English
EspañolWithin a family, tenderness is the language of love. The warmth, sweetness, softness with which the personal spirit channels its affections in any form of giving and embracing through its body.
Text
“Against this backdrop of love so central to the Christian experience of marriage and the family, another virtue stands out, one often overlooked in our world of frenetic and superficial relationships. It is tenderness.” (The Joy of Love, n.28)
Commentary
It amazes me how young children – for example, my children – share kisses, hugs, and sweet words so naturally with those who love them. Children love tenderly. They seem to be experts at giving and asking for it – how spontaneously natural they are!
And it makes you wonder how hard it is for us adults to do the same. Adult intimacy is sometimes contaminated – perhaps gagged – with fear and suspicion. We hide our naked inner selves. We hide it away with characters that we pretend to be but are not. It is not as easy for us to express, with simple naturalness, affections, and feelings of love, especially in their sweetest, warmest, and most personal manifestations.
Yet, how much good – how much direct, immediate, authentic communication of our intimate selves as spouses, parents, children! – it brings to our family love when we show up for our loved ones, ready to give affection and warmth through our bodies and senses, surrounding them with tenderness.
In the, loved shared as a family, tenderness expresses the most profound, most intense, most naked and immediate beat of our hearts as a husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter, grandparent or grandchild. This rings true when tenderness communicates the “fire” of love through gestures, acts, and behaviors.
Through tenderness, our person, in its naked intimacy, makes itself present and can “touch” the gift of self-giving and embracing within. Thus being more present when greeting, hugging, kissing, having a conversation, handing out a cup of coffee, listening to another person´s sorrows… Tenderness is the warmth and gentleness of giving and embracing. It is not just any warmth or courtesy. It is that “intense warmth” and “trembling of the heartbeat” with which the personal spirit pulses when loving and communicating it to our beloved. A “sensitive jewel” of our spirit, whose act of existence is not a cold, isolated, solitary, and merciless principle towards others. A jewel of the personal spirit incarnated in a person´s body, turning it into a caress of love. Our act of existing is a source of warm life, open to others, that gives and embraces. Tenderness springs from that living depth that is our personal being. It is the most delicate and exquisite heartbeat with which when we love, our spiritual heart silently becomes attentive to the beloved and says to them through their body: “I am wholly and sincerely a gentle touch for you, my love.”
When tenderness is set to “caress mode,” it manifests, through the body, how ineffable the personal spirit is when it loves, for it gives itself and embraces within. Therefore, when “our people” want to be tender, they sense the most direct and immediate way to communicate it is by “silently living” within the universe of non-verbal caresses rather than putting themselves in oral or written discourse. In this manner, a caress signifies the body´s silence because it brings forth the ineffable; however, this shakes it to its core, for it communicates the spirit´s tenderness in giving itself and embracing another.
