Every man carries in himself the desire to love in a free and disinterested way, but all of us make the experience of how much wounded and limited is our way of loving. Every man carries  in himself the desire of loving in a free and disinterested way, but all of us experience how much our way of loving is wounded and limited, signed by closeness and introspection. We are frail, created from the dust of the earth, though made to the image and similitude of God, called to communion with Him and to relation with others.

This paradox that inhabits us manifests a tension, which characterises us as human creatures and which accompanies us along the path of our existence: a sublime call reaches us in our deep misery (See  Gaudium et Spes 13) and in our being pots of clay.

Human life is woven with many types of relations; we live relations of work and collaboration, relations of friendship and family bonds; there are fraternal relations as in the religious community or in various ecclesial groups. W can share also our free time, some values and interests; we can live  a mutual political commitment for the common good. Though it is the matter of different modalities of interaction, as persons we are called to be involved in relations with others and to imperil ourselves and our values.

To live the gratuity in our relations is a fruit of the Spirit who works in us ceaselessly and who teaches us how to love, but it is founded also on the human capacity whose roots are far away in history and in the development of the person, teaching us how to grow along our entire life. 1 With the help of psychology we can try to individuate some human presuppositions, which are at the basis of our capacity to love free of charge.  

«You deserve a great appreciation and I love you»

In my service as a vocational woman accompanist, I often experience that persons carry in the depth of their heart an insecurity or a doubt on themselves and their own positivism. Every one of us has learnt to relate with oneself within the tissue of the relations that one has lived from the beginning of one’s life, and throughout this history one has developed a more or less positive sense of one’s identity. I do not refer so much to self-concept, namely to how a man evaluates himself and his capacities, as rather to the state of feeling lovable for what he is (not for what he does), sufficiently well and feeling at home with himself.

Some wounds in this regard have their roots in the past. Sometime we have learnt that others love us “on condition that…”an this constitutes an unsought heritage, but simply received. Yet it questions us in our present as a task to be assumed and faced (and if at times we need somebody’s help, it is enough to ask it). In fact, we learn to believe in our own amiability by renewing every day self- trust and the appreciation for the received love.  

The gratuity of relation flows from the felt awareness of being loved gratuitously (without the duty of having to conquer the affection):: «Christ gives us two fundamental certainties: of being infinitely loved and of being able to love limitlessly. Nothing like the cross of Christ can give us these certainties in a full and definitive way, as well as its deriving freedom» (Fraternal life in community  22).

«Giulia is hardly more than twenty years old and is a brilliant person, but always rather anxious. The results of her work are very important for her: in her  study, in the part-time work that she carries on , in the parish. If she does not succeed in doing something very well, she feels frustrated and helpless, guilty  and shuts herself up.

Giulia is the third child born in her family unexpectedly, after a sister and a brother. She never misses cares and attention, yet from the very beginning of her life she feels that no place has been prepared for her in her house, her arrival was not waited for which she has learnt that she needs to earn her place. She does not mean the physical place, but the emotive and affective one. Thus Giulia “learns” that affection, love must be earned, for instance through success. She interiorises the message, “I am worthy to love only if I obtain excellent results”».

It is the matter of an experience that gets lost in the past of Giulia’s history, but that, though far in time, causes a little wound that keeps on bleeding up-to-date and that can influence the present. The fear of not been loved is a ghost that dwells in the human heart: sometimes it whispers and creeps in, at other times it shouts and threatens. However, it is only by looking at its face and calling it by name that it stops to have an excessive power on our life and can assume more realistic contours. Anyhow, none of us has been loved (and loves) in a perfect way. However, love, though limited and wounded, does not stop of being love. To believe in one’s own amiability, therefore, becomes, in adulthood, a commitment and a choice to be renewed daily. The gratuity of relation is based on the certainty of having been loved gratuitously.

To accept the unrest of conflicts

We often experience delusions in our relations: the man is not as I have been knowing him up to this moment; he reveals aspects which I had not seen before and which I do not like. Or, as it more frequently happens, he is different from what I expected and desired.

Sometimes we idealise our friend, the spouse, our sister, and we project our expectations on the other person, Thus, we see in our friend what we like or what we would like to see, and we make his/her aspects absolute, while we hardly observe the other aspects. In the same way, each of us disregards and deludes the expectations that others await from us. In some cases the idealisation of the other is so strong as we risk to be deprived of a realistic perception of him/her and, more or less unconsciously, we tend to amplify some positive characteristics to the disadvantage of a more objective vision.

