The Time of Youth
Once boys and girls become teenagers, they tend to polarize or to separate into their own groups, boys with boys, girls with girls. The natural differentiation permits a true physical and psychic development of each. The boys through an aggressiveness in their games unfold chivalry, daring, strength, mastery over nature, and tend even to form community life, even though it is in terms of gangs.
The girls, on the other hand, in virtue of this separation, evolve sensitiveness, refinement, ideals and timidity, in order that there may not be a too precocious revelation of a secret. There is also an introduction to the rhythm of the cosmos and a reminder that they have within themselves creative possibilities and are the bearers of life. These negative and positive poles are necessary at a certain point in life, otherwise no sparks will be generated later.
Where this polarization is not developed, due to a seriousness in love developed at a very early state, there is an arrested development both in the way of timidity for a woman and chivalry for a man. The bow and violin are brought together before the bow is waxed and the strings are tuned. Young people are led into the big league before an apprenticeship in the minors. The boys, never having passed through a period of polarization because of too early courtship, develop effeminacy and foppishness, and often become sentimental and unruly. The effect on girls is to make them impudent, boyish and tough, all of which are shown in the fashions, particularly in their dressing like boys. Young men do not want in others the qualities which they already possess, but the qualities which they do not. Everyone in love is looking for a complement, a difference, a filling up of what he lacks.
The next stage to polarization is what might be called divinization, in which the brain becomes clouded with erotic vapors which make one see divinity in humanity. Though there is a tendency at this stage to repudiate genuine religious worship, nevertheless, the language of religion is taken over in such words as worship and eternity and loving forever. The Devil in Goethe says, "After drinking that drought you will see Helen of Troy in every woman."
The divinization has its basis in the fact that we have a soul as well as a body, and the soul, being infinite, can imagine infinite happiness. We can, for example, imagine a mountain of gold, but we will never see one. All experiences are colored with the brush of infinity, which accounts for this divinization in which the other partner becomes either a god or an angel.
Divinization is also a kind of crystallization. A piece of wood left for a time in the Salzburg salt mines will become covered with crystals which make it appear as if it were a mass of glittering jewels. This crystallization stage means that the young people do not actually fall in love with a person; they may fall in love with an experience because all is sweetness and light. There is a danger of projecting what one would like to find in another so that what is loved is not so much the other person as the projected image.
Strange though it is, there seems to be more of the idea of worship in the boy than there is in the girl. "Pinups" are generally found in the rooms of boys, rather than on the walls of girls. Girls lean more to uniforms, hairdos and other such trappings. There is this, however, in common between the two, namely, the significance of the general over the particular, the genus over the individual. The pinup on the wall of the boy and the long hair over the eyes of the boy become specimens of the other sex; there is a disregard of the purely personal, which reaches its extreme example in prostitution, where the person does not matter. "Falling in Love with Love" is the song side of this love of the impersonal instead of the personal. Sex is replaceable; a person is not.
The Experience Of Love
Many young people who think they fall in love are actually falling in love with the experience of love. Because the other person gives a "glow," qualities are attributed to him or her which do not exist. She marries a "hero" and lives with a husband; he marries a "goddess" and lives with a wife.
Just suppose that while talking to you, I began tapping the pencil upon a table. You would notice it and perhaps consider that act strange. But if I did it every day, eventually you would not notice it. In order to bring it to your attention, I would have to pound much harder on the table each succeeding day. This is an indication of how sensations and feelings wear thin. If, therefore, a marriage is based wholly upon feeling and emotion, then love dies when the emotion dies. But where there is a love of the person because of the nobility of character and good-heartedness, then love never ends, but increases from day to day. An old German proverb states, "When love is young, it bubbles like new wine; the more it ages and grows clear, the more it becomes still."
A young man may know and appreciate a number of young women, and yet in the depths of his soul remain unmoved. And then one day, a woman with no conscious purpose will release some secret spring in the depths of his personality, and from that moment on, she becomes the center of the world.
What creates this new condition? It may have been knowledge of her character and personality, but it may also have been rather spontaneous, or what is called love at first sight.
