Recently I was watching a sappy YouTube video depicting this holy Christian couple talking about their love story. Usually...I wouldn't be caught dead looking at sappy videos like this...let alone tearing up whilst watching them...but here we are.
The man said something that struck me straight into writing this piece.
He said he prayed to God that He would give him a woman that was so beautiful, that it hurts.
At first the statement twinged in my heart and left me a bit unsettled. I just began to wonder, as I think the feminine heart tends to, if I was ever going to be that answer to someone's prayer. That they would pray so fervently to the Lord for someone so beautiful it hurts, and that answer would be the ability to encounter my heart.
The video cuts to this groom watching his bride walk down the aisle and he physically looks like he is in pain while he is crying watching his beloved draw nearer to him.
Immediately I thought about our Lord on the Cross. A love so intense, so beautiful that it hurts. A love that poured out so openly, so purely and so freely that it physically hurt the Giver.
At the core of our human existence, we all desire three things:
- to be seen,
- to be known,
- to be loved.
We desire someone to know us so entirely, so intricately and so fully that even knowing everything about us, they still choose to love us.
We can find someone on this side of heaven that knows us so completely:
but ultimately this will never be enough.
Two friends of mine just got married last weekend and the priest who married them asked them each to text him why they love the other and why they want to marry them. Besides my sobbing being proof enough of the beauty of their words, my good friend Neil, when asked why he wanted to marry his bride, Mary, said this,:
"Because marriage leads to sainthood."
The most poignant words following this statement were encapsulated in a simple statement from our priest:
"Neil, Mary's love: will never be enough. Mary, Neil's love: will never be enough. Only God's Love is enough. Only God's Love can complete you."
To some this statement might seem ridiculous since our culture tells us either to do it on our own and be independent people who don't need other humans to survive OR we have to find someone who completes us.
In reality, humans can only complement each other. The Lord is the only one who can complete.
The groom in the video I was watching says that his bride coming towards him on their wedding day was like a, 'great beaming light of beauty.'
This reflects so intensely what Pope Saint John Paul the Great says about human and Divine Love:
I fell in love with human love;
there I saw a
particle of
DIVINE LOVE.
This Love that the Lord invites us to participate in, especially in the gift of the Eucharist, is that True Love that knows us so intimately, so wholly, so completely, so infinitely.
A Love that literally formed our inmost being and intricately knit us in our mother's wombs. (Psalm 139:13)
A Love that even knowing everything about us, still chooses us each day as asserted in Romans 5:8, "But that God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."
This 'particle of Divine Love' that we experience through our broken and wounded human love points us towards what we were made for: a true, authentic, genuine, pure, self-sacrificing and never-ending Love from the Father.
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