Eat with your family, not with your smartphone
Today we will reflect on a characteristic quality of family life, which is learned from the first years of life: fellowship, that is, the attitude of sharing the goods of life and of being happy to be able to do so. To share and to be able to share is a valuable virtue! Its symbol, its “icon” is the family gathered around the domestic table. The sharing of a meal — and, therefore, in addition to food, also affections, the recounting of events –is a fundamental experience. When there is a celebration, a birthday, an anniversary, it finds us around the table. In some cultures it is typical to do this also when mourning, to be close to one in sorrow because of the loss of a relative.
Fellowship is a sure thermometer to measure the health of relations: if there is in the family something that is not well, or some hidden wound, at the table it is immediately understood. A family that almost never eats together, or that does not speak at the table, but watches television, or looks at smartphones, is a family that is “very little a family.” When children are attached to their computers at the table, to mobile phones, and do not listen to one another, this is not a family, it is a boarding house.
Christianity has a special vocation to fellowship; everyone knows it. The Lord Jesus gladly taught at the table, and sometimes represented the Kingdom of God as a festive invitation. Jesus chose the table also to give his disciples his spiritual testament – he did so at supper – condensed in the memorial gesture of His Sacrifice: gift of His Body and of His Blood as food and drink of salvation, which nourish true and lasting love.
In this perspective, we can well say that the family is “at home” at Mass, precisely because it brings to the Eucharist its own experience of fellowship and opens it to the grace of a universal fellowship, of the love of God for the world.
By participating in the Eucharist, the family is purified from the temptation to shut itself in on itself, fortified in love and fidelity, and stretches the limits of its fraternity according to Christ’s heart.
In this our time, marked by so many closures and too many walls, fellowship, generated by the family and dilated by the Eucharist, becomes a crucial opportunity. The Eucharist and the families nourished by it can surmount the closures and build bridges of hospitality and charity. Yes, the Eucharist of a Church of families, capable of restoring to the community the active leaven of fellowship and mutual hospitality, is a school of human inclusion that is not afraid of confrontations! There are no little ones, orphans, weak ones, vulnerable ones, wounded and disappointed ones, desperate and abandoned ones that the Eucharistic fellowship of families is not able to nourish, refresh, protect and host.
The memory of family virtues helps us to understand. We ourselves have known, and still know, what miracles can happen when a mother has eyes and attention, care giving and care for children other than her own. Up to yesterday, one mother was enough for all the children of the yard! And yet: we know well what strength a people acquire whose parents are ready to move to protect everyone’s children, because they regard children as a joint good, that they are happy and proud to protect.
Today many social contexts put obstacles to family fellowship. It’s true; today it’s not easy. We must find the way to recover it. One speaks at table, one listens at table. There is no silence, that silence that is not the silence of nuns but the silence of egoism, where every one makes do for himself, or there is the television or the computer … and there is no talking. No, no silence. We must recover that family fellowship although adapting it to the times. It seems that fellowship has become something that is bought and sold, but then it’s something else. And nourishment is not always the symbol of a just sharing of goods, capable of reaching one who does not have bread or affections. In rich countries we are induced to spending for excessive nourishment, and then we are also induced to remedy the excess. And this foolish “business” takes away our attention from real hunger, of the body and of the soul. When there is no fellowship there is egoism, each one thinks of himself. So much so that advertising has reduced it to a weakness for snacks and a desire for sweets. While so many, too many brothers and sisters, remain outside the table. It is somewhat shameful!
Let us look at the mystery of the Eucharistic banquet. The Lord breaks His Body and sheds His Blood for all. Truly, there is no division that can resist this Sacrifice of communion: only a false attitude, of complicity with evil, can exclude from it. Every other distance cannot resist the vulnerable power of the broken bread and poured wine, Sacrament of the one Body of the Lord.
The living and vital alliance of the family, which precedes, supports and embraces, in the dynamism of its hospitality, the daily toils and joys, cooperates with the grace of the Eucharist, which is able to create ever new communion with the strength that includes and saves.
In fact a Christian family will show precisely in this way the breadth of its true horizon, which is the horizon of the Mother Church of all men, of all the abandoned and the excluded, in all peoples.
Let us pray that this family fellowship will be able to grow and mature in the time of grace of the forthcoming Jubilee of Mercy.
Source:zenit.org