Episode 14: God-Centred
Experience and evidence tell us that our deepest yearning for happiness cannot be easily satisfied in any way. Not by honour, nor wealth, nor power, nor pleasure. Only God can fill that void in our hearts that He made. Which is why St Augustine famously said once that “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
This also explains why it is so important for God to be at the centre of our family life, and the centre of our children’s lives.
Yet many of us may have difficulty believing in a loving God who wants only the best for us, and therefore have difficulty entrusting ourselves and our families to Him.
Watch episode 14 as we share about why this may be so, and how we can overcome this.
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When my mother was alive, whenever some problem or crisis arose in the family – which was not infrequent – she would exclaim: “God, please help us! Mother Mary, please pray for us!”
And when something good happened in the family, she would exclaim: “Thank God and thank Mother Mary!”
So I grew up with this deeply impressed on me: Let God be at the centre of our family life. Turn to Him always, in good times and in bad. He will guide us through. All we have to do is just try our human best in a given situation, and let God do the rest.
Spera in Deo: Hope in God
This attitude of trusting that God would take care of us certainly helped in building our resilience and confidence, because no matter what happened, we knew God was the one in charge and that He was in control and would guide us through – so long as we did our part in trying our best.
Let’s face it. As parents, and now as grandparents, we know there are so many situations that are outside our control, and if we have an attitude that we need to be in control of all situations and all outcomes at all times, instead of trusting in a loving God Who is the one ultimately in charge, it would be very easy to become depressed.
Mental Health
This is backed up by data. In an op-ed for The Straits Times in February 2021, a senior consultant psychiatrist, Professor Chong Siow Ann, noted that “there is a strong inverse correlation between religious commitment and depression – or more simply put, religious people seemed less likely to get depression.”
Of course, there are many factors that can be involved in the development of depression, including endogenous, environmental and medical ones, but we cannot deny the data that shows clearly the inverse correlation between religious faith and depression.
How else can we explain this?
As we discussed in an earlier episode on the Theology of the Body, it is only in our union with God that the spousal meaning of our bodies will be definitively fulfilled, and it is then that our infinite thirst for love, for fulfilment, and happiness, true happiness, be quenched by the One Who is absolute goodness, beauty and truth – God Himself. Without God, we will not find any meaning in life. Not for ourselves. Not for our children.
Which is why St Augustine famously said: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Easier Said Than Done
Yet we know for a fact that many of us have difficulty trusting in God and letting Him be in control. Why? It has been suggested that it is because many of us have difficulty trusting in a loving Father Who truly wills our good and wants only the best for us.
In a sense, this is a consequence of original sin, isn’t it? Pope St John Paul II once said that original sin was above all an attempt to abolish fatherhood, placing in doubt the truth about God Who is love.
Taken In
When Adam and Eve decided to take things into their own hands and grasped at the forbidden fruit, at what they felt was good for themselves, they did it because they were deceived into thinking that God was withholding something good from them. They did not believe nor trust that God was their loving Father who just wanted their good and their true flourishing.
I know it is not easy. Many of us have been hurt by authority figures in one way or another, at one time or another, and therefore have difficulty, have lots of difficulty, trusting in a God who is love, in a God who came not to be served but to serve.
The Boy in the Quake
Here is a story which Jason Evert related when he gave a talk in Singapore a few years ago. It had a deep impact on me, and I believe it will touch you too.
One day, a father brought his child to school. As the boy left the car, the father said he would be coming back for him. This was in Armenia in 1988. Later that morning, an earthquake struck and the school building collapsed with all the students and teachers inside.
The boy’s father rushed to the school and started removing the bricks and debris with his bare hands. Minutes turned into hours, and hours turned into a day. Then the next day. His hands hurt, his skin was broken, and he was bleeding from the wounds. But he did not stop.
He just kept digging away, removing brick after brick, boulder after boulder, furniture after furniture. He only had his son in mind. Finally, he removed a piece of rubble and there below it was his son. His son just smiled back at him and said, “Papa!” And his son turned to the other students around him and said to them, “I told you my dad would come. He told me so.”
This is the image I hope we can have of our God, Who will stop at nothing in loving us.
Our Mental Image of God
Let us reflect: what is our image of God? Do we buy into the lie that He is like a harsh policeman up there, just waiting to catch us out and punish us when we sin?
