Cry 'Woof'
It’s been said that home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in; and there’s a great truth to this. Our families, the parents and siblings and children of our own blood, have a claim on us that we cannot ignore. We didn’t choose them; we might not always like them; and yet we somehow have to get along with them.
That’s a dynamic that’s in some amount of trouble in our modern American society. We all know families that are broken; and the younger adults in American are being much slower to form families than their forebears. Even in good, functional families, the adult children are often dispersing across the country. And this loss of family is a great loss indeed, for it’s in families that we learn to live together with people at their worst. That bond of familial love holds us together even when we’d like to fly apart.
And then once we have it, we can bring that skill at getting along to the wider society. In Paragraph 54 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis says:
Absorbed and deepened in the family, faith becomes a light capable of illumining all our relationships in society. As an experience of the mercy of God the Father, it sets us on the path of brotherhood. Modernity sought to build a universal brotherhood based on equality, yet we gradually came to realize that this brotherhood, lacking a reference to a common Father as its ultimate foundation, cannot endure. We need to return to the true basis of brotherhood…it becomes evident that God wants to make everyone share as brothers and sisters in that one blessing, which attains its fullness in Jesus, so that all may be one. The boundless love of our Father also comes to us, in Jesus, through our brothers and sisters. Faith teaches us to see that every man and woman represents a blessing for me, that the light of God’s face shines on me through the faces of my brothers and sisters.
The light of God’s face shines on me through the faces of my brothers and sisters—first, through my brothers and sisters in my natural family; and then, by extension, through my brothers and sisters in the faith; and then, by further extension, through my other neighbors and the random people I see on the street.
In short, faith takes that natural bond of blood, and extends it more widely to all of mankind, but particularly to that segment of mankind that it is in my immediate view.
That’s the way it’s supposed to happen; often, too often, we bungle it. Go figure.
This may seem pie-in-the-sky piety, but in fact it is anything but. The notion that individual human lives are of value, the basis for our modern insistence on the equality of men and women before the law and on human rights, derives directly from this. Pope Francis goes on to say,
How many benefits has the gaze of Christian faith brought to the city of men for their common life! Thanks to faith we have come to understand the unique dignity of each person, something which was not clearly seen in antiquity. In the second century the pagan Celsus reproached Christians for an idea that he considered foolishness and delusion: namely, that God created the world for man, setting human beings at the pinnacle of the entire cosmos. “Why claim that [grass] grows for the benefit of man, rather than for that of the most savage of the brute beasts?”[46] “If we look down to Earth from the heights of heaven, would there really be any difference between our activities and those of the ants and bees?”[47] At the heart of biblical faith is God’s love, his concrete concern for every person, and his plan of salvation which embraces all of humanity and all creation, culminating in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without insight into these realities, there is no criterion for discerning what makes human life precious and unique. Man loses his place in the universe, he is cast adrift in nature, either renouncing his proper moral responsibility or else presuming to be a sort of absolute judge, endowed with an unlimited power to manipulate the world around him.
(My emphasis.) Of course, our post-Christian culture is beginning to lose this insistence on the “unique dignity of each person”; we can see this clearly in all sorts of ways, from increasingly invasive laws telling how we ought to conduct our lives day-by-day to the casual day-to-day slaughter of innocent lives by abortionists.
The logic is this:
- Every human life is possessed of a unique dignity; all stand equal before God.
- It is in the Christian family that we learn to respect the dignity of those who annoy us (because our siblings often annoy us). Or, in broken or non-existent families, perhaps we don’t.
- We then bring that skill and practice to civil society, and manage to get along with our neighbor and respect his or her dignity. Or, perhaps, because we didn’t we don’t.
The family really is the basis for the kind of society we live in; and the stable, healthy, Christian family is the basis for the kind of society we say we want to live in.
(For the benefit of a commenter on last week’s Lumen Fidei post, I’m not speaking solely of nuclear families here. Extended Christian families serve just as well.)
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