October 25

What is the Family’s Superpower?

Fiona once asked, “Mom, what’s a family’s superpower?” After a minute I said, “I don’t know.”

“A family’s superpower is loving one another” she answered with a smile …It’s humbling to be reminded of life’s most beautiful truths from a 6-year-old wearing a tutu and wielding a plastic Rambo knife…

“Family” didn’t accidentally come together over time. From the beginning, God created the family for a specific mission—to guard, reveal, and communicate His love. But what does this mean?

Good questions deserve good answers, which is what Pope Saint JPII provided the faithful in a document called, Familiaris Consortio. In it, JPII explains that God designed the family to be the place we first encounter His unconditional love and learn to share it with the people around us.

He teaches that the family is a communion of persons—husband, wife, children, and relatives coming together as one. Man and woman first join together in marriage becoming one flesh. Husband and wife then build a broader communion by welcoming new life into their hearts—biologically or through the precious gift of adoption. Each family, unique and unrepeatable, becomes a life-giving member of the one mystical Body of Christ—the Church! In a special way, the family is the heartbeat of Christ’s love. Lovely, isn’t it?

While superheroes were made for greatness, there’s no family that doesn’t sustain wounds in the midst of battle. Our wounds can become our weakness if the beautiful communion within a family is broken. JPII reminds us that is it through the healing gift of reconciliation that we restore and move into deeper communion with one another.

The gift of the family is where we learn to love another simply because they are. When we share in the supernatural love of God we begin to love one another with His heart — sacrificial and unconditional. This invitation to share in God’s divine love and life is the root of what gives the human person dignity.

The Gospel reminds us of Jesus’s words, that we must “love our neighbor as ourself.” We first learn how to carry out this command within the gift of the family!