English
EspañolThe bread that best nourishes a family, the wine that makes it the happiest, is love.
Text
“Loving kindness builds bonds, cultivates relationships, creates new networks of integration and knits a firm social fabric. In this way, it grows ever stronger, for without a sense of belonging we cannot sustain a commitment to others.” (The Joy of Love, n.100)
Commentary
Belonging to a family is not only a biological matter, as individuals of a species, but a personal conquest. We are born into a family but become united due to the unconditional love that we undeservedly experience since birth. Love in the family, giving oneself and embracing others, is the nourishment that holds its members together.
It is gratuitous love because we give each other freely, without price. We are not bought, nor do we sell ourselves for money, for love can only be paid for with love. We give ourselves and embrace one another because that is our will, for love cannot emerge from psychological coercion, from everything that stifles inner freedom. Love comes from within us because we want to love. And, because we decide to, we freely commit in bonds of love, which are intimate and reciprocal identities for life: we are spouses, fathers, mothers, children, siblings, grandparents, or grandchildren.
Love grows by loving. This experience is lived every day, every year, in families that genuinely love each other and do not give up no matter what happens. Beyond the differences, the difficulties and misunderstandings, defects and limitations, the family members remain united when they know they are loved and can give their love. Unity comes when love is present in every effort to correspond, when family members are aware that people, in their intimacy, cannot live isolated, like lonely people, without being lovingly embraced.
Without this companionship and sharing of life in the heart of each family, which creates intimate bonds that are deep identities, people wither in loneliness and emptiness. One of the modern societies’ epidemics – and dramas – is the loneliness, sadness, and inner emptiness many people experience. For very diverse circumstances – and few are estimable – they do not have a family, or they have been abandoned, or they themselves have fractured it.
Keeping family ties alive is “the best business” in life; the wisest, the most “profitable,” the most human. It gives us reasons to live: our intimate loved ones. It is made possible through keeping those loving relationships alive and is worth every pain. The price of loneliness is terrible and being void of reasons to live is extremely dangerous.
