Wednesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
Today I’m choosing to focus on our first reading; specifically, St Paul’s reference to the Fourth Commandment. As I reflect, I’ll share from an evocative book I’m reading, entitled, Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America, by Kenneth Craycraft. The Fourth Commandment, according to Church teaching, goes way beyond merely the honoring of our parents and reveals to us that the family is the nucleus of society. God calls each of our families to be communities of love ordered toward him. Today, may we grow in understanding our family’s true identity and may we deepen our commitment to nurture our families to be “intimate communities of life and love.”
St Paul writes, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life on earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up with the training and instruction of the Lord.” As St Paul notes, this is the only commandment that includes a promise. When the family is properly ordered, God says, “it may go well with you.”
Craycraft helps us to deepen our understanding of the family in God’s plan. He writes, “the Catholic tradition considers the family one of the ‘three necessary societies,’ along with the Church and civic community.” He quotes Familiaris Consortio in which Pope St John Paul II wrote, “In God’s plan, [the family] is the basic cell of society and a subject of rights and duties before the State or any other community.” In that same document, he teaches, “the fostering of authentic and mature communion between persons within the family is the first and irreplaceable school of social life, and example and stimulus for the broader community relationships marked by respect, justice, dialogue and love.” Craycraft cautions, “If we lose the family, we lose the very foundation of natural human community.” He continues, “Just as the individual person is properly ordered toward rest in God, so too is the family. The family’s ‘first task,’ in the words of Pope St John Paul II, ‘is to live with fidelity the reality of communion in a constant effort to develop an authentic community of persons.’”
As we consider our families as communities of love, rooted in the God-given dignity of each individual person, and ordered together toward God, I invite us to consider two practical implications. First, what growing edges might you and I identify in our families? I might consider areas of relative unhealth or dysfunction that I could work on with my family members in order to embody more fully the ideal that Pope St John Paul II paints. For example, what might you need to work on in order to grow as an “authentic and mature communion?” Or, in what way(s) are you ordered toward God together as a family, and in what areas do you recognize disorder or disordered attachments? Perhaps you might agree to take some simple steps to help lead your family toward greater wholeness.
Second, God intends that the family be a mirror of the divine love that exists eternally in the community of Persons that is the Holy Trinity. As families, we shine God’s love as beacons within the Church to the civic community and world around us. Pope St John Paul II asserts that the family acts as a “stimulus for the broader community relationships marked by respect, justice, dialogue and love.” One only need venture out onto the street, open their news feed, or turn on any form of media to know that our society is plagued by disrespect, injustice, animosity, and hatred. I don’t know about you, but I have a strong tendency to fall into despair when I consider the state of our country right now. Here is a word of hope that I would offer to myself and to you. We can make our country and our world a better place and it begins at home; it begins with our families. Any steps that we can take to make our family and our home a haven of respect, justice, dialogue, and love will certainly have a ripple effect in our communities at large. It begins with us.
Each day is a new day to begin. Let us begin today to nurture and cultivate our “School of Love” so that it might become a “Stage of Love” – a prominent platform upon which the Gospel is preached, and God’s love is known and shared.
I’ll see you in the Eucharist,
Elizabeth Wells