FAMILY: The Vocation and Mission Today

4th October, 2015: 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gen 2: 18-24; Heb 2: 9-11; Mk 10: 2-16

FAMILY is the basic unit of a holistic humanity, not the individual. Where this fact is gainsaid, we see the genesis of every problem the world is infested with today. The Word today invites us to dwell on this theme of Family and rightly this day has been chosen to initiate the 14th Ordinary Synod of Bishops, which would reflect on the theme: The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and the Contemporary World. The Synod which begins today, in the Vatican, would last for 3 weeks and each of these weeks would highlight a sub theme, the very themes that we can find underlined in the readings today.

Listening to Challenges: The Synod would begin with listening to the Challenges of the Family in the contemporary world. In a world that is filled with individualism, materialism and consumerism, the family has become an entity that is seen to be an hindrance, a block, a burden that slows down one's personal progress towards self fulfillment. In the Gospel, Jesus underlines the problems of infidelity and unchastity around the reality of marriage. With the increasing numbers of divorce, reducing numbers of marriages, growing justification of co-habitation, newer claims to the nature of marriage, we are called to listen to the times and understand the challenges involved in building a family today.

Discerning Vocations: The First reading highlights an indelible nature of marriage and family. Being a Family or a Marriage is a vocation. It is not a phenomenon that happens by default. It has to be a conscious choice, well discerned and taken up with absolute commitment. Discerning Vocations here would mean the need for persons to make a choice and the role of the community in helping a person make that choice with ease and seriousness. It would mean also the need of the pastors and those who play that role in some manner or degree, to accompany individuals within this context. To mark this fact of family being the locus of one's calling,  during the Synod,  on 18th of October,  the parents of St. Teresa of Liseux will be canonised acknowledging their role as parents in promoting sanctity in their family. 

Exploring the Mission of the Family Today: In the second reading we see that the Word reminds us of the most fundamental function of a family: it makes us brothers and sisters in the Lord. Though every person is an individual, each with his or her interests and motives, dreams and vision, desires and ambitions, we are never islands. We are called to live in a family, to begin with and that family is required to become the basic building block of a humanity that is loving, respectful and caring towards everyone else around us.Today a Christian family specially has an enormous responsibility, a mission to accomplish - Evangelisation. It is to share the love of God to the world today. A family is a lived experience of God's love on a daily basis - to share that love with everyone around and with the world at large is simply what Evangelisation means today. Specially against the background of war and injustice, exploitation and domination, violence and crime, terrorism and fanaticism, the Christian families have to become beacons that bear out true love and compassion reminding the world of the Lord who is ever present in our midst and the Lord who is madly in love with you and me.