Today’s Treasures from 'Amoris Laetitia' (123-130): Lifelong Sharing/Joy and Beauty

• If this love is to overcome all trials and remain faithful in the face of everything, it needs the gift of grace to strengthen and elevate it. (124)
• Marital joy can be experienced even amid sorrow; it involves accepting that marriage is an inevitable mixture of enjoyment and struggles, tensions and repose, pain and relief, satisfactions and longings, annoyances and pleasures, but always on the path of friendship, which inspires married couples to care for one another: “they help and serve each other.” (126)
• In a consumerist society, the sense of beauty is impoverished and so joy fades. Everything is there to be purchased, possessed or consumed, including people. Tenderness, on the other hand, is a sign of a love free of selfish possessiveness. (127)
• Loving another person involves the joy of contemplating and appreciating their innate beauty and sacredness, which is greater than my needs. This enables me to seek their good . . . (127)
• Much hurt and many problems result when we stop looking at one another. (128)
• Love opens our eyes and enables us to see, beyond all else, the great worth of a human being. (129)
• This joy, the fruit of fraternal love, is not that of the vain and self-centred, but of lovers who delight in the good of those whom they love, who give freely to them and thus bear good fruit. (129)