Afflicted by Love

Have you ever loved someone so much it hurt? Perhaps you’ve watched a child you cherish walk into a situation where you cannot protect them. Perhaps you’ve sat at the bedside of someone dying and felt your heart strain against the cage of your chest, wishing you could somehow pour yourself into them, keep them here, hold them just a little longer. Perhaps you’ve simply looked at the face of someone you love and felt that strange mixture of overwhelming joy and a piercing ache you could not name.

If you have known such a moment, you have stood at the edge of something the saints understood far more deeply than most of us dare. They spoke of being afflicted by love, or wounded by love, or (as Teresa of Avila put it) of a love so fierce it felt like a burning arrow plunged into the center of the soul.

To modern ears, this language can sound overwrought, even unhealthy. When Bon Jovi sings that he was "shot through the heart," he knows the pain of love, but he is wrong when he casts blame upon the other can says she gave love a "bad name." Granted, the song seems to describe some kind of betrayal, a vulnerability on account of love, but why would that hurt at all if love hadn't itself rendered the heart vulnerable?

Yet, it does not require a betrayal for love to ache. Love aches not only when we're separated from our beloved. It can ache even when we're intimately close, even on a wedding night, when the bride and bridegroom give each other to one another fully, and wish, somehow, they could be even closer. There is a loss of "self" in that moment of gift of one to the other, and the loss of self-serving love, of a love directed toward me, myself, and I, is called by St. Paul in Ephesians 5 a mystery that is an encounter with Christ's love for the Church.

In a very real way, genuine love freely given, is a crucifixion of the self. It is a death of self-love, and an encounter with sacrificial love.

The pain in love is what love must afflict upon us if it to truly be love. Yet, this strikes us as off. It doesn't "feel" like what we think love feels like. Are we really meant to suffer in our love for God? Isn’t the Christian life supposed to bring peace?

And yet the saints are unanimous. To love God deeply is to be wounded by that love. To draw near to the Divine Fire is to be burned. The question is not whether this wound is real, but what it means, and why it is counted among the greatest graces a soul can receive.

 

The Biblical Roots of the Wound

Long before the mystics wrote of love’s afflictions, the Bible had already planted this strange seed. The Song of Songs contains a line that resonates with this truth: “I am faint with love” (Song of Solomon 2:5, NRSV).

A few chapters later, the bride declares, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Song of Solomon 6:3), but this belonging is never simple possession. It is always a kind of sweet torment, a seeking and finding and losing again. “I sought him, but did not find him; I called him, but he gave no answer” (Song of Solomon 5:6).

The Hebrew word often rendered as “faint” or “sick” in 2:5 is ḥolat, a word used elsewhere of genuine illness. The bride is not merely tired. She is undone. Love has entered her like a fever.

The New Testament speaks of the same reality in a different key. Paul writes of an “inward groaning” as we wait for the fullness of redemption (Romans 8:23). He speaks of being “constrained” or pressed upon by the love of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:14). And most strikingly, he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

There is no way to read such words without recognizing that the life of love Paul describes is a life that costs something. It is a life in which the self is wounded open so that Christ may enter and dwell.

Jesus himself says, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). Fire warms, but fire also burns.

 

Why Love Must Wound

To understand why the saints speak of love as affliction, we have to understand what love actually does to a human soul.

Love, by its very nature, enlarges us. It pushes outward against the narrow walls we have built around our hearts. Anyone who has truly loved knows this. To love is to become vulnerable, to allow another’s joys and sorrows to become your own, to surrender a portion of your autonomy for the sake of communion.

Now imagine what happens when the Beloved is not merely another human being, but God himself.

Imagine what happens when Infinite Love begins to pour itself into a finite vessel.

The vessel must expand, or break, or both.

The soul that receives divine love must be enlarged beyond what it was, and this enlargement is not painless. It is a stretching. It is a tearing of old skins so that new wine may be poured in (Luke 5:37-38).

St. John of the Cross, writing in the sixteenth century, described this enlargement when he spoke of the soul being prepared for union with God as wood is prepared for fire. The wood does not simply catch flame. First it must be dried, then blackened, then consumed. The fire is the same fire that will eventually make the wood itself radiate light, but the early stages feel like nothing but loss.