One may ask if each of us does not really carry in his or her own heart a blueprint of the one that he or she loves. This blueprint is made by our reading, our prayers, our experiences, our hopes, our ideals, by our mother and father. Then suddenly, the ideal becomes concretized and realized in a person, and we say, "This is it."
Each of us carries around in his own heart the music that he loves. We hear a certain kind of music for the first time, and we immediately love it. It satisfies the rhythm and the tempo that are already inside our hearts. Love at first sight may he incomprehensible, but it is a fact, nonetheless. In the end it may not be first sight; it may be just a dream coming true.
Beauty in a woman and strength in a man are two of the most evident spurs to love. Physical beauty and vitality increase vigor in each other, but it is to be noticed that beauty in a woman and strength in a man are given by God to serve purposes of allurement. They come at that age of life when men and women are urged to marry one another. They are not permanent possessions. They are something like the frosting on a cake, or like the electric starter of an automobile motor. If love were based only on the fact that she is a model and he is a fullback on a football team, marriage would never endure. But just as the frosting on the cake leads to the cake itself, so too do these allurements pass on to greater treasures.
Once on congratulating a wife who had a very handsome husband, we heard her reply, "I no longer notice that he is handsome; I notice now that he has greater qualities."
Our Love
Two great gifts are given to the young at a time when the family is meant to be founded, namely, beauty in a woman, and strength and power in a man. The least permanent of all gifts, they appear at a time when they were meant to serve purposes of allurement. Power is soon sapped, as athletes reach their point of retirement shortly after thirty. Beauty has two elements: one is surprise, and the other is love in the eyes of the beholder. Because surprise is essential, the man who marries a beautiful woman may become so used to her beauty that he never sees it. Unless there is a deepening of the concept of beauty in the sense that he finds beauty of heart and soul and virtue within, mere physical loveliness is apt to fade. When love goes, beauty seems less beautiful.
Marriage is something like television; it eats up material and no one wants to see it again. Other men will tell the husband about the beauty of the wife, and women will tell the wife about the charm of the husband. Too infrequently it is noted that many husbands and wives are more amusing when they are not together. Wives sometimes cannot understand why others enjoy the company of their husbands, and vice versa. This is because each can tell the same old things to a new audience. This phenomenon is present even earlier in life. A seven-year-old sister of a girl being courted said to the young man, "When you are coming, my sister sings and dances, gives me cookies, presses my dress, and when I speak to her I always get a nice answer. But when you go, she gets mad, scolds, slaps and bangs me about. I wish that you were here all the time."
One is not to be a cynic about power and beauty. Though they are passing gifts of life, nevertheless they were meant to be renewed. Every boy that is born to the couple is a rebirth of power, and every daughter is a rebirth of beauty. Baby talk becomes cute once again; new mysteries are unfolded, namely, fathercraft and mothercraft, as the husband and wife see themselves as sculptors quarrying new images from the block of humanity. The words of religion used in courtship such as heaven and beautiful now appear to have a new meaning; for what is heaven but a place where love is an eternal ecstasy, and where we can be lifted up above the tears and trials and loneliness of earth?
The beautiful is now understood as a quality which love bestows, and what is it but a re-echo that humanity is beautiful to God because He loved it and gave Himself up for it. Love awakens to its messiahship and the realization that both partners are called upon to be the servants of life, as into their dual selfhood creeps a sense of their mission as the protectors and defenders of life. They may not know it, but their elemental instincts are rehearsals for a deeper love. Nothing transfigures love and lifts it to new heights as much as sacrifice, for love is freedom in search of servitude to another.
The only way that love is known is by an act of self-denial. There is much more of the Divine in love than those in love know. First of all, they always speak of "our" love. "Our" love is more than the sum of the love of each. It is a reference to I something outside of themselves of which they say, "This thing I is stronger than we are." What is this love that is outside of; them which pulls them together, except a reflection of that mysterious cycle of love in the very Heart of God? So long as the Divine is kept in marriage, there will never be cynicism. Every man will know that every woman promises him something that only God can give, and every woman will know that man promises her something that only the Divine can bestow. True love is really Divine Love on pilgrimage.