«Marcus and Laura married  few months after a two years engagement. He was a meek and welcoming man, she was a dynamic, sometimes impulsive, woman. One evening Laura went home very angry from her work  and during supper she manifested to Franco her frustration and moodiness for some wrongs she had suffered in the office. Marcus listened quietly and tried to see the good sides of the situation. Laura felt to have been misunderstood and got angrier. Day after day, Laura enters in contact with this aspect of Marcus’ character, namely his tendency to be a pacifier, perhaps indefinitely, and clashes against her expectation of a husband capable to face the situations directly. This is how Laura had known or desired him to be, which means that Laura must grow to a more objective knowledge of her Marcus and  (vice versa)she must learn to accept that he is the motive of her love, but simultaneously also of her anger».

We know that it is not easy to welcome and to live delusions; however it is the matter of an important passage that opens the way to a new, more objective vision of reality and to a more realistic relation. This phase requires the capacity of keeping the pieces together, namely to integrate the positive and negative aspects of the other, above all, the ambivalent feeling of affection/anger that we may experience in our relations with the other. I shall be able to integrate the various aspects of the other as much as I know to look at

myself in this way, knowing and accepting that not everything is weak in me and not everything is strong.

Entering and coming out from a relation

The relations of friendship may have different levels of depth. Let us think, for instance, of the effect produced by a stone that is thrown into a pond: it draws in the water several concentric circles from the point it falls into. Similarly, in a relation there are different levels of intimacy, namely unequal degrees of openness to self and others in a context of reciprocity  Self surrender shows a certain experience of security and trust: I feel that the other does not despise me, does not reject me. Once a person told me of having made a deep experience of friendship when,. working with some colleagues for a long time in a delicate project, she felt that they went on appreciating and liking her also after discovering her limits and frailties.  

The relation of intimacy supposes two kinds of capacity or better, an adequate balance between two aspects: autonomy and dependence. Autonomy, as the capacity of standing on one’s feet, allows us ro recognise our own personal individuality, as subjects capable of thinking, loving, deciding and acting. Dependence, understood as the capacity to allow the other to involve and reach me, constitutes the basis enabling me to welcome and receive the affection of others; moreover it creates the possibility of a healthy sense of belonging (to the family, the religious community, the group….). It is born from the humble awareness of not being self-sufficient and of standing in need of others.  Autonomy and dependence require a dynamic balance in the person; if autonomy is too strong, it easily turns into self-sufficiency, or fear of the other, thus preventing a relation from being realised. On the contrary, when the need of depending is excessive, the person finds it difficult to leave the relation, risking of remaining enmeshed.   

He who loves weakens himself

There is another important aspect that allows us to live our relations gratuitously. When I truly love, I make myself weak, vulnerable: it is the matter of capacity to assume the risk and to suffer, or, in evangelical terms, to carry the cross. Reciprocity belongs to the horizon of mature relation, in the sense that the persons involved in relation experience both the act of “to give” and that of “to receive”. This does not mean that the main motive of a relation is “to give to the end of receiving”. In fact, in mature reciprocity there is the availability to donate oneself and the openness to welcome the gift of the other, rather than the claim that he/she donates himself/herself. The other might also reject me, may not want to welcome my affection, or may not want to return it. In this sense we say that he who loves is weak and vulnerable: the risk and suffering belong to the horizon of gratuity.

Even when we are not rejected or betrayed, relation and suffering walk together. In any fraternal and friendly relation, we are called to create a place, a space for the other and, therefore, to experience, in different ways, a renunciation. To like the other means to want the good of the other, above all when this implies the renunciation of our personal gratification  There is also another characterising aspect of every meaningful relation, namely separation. This is an experience that peeps into the existence of every person in different ways; in fact loving the other means allowing the other to walk along his/her own and to deny the desire of keeping him/her for oneself.

«Give gratuitously…»

This is the challenge that accompanies the journey of the Christian believer every day: man cannot live without love. He remains incomprehensible, his life remains deprived of sense if love is not revealed to him, if he does not meet love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, participating vividly in it (Redemptor hominis 10). Jesus opens a way trough his total and gratuitous self-oblation and he invites us to follow him along this way, accompanying and sustaining one another in His Spirit. We experience how easy the Gospel is, because the Kingdom of heaven belongs to the little ones, and how difficult it is at the same time, knowing how much commitment the daily welcome of Jesus’ invitation demands, so that we may go beyond ourselves “up to reaching the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4,13).

Samuela Rigon
Francescane dell’Addolorata
e-mail: samu.rig@libero.it

1 Cf F. IMODA, Sviluppo umano, psicologia e mistero. Edizione riveduta e aggiornata, Dehoniane, Bologna 2005 (cap. V: «Il mistero umano e lo sviluppo dell’ortopatia», 179-246).