“Love is by its very nature creative”
One does not love a person because it is easy.
Why does one love at all?
What do I love you for, Monica? Don’t ask me to answer.
I couldn’t say. Love outdistances its object,
or approaches it so closely that it is almost lost from view.
Man must then think differently,
must leave cold deliberations
and in that “hot thinking”
one question is important:
Is it creative?
— Christopher, speaking to Monica, in John Paul II’s play The Jeweler’s Shop
Dear Teresa (Pope John Paul II’s student),
Before I leave for Warsaw I have to tell you a few things (think together with you):
1) I don’t want you ever to think this way: that life forces me to move away from the perspective of something that is better, riper, fuller, to something that is less good, less mature, less attractive. I am convinced that life is a constant development toward that which is better, more perfect — if there is no stagnation within us.
2) After many experiences and a lot of thinking, I am convinced that the (objective) starting point of love is the realization that I am needed by another. The person who objectively needs me most is also, for me, objectively, the person I most need. This is a fragment of life’s deep logic, and also a fragment of trusting in the Creator and in Providence.
3) People’s values are different and they come in different configurations. The great achievement is always to see values that others don’t see and to affirm them. The even greater achievement is to bring out of people the values that would perish without us. In the same way, we bring our values out in ourselves.
4) This is what I wanted to write you. Don’t ever think that I want to cut short your way. I want your way.
— Wujek (Pope John Paul II)
The bridegroom examines his bride attentively, as though in a creative loving restlessness, to find all that is good and beautiful in her and that he desires for her. The good that the one who loves creates with his love in the beloved is like a test of that same love and its measure.
— Pope John Paul II, writing in Man and Woman He Created Them
The strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles, when his or her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults, and without in the least approving of them.
— Pope John Paul II, writing in Love & Responsibility
Oh, do not worry about giving birth…
I know it is the woman who gives birth.
Do not fear what I say:
how differently YOU ARE GIVING ME BIRTH!
You want to give me birth like this all the time —
to introduce me to what is
and what has not yet come to be
(and if it is somehow already, it is thanks to you).
Though born once,
I am also many times unborn
and want to be born many times.
— Monica, speaking to her father, in John Paul II’s play Radiation of Fatherhood
I am putting my feet in the water.
What a soothing coolness, what freshness,
What rebirth!
Life enters anew into all my cells.
Ah, as I am being born anew from this forest stream,
I ask: Be water for me!
I ask: Be water for me!
— Monica, speaking to her father, in the play Radiation of Fatherhood
Spiritual parenthood as a sign of the inner maturity of the person is the goal which in diverse ways all human beings, men and women alike, are called to seek, within or outside matrimony. This call fits into the Gospel’s summons to perfection of which the ‘Father’ is the supreme model. So then, human beings will come particularly close to God when the spiritual parenthood of which God is the prototype takes shape in them.
— Pope John Paul II, writing in Love & Responsibility
Man must reconcile himself to his natural greatness.
— Pope John Paul II, writing in Love & Responsibility