Going Steady And Early Marriage
The problem of the age at which one is to marry is not absolute; it depends upon how mature spiritually and how mentally developed are the persons involved. To begin going steady at the age of fourteen or fifteen and to commit oneself exclusively to the other person is very much like buying a house when the foundations are laid. One does not know how many stories there will be, nor the size of each room, nor the arrangement of the floors. In marrying young, one does not make a choice of another partner; one just falls into a habit.
Such young people live under the illusion that they are in love when they are really only in love with an emotion.
The young must distinguish between liking and loving. The good-looking girl who passes any young man on the street produces on the fringe of his sensibility an impression; in fact, the girl makes far more impression on him than he does upon the girl, though this is hard for him to believe. The way her hair is tossed or her heels click in front of him creates a stimulus without his higher self ever having a part in it. If this results in an early courtship, there is a complete elimination of choice due to this first attraction of the senses. When a man buys clothes, he does not always take the first suit offered him by the clerk but a teenage suitor often does.
Going steady when young, with the first one who thrills emotionally, causes a rigor mortis in life. One sees it in the dress of young teenagers. Once they become engaged, they do not care how they dress or act in the presence of the partner. Why comb the hair? Why not wear overalls on the street? They become like some women after ten or twenty years of marriage who never think of dressing well to please their husbands. The teenagers are already in mental middle age.
The man that a girl loves at fifteen is not the one she will love at nineteen, that is to say, love enough to marry. Sometimes the one she loves at twenty is not the one that she would like to marry at twenty-three.
The reason is that a woman's nature cannot dissociate sex and love as readily as a man. Her nature is much more integrated, and her elements cohere more gradually. That is why a woman is slow to fall in love. She will not give herself until she completely possesses the personality or is ready to be possessed by the personality. This is the safeguard God has put into her to prevent her from making a fool of herself, like the little girl who recently bemoaned, "He broke off our engagement. He returned my frog."
"Kicks"
A young mother ran away with five different lovers in five months, abandoning her children. She appeared before a judge who belonged to the new school advocating that compassion be shown to the criminal. The judge relieved the wife of the responsibility of her two children, allowed her to keep the home that she obtained in an original settlement with her estranged husband; he then allotted her $200 a month until she could get settled "emotionally." The judge, in concluding the case said, "She is more to be pitied than censured."
A Federal judge in Washington assailed what he considered to be "an unfortunate trend of judicial decisions which strain and stretch to give the guilty, not the same, but vastly more protection, than the law-abiding citizen." Bleeding hearts, some of whom are supposed to administer justice, are so concerned for criminals and terrorists that today the good citizens are considered off the reservation, as the new compassion exalts the guilty and condemns the innocent.
What is the cause of this reversal of judgment? The loss of a moral sense. Dostoevski wrote that in a future day men would say there is no crime, there is no sin, there is no guilt, there is only hunger; then men will come crying and fawning at our feet saying to us, "Give us bread." Nothing will matter except the economic.
A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaughts of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger. As it has been put:
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
Why is Communism so anxious to see the moral degeneracy of the United States? Because it produces chaos, and chaos is the door Communism enters to seize power. Communism is the forcible organization of chaos created by license. When the sheep disperse, the shepherd sends a dog barking at their heels. The transition from "nothing matters," which is indifference to virtue and justice, to "everything matters," in which even our thoughts are controlled, is short and slippery.
