English
EspañolWhen does loving bear fruit? When it is not a doctrine in my mind, but a life spent daily with those who surround me.
A love truly shared is brave, humble, and exemplar. Your convictions regarding the truth of love, marriage, and family are blah blah blah – even harmful, hypocrisy that deters others – unless you lead by example in your family—reality over discourse. Bravery resides in living by our convictions, and the testimony of love and marriage that we bear by authentically living will radiate courage and strength.
Text
“As Christians, we can hardly stop advocating marriage simply to avoid countering contemporary sensibilities, or out of a desire to be fashionable or a sense of helplessness in the face of human and moral failings (…) What we need is a more responsible and generous effort to present the reasons and motivations for choosing marriage and the family, and in this way to help men and women better to respond to the grace that God offers them.” (The Joy of Love, n.35)
Commentary
Every moment of love that you genuinely share, even the most hidden and minuscule, is a living seed that will always bear fruit within another person in due time, even in someone you do not know. Why is this so? Because love is life and to love is to live a life that gives life. The fact that loving is a life that gives life…is not poetry, nor rhetoric, nor a beautiful mental notion. It is a direct manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit, Love of the Father and the Son, who is the great giver of life.
When you love in real and ordinary life, when you infuse love in your marriage and family bonds, you become an intimate accomplice of the Spirit. That is then when you most resemble the image and likeliness of God himself. Each moment you live, even the humblest and most secret acquires a colossal power of fruitfulness. In this resides the Christian’s trust and bravery. This is his vaccine against cowardice, fear, and lukewarmness.
Try to improve your love, and you will see. The first fruit will be a careful pruning of yourself…which, in turn, will make you a more authentic lover.
Our example as a family is the best seed and school. May the Christian traits within us come to light in a way that is as courageous as humble, without the need to resort to rhetoric or force. May human truth and goodness, which animates the Christian concept of family, be understood through our behavior: as spouses, parents, children. The desire to imitate what we admire because we see it truly lived out in everyday life and experience its fruits of love and union acquires a profound and straightforward radiation force.
Any of our acts of love, especially those carried out through abnegation, sacrifice, and generous, selfless dedication, have the extraordinary potential of the truth, goodness, and beauty of family. In everyone´s intimacy lies the longing to be unconditionally loved with loyal fidelity, without deceit or betrayal. And that longing, especially in today´s society full of emptiness and loneliness, is what must ignite the example of love shared in our families.
