Celibacy: a Heart passionate for God
ow can we live our vocation feeling God’s closeness and the joy of self-giving? How can we passionately walk this path? Can what we are obliged to. do also make us feel fulfilled? How can we make our affections help us fall in love with God and not desire other loves that distract us? We will now attempt to address some of these questions about the dynamics of our emotions and how they can lead us to a good relationship with God.
Table of contents: heart passionate for God
- “A man is worth as much as his heart is worth”
- Celibacy and a passionate heart to love
- A Thermometer Cannot Tell Time
- Decide with head and heart
- Harmony without Tyrants
- Special Affections Without Special Effects
- Time to love with a passionate heart for God in celibacy
“A man is worth as much as his heart is worth”
We are worth as much as our hearts are worth, not just our feelings. The heart is “that center of the human being where intellect, will and feeling, body and soul are united. That center where the spirit becomes flesh and the flesh becomes spirit; where will, feeling and intellect are united in the knowledge of God and in love for Him”[1].
That is why we are worth and are much more than just what we feel. We are not defined only by what arises in our emotions or moods: we are a sum of our desires and decisions.
The essential truth of our identity, lies in our hearts. There, love becomes real. It is important to bear in mind that love is not just feeling[2]. Loving is the work of the whole heart, of the whole person, not just feelings, although our affections have a very important mission.
Celibacy and a passionate heart to love
To love is the purpose of the person; it is the fruit of freedom and not just of emotions. We form who we are by our decisions. We are free because we have intelligence and will. These capacities allow us to discover the truth and decide what makes us better. Therein lies the greatness of each person.
This does not mean that feelings should be relegated or ignored. But also, we should not interpret them as the only or main measure of who we are and what we are worth. We must aspire to love God with all our being, with all our heart. “The principle of love is twofold -explains Thomas Aquinas-, for one can love both by feeling and by the dictate of reason. By feeling, when man cannot live without what he loves. By the dictate of reason, when he loves what his understanding tells him… And we must love God in both ways, also sentimentally, so that the heart of flesh feels moved by God, according to what Psalm (83, 3) expresses: my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God“[3].
A Thermometer Cannot Tell Time
No one uses a thermometer to tell the time, nor does anyone look at the clock to find out the temperature. The same goes for the head and the feelings. If we look to one what only the other can tell us, we will constantly live in trouble. What gives us joy, what truly satisfies our heart is what does us good: it makes us better and helps us to love.
Feelings provide us with impressions of the outside and of what is happening inside us. They are impressions that drive us towards things or away from them. They are the first impressions that then need to be verified in a second instance by the intelligence, to see if they correspond to reality.
We can say that “a feeling is true to the extent that it is produced by an intimate connection with reality. (…) A feeling is authentic to the extent that it reflects and is faithful to the reality that awakens it. Therefore, faced with different realities, different people, different situations there are, logically, different feelings”[4].
From feelings, we should expect to understand whether what we like what we perceive, but they cannot tell us what we should do, or what would be the best choice. Feelings are the sensors of just a part of reality. But there is the part of reality that transcends what I feel and opens us to our most spiritual dimension: projects, ideals, motives, choices, identity, history.
Decide with head and heart
Therefore, deciding and judging only by what we feel, when it comes to great realities that are beyond just what we feel, can be a great mistake and a source of suffering. Let’s take an example: a family father who arrives home tired and sad at the end of the day, perhaps because his work day was not gratifying, and he does not feel up to facing the rest of the day. His feelings drive him to run away, but he certainly he understands that the best thing to do is to go home and give himself generously to his family, even in a bad mood. Surely -perhaps the next day- he will b joyful for having managed to overcome himself and give himself to his family, which is an important focus in his life.
Did the feelings make a mistake? No! Was he wrong by deciding with his head, against what he felt? No! A mature person does not ask his feelings to tell him what is the best decision to make. He does not ignore them either, but rather counts on that reading of reality, without being surprised that they do not always resonate with the background reality, which is so often not emotional. In the same way that a thermometer is not a clock, feelings do not measure where we should go: they only inform us whether the temperature of what we are living here and now is pleasant or not.