This is why the saints use language of affliction. They are not being dramatic. They are describing, with the best words they can find, what it feels like when a soul is being prepared for a love it was not yet large enough to hold.

 

The Three Faces of Love’s Affliction

The saints identify at least three distinct ways that love afflicts the soul.

The first is the wound of longing. When God touches a soul, however briefly, he leaves a mark. The soul now knows something it did not know before, and everything in ordinary life feels pale by comparison. This is what Augustine meant when he prayed, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1). The wound of longing is the holy dissatisfaction of a heart that has tasted something it cannot yet fully possess.

The second is the wound of purification. To love God is to want to be like God, and to see clearly how unlike him we still are. The closer the soul draws to the Divine Light, the more it sees its own shadows. This can be agonizing. The saints speak of weeping over small faults that once seemed insignificant, of feeling the weight of sins they had long forgotten. This is not scrupulosity. It is the soul’s honest reckoning in the presence of Holy Love.

The third is the wound of compassion. As we grow in love for God, we inevitably grow in love for those whom God loves, which is everyone. And to love broadly is to suffer broadly. The saints wept for sinners they had never met. They carried the burdens of strangers. Paul wrote that he had “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” in his heart for his own people (Romans 9:2).

This is not a malfunction of Christian love. This is Christian love functioning exactly as it should.

 

The Hidden Sweetness

Here is the mystery that outsiders cannot grasp: these wounds are not only painful. They are also, somehow, sweet.

St. Teresa of Avila, describing her own experience of love’s affliction in her autobiography, wrote that the pain was so great it made her moan, but the sweetness was so excessive that she wished it would never end (The Life of Teresa of Jesus, Chapter 29). This is not masochism. It is the discovery that in the economy of divine love, suffering and joy are not opposites. They can occupy the same moment in the same heart because they are both products of the same fire.

The reason is simple, though profound. Pain in divine love is not pain against the soul but pain of the soul’s enlargement. It is the pain of becoming. Just as an athlete’s burning muscles are the site of growth, or a laboring woman’s agony gives way to new life, the soul’s affliction in love is the very place where its transformation is happening.

To ask for the love without the affliction would be to ask for the destination without the journey. It would be to remain small.

 

How to Live This in Daily Life

So what do we do with this? Most of us are not mystics. We are not being pierced by visible arrows or lifted into ecstasy. How does this theology of holy affliction speak to ordinary lives lived in ordinary rooms?

First, do not be afraid when love hurts. When you find yourself weeping for someone, when you feel the weight of a prayer you cannot seem to finish, when you ache with longing for God in the middle of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, do not assume something has gone wrong. Something may be going exactly right. The discomfort of love is often the growing edge of grace.

Second, resist the cultural pressure to sanitize love. We live in an age that tends to define love as a pleasant feeling or, at best, a supportive attitude. Christian love is something far more costly. When you find yourself resenting the demands that love makes on your time, your patience, your resources, remember that these demands are not interruptions of love. They are love itself, doing its real work.

Third, offer the wound back to God. When you feel love’s affliction, whether it is grief, or longing, or the painful awareness of your own unworthiness, do not try to numb it. Do not rush to distraction. Instead, hold the wound up to God like an empty cup and say, “Fill this.” The saints learned, largely through contemplating on Christ's love-charged wounds, that the wounds of love become channels through which God pours more of himself into us.

What we try to hide, we have to carry alone. What we offer, God transforms.

Fourth, practice small acts of surrender. Most of us will not be given dramatic spiritual experiences. But we are given a hundred small opportunities each day to let love enlarge us. The unglamorous phone call to a lonely relative. The patient listening when we would rather speak. The forgiveness we would rather withhold, but offer anyway. Each small yes is a tiny wound of love. Each tiny wound, accepted, widens the heart.

Finally, trust that the wound is working. You may not see the transformation. You may go years feeling only the affliction and none of the sweetness. This is normal. The saints themselves endured long seasons of darkness. What matters is not that you feel your progress, but that you remain willing. A wood burning in the fire does not know it is becoming light. It only endures burning. But the light comes.

To be afflicted by love is not a misfortune to be avoided. It is the signature of a heart being made ready for union with the One who is Love itself. “Faint with love,” the bride says in the Song. May we all be so fortunate as to know what she means.