Another effect of the growth of "everything goes" is a passion for more and more excitement. One notices that many juvenile delinquents state that they became dope addicts because alcohol no longer gave them a "kick." This is true of every sensation. To produce an equal effect or kick over a long period of time, one must increase the stimulus. One can get used to noise in a boiler factory. Weber and Fechner tried to tie up the psychological law with mathematics, stating that to increase the kick in the ratio of one, two, three, four, one had to increase the stimulus two, four, six, eight, sixteen. Now, after the delinquents become used to dope, what new thrill will be necessary? History proves that such emotionally exhausted punks begin to be sadistic and take pleasure in inflicting cruelty on others. Could persecution of any social or religious class be in the distant future? It is my guess that our jaded and sated appetites will demand an intermediary kick, and perhaps it will come in a new sport, namely, bull-fighting. Will we thrill to cruelty to animals, even though done skillfully? Perhaps! But this we do know, the policy of not restricting degeneration on the ground that it destroys freedom may lead to a love of seeing others punished to take the blame off ourselves. Even in television, the realistic and the possible already bore us; we must have the impossible, the supernatural. What faith! What credulity! Believing in the Resurrection of Divine Justice and Love demands less credulity and gives a thousand times more peace, and no demands for more violent kicks.
The Curve Of Love
Why is the curve of love chaotic? Should not love be a constant ascension—something like the indefatigable mountain climber who unerringly finds the peak? And yet the fact is: the curve of love is chaotic. Human love is full of what might be called the intermittances of the heart.
Why is there among so many couples an aloneness together, in which husband and wife seem to get no closer than two ships colliding in a harbor? Each moves in his own orbit, bound together only by common habit or a common burden of discontent. Why are so many marriages like battles in which defeat is never definitive and final? The pendulum swings between egotism and altruism, and finally degenerates into an exchange of egotisms. The reason is because the other person is made an idol: the man is considered as a god who sacrifices himself for the beloved; and the woman is considered as a goddess who is capable of giving an unending ecstasy of love. Once we start with the premise that each is an infinite capable of giving total happiness, we are foredoomed to disappointment.
It is hoped that all barriers will be broken down, that a sense of completeness will follow a fusion of personalities. But this is impossible, because in all human love there is something that escapes, namely, the soul. The body is owned, but the spirit we cannot clutch in our fists, any more than the winds or the zephyrs. There is a part of the Other that we have not received, and a part of ourselves that we cannot give. Because there is something that escapes possession, that thwarts our desire for total unity, each is thrown back on self, more lonely than before, even more melancholy. If unreciprocated love is tragic, sometimes reciprocated love is even more so. In a mysterious way, each has kept the secret of happiness and cannot share it.
He who forgets the body is the vestment of the immortal soul is destined to boredom. Then comes the blame. Both husband and wife feel cheated. They then separate to find new gods and new goddesses, forgetful that adding zero to zero will never make happiness.
Why is our age haunted by death and sex? The two are linked together. Baudelaire pictured a woman representing sex, holding a skull in her hand, to signify that love ended in death. Freud has written much of what he calls Eros and Thanatos, the two Greek words meaning love and death. From desire to death through passion—such is the lot of man, according to Freud. He claims that the sexual instinct is one with the aggressive instinct. Love is the life instinct; death is the destructive instinct. Both he and Baudelaire have the melancholy which the French call the nostalgie de la boue et du neant. Keats expressed it in a letter to Fanny Brawne: "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks; your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could take possession of them in the same moment."
Why are hearts haunted today by death and obsessed by sex? First of all, because modern man, having denied immortality, must necessarily see death as the end of his pleasures. Man is like a prisoner in a death cell who is given all the food and drink he wants for his stomach, while knowing that the hour of execution is about to strike. He who thinks of sex must think of a moment when the last embrace is passed from friend to friend, but to think thus is to think of death.
A second reason is that modern man feels himself in the clutches of vast impersonal forces which he cannot control, such as atoms and death. Not having any goal beyond the animal, he tries to compensate for the want of it by the intensity of an erotic experience; in the face of death he clings desperately to the one thing in which he can find a distraction. Lovers are as miserable without love as torches are without fire.
Self-Abandonment
Every now and then in history, particularly in times of great spiritual and moral crises, an era of carnality erupts. There is an excellent description of this phenomenon in the letter that Paul wrote to the Romans in which he described the close relationship that exists between the rejection of God and homosexuality, and of the rejection of authority with violence, and the primacy of sensate pleasure before duty. Recent figures reveal that persons under eighteen years of age were involved in forty-three per cent of all the serious crimes in this country, and that youths under eighteen years of age were mixed up in fifty per cent of all burglaries, larcenies and automobile thefts. In ten years juvenile delinquency has increased eight hundred per cent. The United States has the largest narcotic market in the world.