Or do we see Him as a God Who is madly in love with us and our children, and wants only our flourishing and good, even if it means bleeding, suffering and dying for us? Can we let this God be in charge? Can we let Him be at the centre of our family life?
In the next episode, we will talk about the importance of honesty in connecting with our children.
Resources
Christ at the Heart of the Family: Chapter Three of Amoris Laetitia by Julian Paparella
The Bridegroom is with You (Letter to Families, Pope St John Paul II, 1994)
DOWNLOAD THIS RESOURCE AS A PDF
#18. Dear brothers and sisters, spouses and parents, this is how the Bridegroom is with you. You know that he is the Good Shepherd. You know who he is, and you know his voice. You know where he is leading you, and how he strives to give you pastures where you can find life and find it in abundance. You know how he withstands the marauding wolves, and is ever ready to rescue his sheep: every husband and wife, every son and daughter, every member of your families. You know that he, as the Good Shepherd, is prepared to lay down his own life for his flock (cf. Jn 10:11). He leads you by paths which are not the steep and treacherous paths of many of today’s ideologies, and he repeats to today’s world the fullness of truth, even as he did in his conversation with the Pharisees or when he announced it to the Apostles, who then proclaimed it to all the ends of the earth and to all the people of their day, to Jews and Greeks alike. The disciples were fully conscious that Christ had made all things new. They knew that man had been made a “new creation”: no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female, but “one” in Christ (cf. Gal 3:28) and endowed with the dignity of an adopted child of God. On the day of Pentecost man received the Spirit, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth. This was the beginning of the new People of God, the Church, the foreshadowing of new heavens and a new earth (cf. Rev 21:1).
The Apostles, overcoming their initial fears even about marriage and the family, grew in courage. They came to understand that marriage and family are a true vocation which comes from God himself and is an apostolate: the apostolate of the laity. Families are meant to contribute to the transformation of the earth and the renewal of the world, of creation and of all humanity.
Dear families, you too should be fearless, ever ready to give witness to the hope that is in you (cf. 1 Pet 3:15), since the Good Shepherd has put that hope in your hearts through the Gospel. You should be ready to follow Christ towards the pastures of life, which he himself has prepared through the Paschal Mystery of his Death and Resurrection.
Do not be afraid of the risks! God’s strength is always far more powerful than your difficulties! Immeasurably greater than the evil at work in the world is the power of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which the Fathers of the Church rightly called a “second Baptism”. Much more influential than the corruption present in the world is the divine power of the Sacrament of Confirmation, which brings Baptism to its maturity. And incomparably greater than all is the power of the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is truly a wondrous sacrament. In it Christ has given us himself as food and drink, as a source of saving power. He has left himself to us that we might have life and have it in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10): the life which is in him and which he has shared with us by the gift of the Spirit in rising from the dead on the third day. The life that comes from Christ is a life for us. It is for you, dear husbands and wives, parents and families! Did Jesus not institute the Eucharist in a family-like setting during the Last Supper? When you meet for meals and are together in harmony, Christ is close to you. And he is Emmanuel, God with us, in an even greater way whenever you approach the table of the Eucharist. It can happen, as it did at Emmaus, that he is recognized only in “the breaking of the bread” (cf. Lk 24:35). It may well be that he is knocking at the door for a long time, waiting for it to be opened so that he can enter and eat with us (cf. Rev 3:20). The Last Supper and the words he spoke there contain all the power and wisdom of the sacrifice of the Cross. No other power and wisdom exist by which we can be saved and through which we can help to save others. There is no other power and no other wisdom by which you, parents, can educate both your children and yourselves. The educational power of the Eucharist has been proved down the generations and centuries.
Everywhere the Good Shepherd is with us. Even as he was at Cana in Galilee, the Bridegroom in the midst of the bride and groom as they entrusted themselves to each other for their whole life, so the Good Shepherd is also with us today as the reason for our hope, the source of strength for our hearts, the wellspring of ever new enthusiasm and the sign of the triumph of the “civilization of love”. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, continues to say to us: Do not be afraid. I am with you. “I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20). What is the source of this strength? What is the reason for our certainty that you are with us, even though they put you to death, O Son of God, and you died like any other human being? What is the reason for this certainty? The Evangelist says: “He loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1). Thus do you love us, you who are the First and the Last, the Living One; you who died and are alive for evermore (cf. Rev 1:17-18).