English
EspañolWhat is the family´s spirituality? It is found within and not on the outside. It resides in each of the loving relationships that come to life in the family. If you live these types of love with authenticity, you will encounter, at their core, the Triune God.
Text
“Today, we can add that the Trinity is present in the temple of marital communion…” (The Joy of Love, n.314). “The Lord’s presence dwells in real and concrete families, with all their daily troubles and struggles, joys and hopes… If that authenticity is inspired by love, then the Lord reigns there, with his joy and his peace. The spirituality of family love is made up of thousands of small but real gestures. In that variety of gifts and encounters which deepen communion, God has his dwelling place. This mutual concern “brings together the human and the divine,” for it is filled with the love of God. In the end, marital spirituality is a spirituality of the bond, in which divine love dwells.” (The Joy of Love, n.315)
Commentary
The spirituality of the family is within itself. Do not look for it outside, in other forms of life and love, to transfer it to the family because you assume that the family does not have its own path of an intimate encounter with God.
What is spirituality? A path of encounter with the Spirit of God and incarnation of the Spirit found in your ordinary and concrete life. The family’s spirituality consists of the giving of self, embracing one another and the processes of union that contain each of the intimate types of love that are lived in the family’s heart. In the relentless struggle for them to be true love, it also consists in the authenticity with which, daily, spouses live their union of conjugal love: they preserve it, make it grow, and restore it as soon as possible from wear and tear, erosion and wounds. Truthfully and lovingly being, in each moment and circumstance, fathers, mothers, children, siblings, grandparents, or grandchildren, equally contributes to the family´s spirituality. The Triune God resides within these loving relationships.
When we live our conjugal and familial love, we encounter the Triune God and Creator. Thus, we bring God´s dream of love for human beings to life.
The spirituality of the spouses is to live their bond of love in each concrete moment. In this way, through each of their loving bonds, the family itself, based on the union of conjugal love, by living their love´s truth and fidelity, is a temple of the Triune God and becomes an intimate accomplice and shares with the Spirit of God the love of Creation. Thus we “divinize” this world; that is, we “spiritualize” it with that Spirit of God with which his Love created the human being, man and woman, and sealed within them the love of “one flesh.” In this sense, the family of matrimonial foundations embodies the lay spirit, that is, the consecration to the Triune God of the world from within it.
