The Family: Cenacle of Love

Even though it seems legitimate to talk about a crisis of the family, perhaps it would be more appropriate to talk about a “crisis of love.” Though it’s probably not the case in all family crises, it is certainly the case in the vast majority that – independent of social class or urban or rural location – we should really be speaking about a “crisis of love” which generates the “crisis of the family.”

What is the family if there’s no love? A mere societal cell? A center where opposing interests mix? And what if we’re dealing with a Christian family? Whatever it may be, it’ll be a far cry from being that mystery of love, that sacrament of the loving presence of the couple and their children that tells the world that Christ Jesus is its center and life. To forget that marriage, from which the family emerges, is a vocation, God’s calling to the couple to pursue a path of holiness, is to surrender to an empty routine and with it to the impoverishment that kills the sublime and ends up undermining the very union itself.

Christian conjugal life is a path to holiness. It’s painful that today many forget or even ignore this fact. When the dimension of marriage as an ascetic path along which the couple endeavor to kill their egoism in order to submerge themselves in a “we” that transcends the “I” and the “you” in a mysterious reality that makes Christ present between them is forgotten or ignored, what gets destroyed is the possibility of living a marvelous reality: that of the family as a cenacle of love. Sadly, one will have no difficulty in confirming that fact that many “families” are nothing but a plurality of egoisms.

Because these realities are forgotten many people get married today with the same ease with which they drink a glass of beer or soda; without much thought or preparation. An unhappy affirmation for sure, but far unhappier is the number of homes destroyed by a lack of love. The number of child victims in those homes is the tragic result of a superficiality which confuses the mystery of love with fleeting emotions. Even in cases where there is a strong incidence of structural factors at work there remains so much that could have been overcome by an authentic, purifying love!

To many people it makes little sense to speak of the family as “a little Church” or as a reflection of the intimate love of God. What’s missing is love. There is a failure to understand that the reality of the human being points to Love, and that the reality of the love that each person lives – when it is truly love – is a participation in that love which comes from God. This is why one has to educate and purify himself. Each human being, invited by God to the sublime reality of participation in love, is wounded by sin – how forgotten today is the terrible reality of sin! – and sin, this anti-Love tendency which anybody can evidence in himself, is a serious obstacle to the integral realization of the human being; to his personal integration and communion with others. The Latin American Bishops reminded us emphatically in Puebla [1] that sin is the rejection of love and the rupture of communion, and that its presence poisons man and entire peoples. [2]

Sin, the rupture with God, is the cause of the rupture of the intimate reality of man into a fragmentation and disarticulation that has moved him to the most anguished laments compiled in the literature of a Kafka, a Camus, a Celine or a Sartre, but lived out by real people, people who are concrete and near to us. Sin is the source of the evil in man and in society. Sin opens the door to egoism, which, in the context of a marriage, is the negation of marriage itself, and in the context of the family leads to the objectification of the children - to their appropriation as objects - and to the mutation of the responsibilities of a promoting and liberating love which respects and reverences the profound freedom of those “children of God,” into a matter of merely “giving them things.”

Many family “crises” owe their existence to the substitution of the reality of “being,” which is love, with that of “having”; a tragic substitution that is the child of a civilization submerged in the most vulgar materialism and in the hedonism it gives rise to.

That many parents fail, by omission, to fulfill their duty of forming their children in the faith is but an example of the ignorance of the profound and eminently diffusive reality of the mystery of love. We even see the painful reality of parents who, faced with their children’s discovery of the consequences of the faith they received at Baptism, oppose them, jealous of God and His ways, and consider an authentic liberating commitment with the Lord Jesus something exaggerated. They ignore love! They’re blind to the reality of Christ! That’s why in place of love, which is respectful of the freedom and destiny of the other, there arises the eagerness to possess, control, and objectify, born of anti-love. What an obstacle this is to God’s Plan!

Marriage and the family are projects in the life of their members. They are paths by which God invites those members to a fulfilling encounter, to a conversion, to openness. The family, cenacle of love, is an existential project, a style of life founded upon the model of the Family of Nazareth. It constitutes a horizon which should orient all those that the Lord calls to live the vocation to marriage or to live out their presence within the family, to discover the liberating dynamism of Love.

Christ’s call to conversion [3] is not an invitation to separate faith life from daily life, as some seem to understand it, but, rather, to integrate faith into daily life. All the acts of one’s life should reveal the effects of a commitment with the Lord. In conjugal and family life one must strive to allow the transforming presence of God to flow into concrete life, manifesting itself in the diverse aspects and realities of the daily life of each of the members of the couple and the family.

Loving is a human possibility, but it is not a reality that is easy to achieve. Love, responsibility, freedom, and respect, are realities that belong together. The social communications media have vulgarized and insulted the supreme reality of the mystery of love. Each person’s task is to discover himself and to discover the types of tendencies that lie within him, to track down the roots of anti-love in order to counter it and make space for the generous and reverent impulse of Love, love which is a participation and which leads to communion. There is a close link between the task of becoming a man, of being a full human being, and the task of opening oneself to the grace of God in order to eradicate the anti-love tendencies and make way for Love, for its consequences and participations.

Marriage, a vocation of human encounter in love, is a reality that can verify the truth of the “we”, a dimension which, being rooted in love, belongs to a dynamism of openness and communion towards others.

The family is also a medium of relations that - when these relations are centered in love and communion, in the respectful freedom of each member within a just and prudent order - is a “cenacle of love” that fulfills its members and opens their lives to the Lord of Life. It becomes generous in solidarity with other human beings, sharing their anxieties and hopes, thus effectively testifying that love, due to the action of He who is all Love, is possible and real.

Marriage and the family are sublime realities that must be understood and valued in the light of the Lord’s revelation so that they can be lived to their fullness in conformity with the loving Salvific Plan of God.

1980

Notes

[1] Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate, Puebla - Republic of Mexico, 1979.

[2] See Puebla, 185-186; 328-329.

[3] See Mark 1:15

Notice: These articles have been translated by members of the Christian Life Movement and have not been revised by the author.

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