Dr. Milton Senn, director of Yale's Child Study Center, states that of all marriages in which both partners were high school students, there was a premarital pregnancy in eighty-five per cent of the cases.
This brings up the question: are we suffering from a moral or a cultural degeneration? There is no doubt that it is a moral degeneration, but it involves more than youth. Therefore, it is a cultural decay. It often happens that an individual who is frustrated may look for some kind of escape in sexual promiscuity. So it is with society. When it runs up against a dead end, many aberrations—artistic, political, economic and carnal—leave their sediment or scum on the surface of society.
Cultural decay reveals itself with society particularly in two areas: first in public life; second, family life.
In public life there is an evident want of integrity and honesty in such things as the primacy of the "fast buck," price-fixing, built-in obsolescence in mechanical things, the substitution of the novel and the new for what is already practical and useful.
In family life, too, youth sees the wedding ring cut in two. Thirteen million youths in the United States are "half orphans." Some see drunken fathers, others see neurotic mothers. The want of fidelity and love in the home makes them despair as much of loyalty in private matters as of honesty in public.
Parents will often say in justification of their position, "I can do nothing with my children." This is an absolutely correct answer, but it needs an explanation.
A mother who takes dope while she is carrying her child will see the child after birth suffer the effects of her own excesses. Somewhat the same symptoms of chills, "shakes" and other disorders pass into the infant. The mother, in the face of the victimized infant, may say, "I can do nothing for the infant." The fact is the mother has already done everything for the infant. She has made the infant that particular way. The blame is at her door, just as well as the blame for dishonesty and stealing in a boy is to be laid at the door of the father who cheated on his income tax.
Teenagers, when frustrated in these two important areas of life, look for some kind of escape, and these are generally twofold:
1. There is produced a generation of beatniks, who are actually in protest against culture. They ridicule everything because they have no confidence in it. This ridicule expresses itself in the way they dress or fail to dress, in a general uncleanliness by which they manifest that they feel themselves as strangers to society and are characterless in a characterless society.
2. The other outlet is the orgiastic, or the overemphasis on sex, in which the youth tries to escape the decay of society by a return to the primitive, seeking a release in blood, though he can never find it because he dresses it up in too sophisticated a manner. As a youth loves speeding not in order to arrive some place, but just for the excitement of speeding, so too a teenager is apt to turn to the carnal to make up for the loss of purpose of life and society and family, by the intensity of an erotic experience. He seeks to destroy the mores which he knows to be corrupt, and to drag everyone down to his own level. Abandonment becomes a substitute for creativeness. He hopes to recover some compensation for what his sick soul has lost. Finding no home for the soul in the world, he becomes self-abandoned.
The Proper View Of Sex And Love
In the talk about sex today, there has been neglected one profound relationship which the Scriptures express, and that is the coordination of sex relationship and knowledge. This is the opposite extreme of linking it up with animalism. Adam, for example, "knew" Eve and she conceived. Mary said that she "knew not" man. Why is knowledge used to express the union of man and woman? It is because it is the closest kind of union possible, namely, that between the mind that knows and the thing that is known. It is barely possible to distinguish oneself from what one knows.
Just suppose a student never knew before that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. Once a professor communicates that knowledge to him, he will always be dependent on the teacher for that information. He can never put himself back into ignorance, though he may use the knowledge over and over again. So great is the student's relationship to a college for giving him an education, that the college is called the alma mater.
Sex is like knowledge for several reasons. First, it constitutes an intimate bond between man and woman, a union so close that it is like the mind and its knowledge. Furthermore, once the experience is entered into, just as in education, there is always a dependence upon the one who gave him the knowledge. This man has made her a woman, and this woman has made him a man. A two-in-oneness has been established, which can be repeated over and over again, but it can never be reacquired. The mind which learned a certain truth can never put itself back into ignorance; neither can one who has a knowledge of another put himself back into innocence. Stolen goods can be returned; harsh words can be taken back; a greedy man can repair his excesses by giving to the poor. But here a line has been crossed. The original has been destroyed. A bridge has been burned, and neither person can return again to what he was before this knowledge was acquired.
