People's Edit
The Church and Family
Opinion | People's Edit | Joseph M Thohrii | 22-Feb-2023
The Catholic vision describes the family as a community of life and love. Family life is sacred and its activities are holy because God’s love is revealed and communicated through these activities. As a result, families can come to believe that God dwells among them, empowering them to recognize and respond to God’s gracious activity in their lives. Presuming that the family is the basic unit of human society, the cradle of gratuitous love, and that talking about the family and marriage implies education in fidelity, it reiterated that the family constitutes the future of humanity and must be protected.
In the book of Genesis we read that God created man out of His love to love. So when God created Eve and Adam saw her, his entire personhood rejoiced, and he exclaimed with an emotional delight from the depth of his soul. He was able to give and receive love in the same measure, so there was total harmony and unity of body, mind and soul. The kind of emotional delight, the love and the sense that ‘we belong to each other’ and ‘we complete each other is experienced by most of us in our family’. However not many of us realize the beauty and wonder of this as being part of God’s plan for us to experience a glimpse of His love through our spouse. Our primary relationship, which is with God, is the foundation on which all our relationships at home will depend.
In the stressful, challenging world in which we live today, relationships within the family are fragile and need to be handled with care, if we are to live in harmony together. Two areas of relationship that need special handling are relationships between parents and children and relationships between mother-in-law and daughter-in- law is particularly fragile and need careful and sensitive handling.
Our primary relationship which is with God is the foundation on which all our relationships at home will depend. If we have truly experienced the unconditional love of God, then no matter what the challenges are, we will move towards accepting each other with all our frailties, having understood that though all of us may be broken and weak, we can be strong through and in Christ who strengthens us. To be able to live in harmony in today’s difficult world is the answer to joyous living and secret to true family happiness. The choice is ours. We only need to work at our relationship and harmonious living shall be ours.
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(The Author is a Priest in the Archdiocese of Imphal, Manipur. He can be reached on mtjo89@gmail.com. Viewa expressed are his own)
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