Harmony without Tyrants
Deep joy comes from love: being loved and loving. Love is born from freedom. That’s why we are what we decide to be, not just what we feel. Living for love, and choosing what we do to give ourselves to God is what allows us to work with our head and feelings together: it is what makes the heart unified.
Therefore, to build inner harmony we must not admit tyrants. We have already talked about the tyranny of feelings: of sentimentalism. Now we must be careful to exclude other possible tyrannies that result from an inadequate leadership of our intelligence or will.
On one hand, we must avoid allowing our decisions to be motivated by what “ought to be”, or the law that must be fulfilled. This frame is a good map, but bad fuel for our free action. It is not enough to do things because they have to be done. We must add our free choice, which on many occasions we can make, but we must do it out of love. Pretending to only understand what we have to do would lead us to intellectualism, to the dictatorship of intelligence over other capacities.
We must also flee from voluntarism, which consists in putting a blind decisions into action, without discovering and considering the good motives behind it. A frequent form of voluntarism is perfectionism. This way of acting supposes that we are worth as much as we do everything without error. Thus, the perfection of love that leads to freedom is confused with a technical perfection that ends up suffocating it.
Vocation and sanctity -which is its end- do not consist in a race of doing but in transforming ourselves into sons of God, through love and with His grace.
Special Affections Without Special Effects
Affections resonate with the head when we are able to help them find reasons to be passionate about the usual daily life, about day-to-day life. Emotional maturity that helps to live one’s vocation joyfully consists in the ability to involve one’s feelings in day-to-day life, in the lights and shadows of the normal life that we have, are, and live.
For this to be a reality, first of all, we must avoid fooling ourselves: seeking special moments, exceptional occasions, or situations outside the norm to feel something moving and revolutionary. There is a problem of expectations there that would make us always looking forward to another situation, longing to get out of normality as soon as possible to feel good. It is an attitude that can internally distract us because we are attracted by something different from reality, in a state in which we believe that we will like more.
To be passionate about the greatness of our normal and concrete life requires, first of all, to value it and to seek to love precisely there. Knowing how to be excited about the concrete aspect of one’s vocation is a task of self-knowledge. The head helps -through inner dialogue and spaces for reflection- so that our affections also come to resonate with the good that we can find in everyday life.
Just as a good artist takes his child to a painting exhibition and patiently explains with love what he can enjoy in what he is seeing, in an similar way we -the head- are the ones who must help ourselves to discover what is attractive to our emotions. The affective world plays an important role in the life of prayer.
Time to love with a passionate heart for God in celibacy
For this, we need interior time for dialogue with God and of fruitful silence. We must protect ourselves from the avalanche of information and images, whose volume is such that it represents a constant tsunami for our emotions. There is no time and capacity to process so much stimuli to know what we want, what and why we feel. It is curious, but there are many people who are informed about what is happening in the world, but they ignore who they are, what is happening to them, and what they want. This frenetic exteriority also empties the affections and makes them fragile and fickle, manageable by any impression and situation.
Emotional maturity requires interior recollection[5]. Inner dialogue with Jesus -not only in exclusive times for prayer but on the occasion of everything we live- serene listening to what happens to us -from God and from those who have the grace of accompanying us on the spiritual path-… in short, contemplation of God’s Love is the great gateway to being passionate about Him and about the path that leads us to His Heart. Celibacy lived in this way leads to a passionate heart for God and is experienced with wonder and excitement.
Fernando Cassol
Article notes: Celibacy, passionate heart for God
[1] Benedict XVI, Homily, 17-IV-2011.
[2] This topic is expanded in chapters 3 and 4.
[3] Super Evang., S. Mat. lect., 22, 4.
[4] García-Morato, J. R., Crecer, sentir, amar. EUNSA, Pamplona (2002), 40.
[5] “Entering contemplation is analogous to entering the Eucharistic Liturgy: ‘gathering’ the heart, gathering our whole being under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, dwelling in the Lord’s dwelling place that we ourselves are, awakening faith to enter into the presence of the One who awaits us, letting our masks fall and turning our hearts to the Lord who loves us to place ourselves in his hands as an offering that needs to be purified and transformed.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2711,
