the truth of this relationship, the fullness to which both partners point, and in whom their relationship is fulfilled. Only by letting him in is it possible for the most beautiful relationship that can happen in life not to be corrupted and die in time. This is the audacity of his claim.”[1]
Make no mistake about it. Once the smoke and fog clears, your yearning burning passion and desire for something more, that nothing in this world can satisfy, points directly to the Eucharist, and God’s yearning burning passionate desire for you.
Go to Him.
- Father Carrón is a Spanish priest and professor of theology at the University of Milan. [From Disarming Beauty: Essays on Faith, Truth, and Freedom. © 2017, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN. www.undpress.nd.edu.]) ↑
