English
EspañolA family is not just an address where you can show up to eat and sleep. An authentic family is woven with bonds of love between those who share the same flesh and blood. They share their masculine and feminine bodies as spouses. The children begotten by their parents share the same genealogy of flesh and blood.
Where does the sharing take place? It occurs where these types of love transform a physical space and time in a home. Precisely in that space and time, spouses, parents, and children live that particular kind of companionship, trust, and support that springs from the love between those of the same flesh and blood. From such love comes forth and radiates an extraordinary and exclusive universe of bonds, affections, and feelings that weave a shared history. Without families that genuinely love each other, humanity wouldn’t know such an unconditional embrace and lifelong support from a tender age.
Text
If the parents are in some sense the foundations of the home, the children are like the “living stones” of the family”. (The Joy of Love, n.14)
Commentary
Children represent the future of any family and the future of any society that deems itself truly human. Children are movement, vitality, hope. While at the same time, they need our support as parents to guide them. The best lesson we can teach them is to put their loving relationships in order, dedicate our time, nurture them, and give them advice and strength when needed.
We will never regret being there for them no matter what, especially during difficult times. Fathers and mothers prove that unique and exclusive love during the prosperous moments of their children’s lives and when the child resembles the prodigal son. That is when, by virtue of love, parents overcome pain, disappointment, and discouragement, generating faithful hope, patient faith, unconditional support, a tender embrace, and the mercy to lend a hand and lift them. This is the authentic experience of paternity and maternity that resides in the depths of a heart and is tested time and time again by life.
The greater the mercy, support, respect, sound advice, help, companionship, and lessons of forgiveness that parents instilled in the children amidst life’s difficulties, the more they resemble God the Fountain of all paternity who, by virtue of love, is infinitely merciful and with unfailing hope awaits each morning to hug the son that finally returns home.
If God himself experiences this and tells us about it, it seems perfectly understandable and even” normal” that we as parents experience it too with our children.
