English
EspañolGood and true love is all the more careful in its giving and embracing as the needs of your loved ones increase.
No good and honest doctor abandons his patients, nor complains and reproaches them that they are sick, nor that they need the care to regain their health. We cannot, as a family, allow an excellent doctor to defeat us in such a task. To love seriously, with light and mercy, invites more commitment. Never to abandon, never to reject, never to condemn people.
To embrace every family –to do so with the love, faith, and hope that the Gospel of the family demands– has a message for those who live together without marrying, for a married couple whose love has been dusty because of problems or routine, and for those whose love is sick.
Text
“The Gospel of the family also nourishes seeds that are still waiting to grow, and serves as the basis for caring for those plants that are wilting and must not be neglected.” (The Joy of Love, n.76)
Commentary
Perhaps unintentionally, at times, we may have felt “superior” for having a lovely family without serious problems. “Superior” with respect to other families in which the parents no longer live together, have divorced, or have remarried, or where relationships between the spouses are not going well. Perhaps if we have known or were friends with such families, we have distanced ourselves from them.
This attitude must be rectified. It is too similar to those who, when faced with the badly wounded on the margins of life, just continued walking. They were not the Good Samaritan. Every family in its particular history – also in its drifts, heartache, and shipwrecks – is looked upon with affection by God passing by, who is always merciful love and a Father who goes out to meet every prodigal son with open arms. He shows us what the Good Samaritan does, healing and caring for those whom so many thieves in life wound. For every person and family with problems, with disunity, thrown to the margins, there is a message of improvement, of more excellent health, and God embraces each one with tenderness.
If possible, we should get even closer to those families in need of more affection, help, and company; get physically closer and, above all, find support in constant prayer for the sacrifices required from us due to our love for them. Prayers and sacrifices? Yes, of course, so we draw the attention of all the saints in heaven to lend a hand in the case that interests us. Sacrifices are our concrete work in their favor, here and now; sacrifice is not the slaying of rams and the burning of calves.
