English
EspañolIn the conjugal union and family bonds, we embody the faces of God´s loves: trust, consolation, help, mercy, and tender, intimate, faithful, and unconditional companionship.
Text
“Christian couples are, for each other, for their children and for their relatives, cooperators of grace and witnesses of the faith,” God calls them to bestow life and to care for life. For this reason the family “has always been the nearest ‘hospital’. So let us care for one another, guide and encourage one another, and experience this as a part of our family spirituality. Life as a couple is a daily sharing in God’s creative work, and each person is for the other a constant challenge from the Holy Spirit. God’s love is proclaimed “through the living and concrete word whereby a man and the woman express their conjugal love.” The two are thus mutual reflections of that divine love which comforts with a word, a look, a helping hand, a caress, an embrace. For this reason “to want to form a family is to resolve to be a part of God’s dream, to choose to dream with him, to want to build with him, to join him in this saga of building a world where no one will feel alone.” (The Joy of Love, 321)
Commentary
What have we, as a generation, done to make today’s youth so confused about what it means to be a husband and wife and to live as a family? Or, better said: what have we not done? Probably, we have not loved each other enough, or we have done it wrong, or we, as a generation of parents and grandparents, were not very clear about what it meant to be loving spouses, parents, and children. Somehow, we have broken the intimate relationship between the family and God, that is, between conjugal love and the other types of love in the family and the love of God himself. It seems that we have not known how to teach them, through the experience of lived life, that in the family, we are the Triune God and Creator´s dream of love, the one He had regarding human love and continues to have endlessly.
We embody this dream of God’s love when we are spouses, fathers, mothers, children, siblings, grandparents, and grandchildren. We embody it when, without ever giving up because of our limitations and difficulties, we are with one another, in the ordinary every day, comfort and trust, companionship and help, caress, tenderness and warmth, and unconditional fidelity. This way of giving ourselves, embracing, and uniting with one another is to build our family and, at the same time, to incarnate God’s love in this world. These are not two separate and independent experiences. They are the two faces of the same experience: loving each other within Love.
This is a fascinating and profound life project. The one that gives us reasons to live and vaccinates us against loneliness and emptiness. Entering together into loving each other more and better, precisely as spouses, fathers and mothers, children and siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, is our characteristic “spirituality or mysticism.” That is to say, it is our way of intimately encountering God: the conjugal and family path. Have we taught and lived our intimate loving relationships in this way? Or, to a greater or lesser extent, have we fractured our family love, have we discouraged these loving relationships and made them empty, have we betrayed them and abandoned them unfaithfully…, have we alienated them and set them at odds with the way God loves? If so, the result would be having impoverished or even lost both faces of the same coin: that of our loving familial relationships and that of God´s love.
There is still time to prevent this.
