Tonight, over dinner, I was reading Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's classic newspaper article on "Love Dreams":
Every person carries within his heart a blueprint of the one he loves. What seems to be "love at first sight" is actually the fulfillment of desire, the realization of a dream. Plato, sensing this, said that all knowledge is recollection from a previous existence. This is not true as he states it, but it is true if one understands it to mean that we already have an ideal in us—one which is made by our thinking, our habits, our experiences, and our desire. Otherwise how would we know immediately, on seeing persons or things, that we loved them? Before meeting certain people we already have a pattern and mold of what we like and what we do not like, certain persons fit into that pattern, others do not.I cried reading that, because it made me think about how God has a blueprint of me, and I so want to become His blueprint of the one He loves. I know He loves me as I am, but I want Him to have the joy of seeing me with the beauty that He envisions I would have if I were united to Him the way He wants me to be.
When we hear music for the first time, we either like or dislike it. We judge it by the music we already have heard in our own hearts. Jittery minds which cannot long repose in one object of thought or in continuity of an idea love music which is distracting, excited, and jittery. Calm minds like calm music: the heart has its own secret melody, and one day when the score is played the heart answers, "This is it."
So it is with love. A tiny architect works inside the human heart drawing sketches of the ideal love from the people it sees, from the books it reads, from its hopes and daydreams, in the fond hope that the eye may one day see the ideal and the hand touch it. Life becomes satisfying the moment the dream is seen walking, and the person apt pears as the incarnation of all that one loves. The liking is instantaneous—because, actually, it has been there waiting for a long time.
God, too, has within Himself blueprints of everything in the universe. As the architect has in his mind a plan of the house before the house is built, so God has in His Mind an archetypal idea of every flower, bird, tree, spring time, and melody. There never was a brush touched to canvas nor a chisel to marble without some great preexisting idea. So, too, every atom and every rose is realization and concretion of an idea existing in the Mind of God from all eternity. All creatures below man correspond to the pattern God has in His Mind. A tree is truly a tree because it corresponds to God's idea of a tree. ... [Read the full article.]
The Dominican author Father Simon Tugwell O.P. writes that "man's desires are, in some extraordinary way, the image of God's desire." When I desire the unseen future love whose blueprint I sense, how much more must God desire me, wanting me to return His love and to expand my heart to fill the lines that He has already created.
