Ep.26 | Family: the heart of the human experience
(Meditation song at the end - Prayer of St. Francis by Sebastian Temple)
So, it’s pretty obvious by now if you’ve been following along this journal how much I love being married. But I think I wanted to speak on this with the perspective on the reality of how many people are just not getting married these days. The stark statistics back then were how many people were getting divorced, but now, I can’t even imagine what the numbers are of how many people are NOT getting married in the first place.
And I say this, because, as you heard me say before, I too was ready to turn my head away from the vocation of marriage. As I was going through the spin cycle of my 20s, yeah, I was among the career aspiring ones that felt that getting married was surely going to put a damper on things. And then kids…man, my life would come to a grinding halt! No more going out, no more spontaneous adventures, no more freedom!
I think freedom is what I was afraid of ‘losing’ – but as you’ve heard, my ‘freedom’ led me to living quite the duplicitous life of yes, striving and ‘succeeding’, but on the inside, aching and suffering the stings and stripes of being hurt over and over again. And so, I did the whole self-medicating thing, which of course led to me making mistakes and hurting others too…
Freedom…yeah right…. I was trapped.
And fast forward to now, married and with the most precious little one. I feel like I’m FINALLY living, like genuinely and authentically so. Umm, what about all the struggles you just literally told us about, you may ask.
To you I say, the struggles, the trials, the tears, that IS part of authentically living. So I’ve been learning, when we let God take our hand and lead us, we go through so many hills and valleys. We experience growing pains. We are asked to let go and courageously say yes to stepping into the unknown.
Our freedom comes in giving up our lives.
Sounds crazy, but I can’t tell you how much more fulfilling living has become now that I have become a wife and a mother, two roles of which involve serving. Especially in this day when there’s such a push for this independent woman figure, or even abandoning what it means to be a woman all-together, serving others (especially men!) can sound absolutely horrid and old-fashioned. What about my rights as a woman? As a person?
Well, let me tell you that God’s designs are perfect and when you allow Him to form you into the person He created you to be, everything around you starts to fall in place as well.
Trust me, I get it, because I have stories that would make anyone queasy for the ways I’ve been hurt by men. But when I finally went all in, very confused, angry, disoriented, and frightened, God started to work on me piece by piece. It was quite the journey. Nothing happened overnight. I had to take 1 step forward and 10 steps back over and over again.
But at the end of it, I was starting to feel whole and my longings to nurture, to love, to create, to celebrate, to dance, to sing, to be in nature, and more were being re-ordered and purified. A child-like innocence was being restored and I started to find things that weren’t innocent repulsive and the things that were became within arms reach.
That restoration of innocence was really special and helped me love the very essence of man and woman and develop a hope that all is not lost, that all has not been poisoned, and that the pureness of God’s creation still exists.
Sure, I thought that maybe my ship had sailed to experience that special bond of love between an authentic man and an authentic woman, but I knew that I wanted to help the cause of rebuilding God-centered families.
I had the desire to, but I don’t think I really understood or knew why. It was just a feeling.
But now that I am in this sacramental bond and raising a family, I’m starting to understand why.
Family is where it all starts. And if you take just a second to think about your own family, family situations that you know about…would you classify any of them as ‘broken’?
It’s been this week that I’ve really reflected on how our societal issues and sufferings, the whole gender ideology and transhumanism stuff, violences against each other and children…to me, it’s all a reflection of the brokenness of the nuclear family, what us Catholics call, the Domestic Church.
With all the things my husband and I go through together in any given week, I realize just how much our family is the grounds of which we train and learn how to be good human beings. It’s on us whether we want to put in the work to make those grounds fertile and yield bountiful fruit or not.
When we till the grounds of our own family with the tears and the laughter, we’re able to bear fruit that feeds and nourishes not just us, but also the rest of our earthly family. Love is the ultimate fruit we spread when we go out and interact with others, whether that’s other family members, people at church, people at work, people in the grocery store, people we pass on our walks.
But imagine if we didn’t take care of our ‘land’. Love wouldn’t exactly be the fruit we were bearing. We’d be going out into the world malnourished. In our negligence of tilling our own family ‘land’, we also would be depriving ourselves of the training we need to practice and forge the skills necessary to navigate what we face when we go out into the world.
And that’s what I see today.
But one could argue that it’s so and so’s fault for the brokenness. Honestly, sooo many fingers can be pointed in all sorts of directions, up and down the family tree (in me and my husband’s family’s too!), to put fault on a family’s brokenness. It’s easy. But man, the resulting resentment is poison to the soul – a pesticide, that helps perpetuate the cycles and brokenness, and not actually dig out the root and begin anew.
My hope is that God’s healing and forgiveness can enter into those generational lines as He did for me and my husband. It’s possible people! My husband and I have allll sorts of ‘generation curses’ and brokenness that we recognized at the onset of our relationship, even before we got married, and we made the firm decision that in our marriage, in our family, things were going to be different. And we both knew the ONLY way that was possible – to put God at the very center…to make Jesus our why…to aim for sanctity. And boy can I say that God has honored our desires thus far.
We of course have our own weaknesses and areas of brokenness, but because we’ve invited God in, grace is found in those areas. We also often find we are able to bring love, with a love that comes from outside ourselves, into those dark areas of our families and any other places we find ourselves in.
I just pray that those who are in blessed, chain-breaking marriages would join together and pray for those who are called into marriage and even those who may be married now, to be graced with the strength, courage, and perseverance to make their lands fertile so we can crowd out the many evils, the confusion, and the violence in our world today with God’s victorious love.
Personal prayer: Heavenly Father, you gave us your Son to reconcile us to you, to restore us to who you created us to be – thank you. Not only that, your Son was raised within a family, sanctifying marriage and family life. With the example of the Holy Family before us, please grant all families, especially those seeking to break bonds of evil, all the graces and mercies they need to begin anew, to nurture and grow in your Love, and spread it throughout all the earth. Amen.