50 Beams of Light

Some popular book made into a popular film claims to know what men and women really want in our deepest desires.

Here are 50 shades of light - not only what men and women want in our deepest desires, but what we were made for in our deepest being.

These excerpts are about true love and marriage from the Vatican Information Service posts over the past two years. Clearly, Our Holy Father wasn't speaking only about this particular muddled seedy novel-made-film, but most of these wonderful statements apply so well.

1 Proclaim the beauty and truth of the Christian message to a society which is tempted by confusing presentations of sexuality, marriage and the family. ~Pope Francis Jan 16, 2015
2 We are all called to be holy! …each person in the condition and in the state of life in which he finds himself: consecrated persons, married couples, unmarried baptised persons, parents, grandparents, catechists, educators and volunteers. Every state of life leads to sanctity, if lived in communion with the Lord and in the service of one's brethren. ~Pope Francis Nov 19, 2014
3 Indissoluble, happy marriage, faithful forever, is beautiful, possible and present in society. ~7th General Congregation of the Synod of Bishops Oct 14, 2014
4 The path to marriage must involve a true growth of the person.. ~7th General Congregation of the Synod of Bishops Oct 9, 2014
5 Marriage is a path with areas of light and shadows, during which the mercy and grace of Christ can regenerate and channel married and family life. ~Pope Francis Sept 14, 2014
6 The love of Christ, which has blessed and sanctified the union of husband and wife, is able to sustain their love and to renew it when, humanly speaking, it becomes lost, wounded or worn out. ~Pope Francis, homily marrying 20 couples on Sept 14, 2014
7 The love of Christ can restore to spouses the joy of journeying together. This is what marriage is all about: man and woman walking together, wherein the husband helps his wife to become ever more a woman, and wherein the woman has the task of helping her husband to become ever more a man. ~Pope Francis, homily marrying 20 couples on Sept 14, 2014
8 Marriage is a symbol of life, real life: it is not 'fiction'! It is the Sacrament of the love of Christ and the Church, a love which finds its proof and guarantee in the Cross. ~Pope Francis, homily marrying 20 couples on Sept 14, 2014
9 Devotion to The Sacred Heart of Jesus teaches the young to love intensely, the sick to be strong and to carry the cross of their suffering with patience, and the newly married to build their family on the foundations of the faithfulness and love of God. ~Pope Francis June 11, 2014
10 Marriage is a sacrament that leads us to the heart of God's plan, which is a plan of alliance with His people, with all of us, a plan of communion. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
11 We were created to love, as a reflection of God and His love. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
12 Marriage is the icon of God's love for us. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
13 The Bible uses a strong term: it says one 'flesh' only, so intimate is the union between man and woman in marriage. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
14 Married couples, thanks to the Sacrament, are invested with a genuine mission, that of making visible, starting with simple and ordinary things, the love Christ has for His Church ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
15 There are always arguments in marriages, and at times even plates are thrown. But we must not be sad about this: this is the human condition. And the secret is that love is stronger than the moments in which we argue. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
16 I therefore always advise married couples never to let the day draw to an end without making peace. There is no need to call in the United Nations peacekeepers. A little gesture is enough: a caress, see you tomorrow, and tomorrow we start afresh. This is life, and we must face it in this way, with the courage of living it together. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
17 Married life is beautiful, and must be protected. ~Pope Francis April 2, 2014
18 The beauty of the family and of marriage, the grandeur of a reality both simple and profound, a combination of joy, hope, burdens and suffering, just like the rest of life. ~Pope Francis March 25, 2014
19 Christian marriage must be lived without ambiguity. ~Pope Francis March 24, 2014
20 Marriage and the accompanying of families have the vocation to be the native place for coexistence in love, the original cell of society, transmitter of life and domestic church where faith is forged and lived out. ~Pope Francis March 3, 2014
21 St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows stimulates newly-weds to make the Gospel the fundamental rule of your married life. ~Pope Francis February 26, 2014
22 Married love is able to open us up to God's unconditional love for all. ~Archbishop Paglia, February 25, 2014
23 If there is no love, then there is no joy, and authentic love comes to us from Jesus. ~Pope Francis February 25, 2014
24 How beautiful, true and good it is to form a family, to be a family today; how indispensable this is for the life of the world, for the future of humanity. ~Consistory on the Family February 20, 2014
25 “The joy of 'Yes' for ever” ~Pope Francis' Message to 10,000 Couples on St. Valentine's Day in St. Peter's Square in 2014
26 It is still possible to take the risk of saying “for ever;” it takes courage, but “for ever” is a prospect that brings joy and allows us to look to the future with hope. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
27 If love is a relationship, then it is a growing reality, and we can also say, by way of example, that it is built in the same way that we build a house. And we build a house together, not alone! … You would not wish to build [love] on the shifting sands of emotions, but on the rock of true love, the love that comes from God. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
28 Just as God's love is stable and lasts for ever, we want the love on which a family is based to be stable and to last for ever. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
29 We must not allow ourselves to be conquered by a 'throwaway culture'. This fear of 'for ever' is cured by entrusting oneself day by day to the Lord Jesus in a life that becomes a daily spiritual path of common growth, step by step. Because 'for ever' is not simply a question of duration! ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
30 A marriage does not succeed just because it lasts; its quality is also important. To stay together and to know how to love each other for ever is the challenge Christian married couples face! … In the Our Father prayer we say, 'Give us this day our daily bread'. Married couples may also learn to pray, 'Give us this day our daily love', teach us to love each other, to care for each other. The more you entrust yourselves to the Lord, the more your love will be 'for ever', able to renew itself and to overcome every difficulty. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
