Reciprocity Reciprocity between persons is essential for true love. What is often referred to as unrequited love creates a state of pain and suffering in the heart of the lover. Reciprocity establishes a mutual exchange in a relationship. However, that exchange must be founded on values that reflect what is true, good and virtuous about love. Karol Wojtyla wrote:
It is reciprocity which determines whether that “we” comes into existence in love. Reciprocity is the proof that love has matured, that it has become something “between” persons, has created a community of feeling and its full nature has thereby been realized.[1]
By contrast, reciprocity between persons founded on selfish motives is doomed to failure and demise, “for there cannot be genuine reciprocity based only on desire or a consumer attitude,”[2] else there is not true love. This is a particular problem in Western Civilization and gradually becoming a global concern. Therefore, the first man and woman were able to enter into a relationship with true reciprocity because they were innocent. In the freedom of original innocence, an innocence that permeates the heart, man and woman make of themselves a total gift one to the other. It presupposes freedom and purity of heart. This is critical today in the context of a post-original innocence experience and is crucial for the connection between devotion to the Sacred Heart and the realization of the nuptial meaning of the body. There cannot be reciprocity between a person who is in the “state of innocence”, that is, has a pure heart, and one who does not, that is, the man who has lost self-control. The latter will abuse the former, the former become an object to the latter. “Interior innocence,” states John Paul II, “(that is a righteousness of intention) in the exchange of the gift consists in reciprocal acceptance of the other, such as to correspond to the essence of the gift.”[3] If one person does not have a righteous intention then he is incapable of accepting the other as a gift and incapable of making of himself a gift to the other. Therefore, there cannot be a communion of persons. If there is no communion of persons, then what is present is a disordered or imbalanced relationship which involves an objectification of persons; that results in an utilitization of the person. When reciprocity is truly present in a relationship between man and woman, then the fruit of that reciprocity produces a personal interpenetration that is understood as intersubjectivity. “The giving and the accepting of the gift of the self interpenetrate, so that the giving itself becomes accepting, and the acceptance is transformed into giving.”[4] It is in this giving of the self that man and woman find themselves, and realize their personal identity that is in the image and likeness of God. For in the immanent life of the Holy Trinity, God the Father and the Son interpenetrate one another personified from all eternity in a relationship that has the procession of their love for one another in the person of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, in an analogous fashion, the love between man and woman, realized in the primordial sacrament of marriage, also bears a likeness to Trinitarian love in as much as their love realizes a communion of persons.[5] It is only when this dynamic is realized that the law of the gift reveals its divine imprint and true meaning. Therefore, the likeness of man and woman to God is contingent on their personal and interrelational communion. [1] Karol Wojtyla. Love and Responsibility. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994) 86. [2] Ibid. 88. [3] TB 70. [4] Ibid. 71. [5] Ibid. cf. 345. Article by Fr. Alejandro Valladres, Archdiocese of Mobile |