A further proof of this bond is to recall how often an unfaithful husband in search of extramarital experiences will practically always begin justifying his marauding with an intellectual position: "My wife does not understand me." If he wants to play another nine holes of golf, he does not invoke some rationalization such as, "My boss has an inferiority complex." But here the carnal masks itself with the spiritual, and the erotic with the intellectual. The truth is that the wife probably does understand her husband only too well. The second woman, in her turn, does not put the relationship upon a physical basis; she invokes her sympathetic and maternal instincts, which is another way of rationalizing her actions.
Sex is one of the means God has instituted for the enrichment of personality. It should be properly seen as mirrored in that wider world of life. Love in monogamous marriage includes sex; but sex, in the contemporary use of the term, does not imply either marriage or monogamy. Sex seeks the part; love, the totality. Sex is rightly called a mystery. It has its matter in the physical powers of generation, and it has its form in its power to share in the creative purposes of God. Because sex is related to creativity and God is the source of all creativity, sex is seen to have an intimate bond with religion.
Sex, therefore, in its proper place, which is in marriage, is a summons from God to share in creation, since man and woman are God's co-workers in the sweet tasks of quarrying humanity.
Obedience
This universe is governed by laws. Things are this way and not that way. By submission to laws we make them our own. For example, if we obey the laws of the body we keep it in health; if we obey the laws of the mind, we keep it learned. Spiritual being has its prizes too, as Our Lord said: "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." In other words, true obedience springs from love, not from force.
The worst man in the world knows a great deal more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want of knowledge that men go to pieces, but rather for want of obedience to the knowledge of the good they already possess.
Earthly rulers say nothing concerning the temper or spirit of those who obey; all they ask is compliance with edicts and laws. Threats and penalties are attached to infractions, such as a fine for speeding. The legal world says, "If you fear me, keep my commandments." But in the Divine order it is different. "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments."
In our day, liberty is taking the place of obedience. Obedience, it is said, has had its day. Civilization is in danger when the rights of liberty plead against the duties of obedience as if the two were opposed to one another. A man who has never obeyed is not the man who will know how to command. Steady drudgery and apprenticeship are the necessary training for the conduct of a great business. He will be a poor general who has never been a lieutenant in the ranks.
Hence Our Blessed Lord went down to Nazareth and was subject to His mother and foster father; then He became obedient unto death, even unto the death on the Cross.
Obedience is not the quality of slaves, for slaves act against their will. He who had liberty to do all things became subject to His parents to prove that obedience is the pathway to freedom. As St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, "You who are children must show obedience in the Lord to your parents; it is your duty."
The parent is strong when he says to the child, "I must have your obedience because I am responsible to God for your upbringing in goodness and truth." On the other hand, the child's strongest encouragement is in the same thought: "In obeying my parents I am doing that which is pleasing to God, and I do it because I love the Lord."
It has been written in the Lamentations: "It is well thou shouldst learn to bear the yoke, now in thy youth." A horse must be broken in while he is a colt; a dog must be trained when he is young. So it is with youth. He who has never learned to submit will make himself a tyrant when he obtains power. A silver spoon has choked many a youth.
St. Thomas Aquinas said, "The respect that one has for the rule flows naturally from the respect that one has for the person who gave it." Authority must always have behind it some value which elicits respect and reverence.
In courtship, there are no laws, but the lover always seeks to fulfill the will of the beloved; and in religion, no compulsion is felt by anyone who loves Christ. The real basis of obedience in the family, therefore, is not the fear of punishment, just as in religion it is not the fear of hell. Rather, it is based on the fact that one never wants to hurt anyone whom one loves. It will bear repeating that Our Blessed Lord said, "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments."
Taken from Guide to Contentment by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.
This item 1421 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