31 Living together is an art, a patient, beautiful and fascinating journey … which can be summarised in three words: please, thank you and sorry. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
32 True love does not impose itself with hardness and aggression. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
33 We exist, and we are sinners. Jesus, who knows us well, teaches us a secret: never let a day go by without asking forgiveness, or without restoring peace to your home. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
34 Marriage should be a celebration, but a Christian rather than a worldly one. He offered as an example Jesus' first miracle at Cana, when he transformed water into wine when the latter appeared to have run out, thus saving the celebrations. What happened at Cana two thousand years ago, happens in reality at every wedding feast. It is the presence of the Lord, who reveals Himself and the gift of His grace, that will render your marriage full and profoundly true. … At the same time, it is good for your wedding to be sober and to emphasise that which is truly important. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
35 Some people are more concerned with external signs, with the banquet, the dress... These are important aspects of a feast, but only if they are able to indicate the true reason for your joy: the Lord's blessing upon your love. Ensure that, like the wine in Cana, the external signs of your wedding feast reveal the presence of the Lord and remind you, and all those presence, of the origin of and reason for your joy. ~Pope Francis February 14, 2014
36 Nowadays marriage tends to be viewed as a form of mere emotional satisfaction that can be constructed in any way or modified at will... discover the beauty of this union, based on love and responsibility... appreciate not only moments of joy, but also those of pain and weakness." ~Pope Francis February 7, 2014
37 Globalization and post-modern individualism promote a lifestyle that makes the development and stability of interpersonal relationships much more difficult and that is not conducive to promoting a culture of the family. Here a new missionary area is opened to the Church, for example, in family groups that create space for relationships between persons and with God where true communion, which welcomes each equally without confining them in elite groups, can grow. ~Pope Francis Jan 31, 2014
38 Christian commitment is not philanthropy... As a sacrament, Marriage is a gift from God and, at the same time, a commitment.” ~Pope Francis Jan 31, 2014
39 Both in married life and in the forms of religious consecration, as well as in priestly life, we must surmount the ways of thinking and acting that do not conform to the will of God. ~ Pope Francis Jan 16, 2014
40 Bound together by an indissoluble sacramental bond, those who are married experience the beauty of love, fatherhood, motherhood, and the supreme dignity of participating in this way in the creative work of God. ~Preparatory Document for the Synod of Bishops, Nov 5, 2013
41 Precisely through the extraordinary beauty of human love — already celebrated in a heightened manner inspired by the Song of Songs, and the bond of marriage called for and defended by the prophets like Hosea (Hosea 1:2, 3.3) and Malachi (Malachi 2:13-16), Jesus affirmed the original dignity of the married love of man and woman. ~Preparatory Document for the Synod of Bishops, Nov 5, 2013
42 Thus, following Christ who is the principle of life, by the sacrifices and joys of their vocation and through their faithful love, married people can become witnesses of the mystery of love which the Lord revealed to the world by his dying and his rising up to life again. ~Preparatory Document for the Synod of Bishops, Nov 5, 2013
43 Pope John Paul II insisted on proposing the divine plan in the basic truths of married love and the family: “The only ‘place’ in which this self-giving in its whole truth is made possible is marriage, the covenant of conjugal love freely and consciously chosen, whereby man and woman accept the intimate community of life and love willed by God himself (Gaudium et spes, 48) which only in this light manifests its true meaning. ~Preparatory Document for the Synod of Bishops, Nov 5, 2013
44 The institution of marriage is not an undue interference by society or authority, nor the extrinsic imposition of a form. Rather it is an interior requirement of the covenant of conjugal love which is publicly affirmed as unique and exclusive, in order to live in complete fidelity to the plan of God, the Creator. A person's freedom, far from being restricted by this fidelity, is secured against every form of subjectivism or relativism and is made a sharer in creative Wisdom. (FC, 11). ~Preparatory Document for the Synod of Bishops, Nov 5, 2013
45 The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children. Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament. ~Catechism of the Catholic Church 1660
46 The first setting in which faith enlightens the human city is the family. I think first and foremost of the stable union of man and woman in marriage. ~Lumen Fidei 53
47 Grounded in this love, a man and a woman can promise each other mutual love in a gesture which engages their entire lives and mirrors many features of faith. Promising love for ever is possible when we perceive a plan bigger than our own ideas and undertakings, a plan which sustains us and enables us to surrender our future entirely to the one we love. ~Lumen Fidei 52
48 Faith is no refuge for the faint-hearted, but something which enhances our lives. It makes us aware of a magnificent calling, the vocation of love. It assures us that this love is trustworthy and worth embracing, for it is based on God’s faithfulness which is stronger than our every weakness. ~Lumen Fidei 53
49 'I promise to be true to you, in joy and in sadness' … At that moment, the couple does not know what will happen, nor what joys and pains await them. They are setting out, like Abraham, on a journey together. And that is what marriage is! Setting out and walking together, hand in hand, putting yourselves in the Lord’s powerful hands. Hand in hand, always and for the rest of your lives. ~ from the Rite of Christian Marriage, Family Pilgrimage, Pope Francis Oct 26, 2013
50 And do not pay attention to this makeshift culture, which can shatter our lives. With trust in God’s faithfulness, everything can be faced responsibly and without fear. Christian spouses are not naive; they know life’s problems and temptations. But they are not afraid to be responsible before God and before society. They do not run away, they do not hide, they do not shirk the mission of forming a family and bringing children into the world. Christians celebrate the sacrament of marriage because they know they need it! … They need Jesus’ help to walk beside one another in trust, to accept one another each day, and daily to forgive one another. ~ Family Pilgrimage, Pope Francis Oct 26, 2013

May we all walk in beams of light each day... Truth... which directs us to the Author of True Love... Christ.