Languages of Love

Psychologist Gary Chapman has famously identified five languages in which we express and receive love: physical touch, words of love and affirmation, quality time together, gifts and acts of service. This is a most helpful, fruitful suggestion. It has provoked me to consider five deeper, underlying, interior languages of love. First is the language of prayer...in which we pray with and for the Beloved. Any genuine love...parental, spousal, romantic or friendly...moves in, out of, and toward the deeper, broader, primordial love of God. For a love to be enduring, true and good, it must rest in the deeper love of God that is expressed explicitly or at least implicitly in prayer. Second is the language of gratitude: the Lover is unceasingly and passionately surprised, delighted and grateful before the unmerited, unexpected, and astonishing gift of the Beloved...as friend, spouse, father, mother, daughter, son, brother or sister. Third is the language of beauty: love is responsive to the beauty of the Beloved. It is this irrepressible, generous and extravagant loveliness that awakens love...and love finds its fitting expression in beauty...the beauty of flowers, a garden, or a gorgeous jewelry or attire. The splendor of our Catholic liturgy and churches is definitive of how we love God. Forth is the language of trust, because love can flourish and grow only in such an atmosphere. The Beloved shows forth her beauty, in its deepest dimensions, only when she trusts; and the Lover shows his love vigorously and efficaciously only when he trusts. Fifth is the language of humility and contrition. The Lover is also sinner and aware that he has failed to adequately reverence and care for the Beloved. And so, he is in a perpetual posture of amendment, eager to repair and compensate for his failure to love the way his Beloved deserves. It is clear that these five languages do not compete with each other, but mutually infuse and strengthen each other: prayer, gratitude, beauty, trust and humility/contrition. These might be understood as the interior of love, the soul or heart or form, which finds a multitude of exterior expressions in the five languages identified by Chapman. An additional and absolutely essential consideration is the necessity of purity in all five languages, and especially chastity in the language of touch. Physical touch is definitive of spousal and maternal/paternal love, but in the friendship between adult men and women, the dreadful realities of original sin and concupiscence absolutely require restrain, discipline, tolerance of frustration and custody of the eyes, thoughts and deeds. Such chastity is, of course, a specific if essential dimension of the deeper and broader purity of heart in which we view the Beloved always in her own goodness and in the light of God's surpassing love.