“…The Christian proclamation on the family is good news indeed”(cf. AL 1)
The celebration of the Holy Family feast day is, for the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters, an opportunity to rejoice, reflect and engage themselves. Family of Nazareth is the best school of humanity to whom the Church always refers us.
In his last encyclical “Fratelli tutti”, Pope Francis, referring to the edification of a great family, he speaks of love saying: “love shatters the chains that keep us isolated and separate; in their place, it builds bridges. Love enables us to create one great family, where all of us can feel at home… Love exudes compassion and dignity” (cf. FT 62).
We have acknowledged that family continues being the best environment to comprehend the meaning of life, to discover and to develop the personal and community gifts, to grow up in the values that make better the human person, to be what we really are, to care the things we have been given while we are here on the earth and everything else that we can recognize.
If all that is so important and we discover and receive in it what is fundamental, it is vital, for the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters, to work with families, to be bridges and to be a light to help them to carry out the mission of sowing what makes possible the sprouting out of a more compassionate, kind, loving and tender humanity … the humanity we need nowadays.
Climate change, as Leonardo Boff says, is not a disease but a fever showing that, in the planet, something is wrong; as well, drug use, femicides, violence, drug trafficking and all the realities damaging life that injure us, are its consequences but their real cause is the violence dwelling in our heart, selfishness, indifference and individualism. The family is the only institution that can always generate a new culture and it is what we really needed to overcome the evil threating life and propitiate «the culture of encounter» of which speaks Pope Francis.
Our Father Founder, Luis Amigó, called us “of the Holy Family” because his desire was that we live as a family of sisters creating, in our daily life, relationships of mutual trust, security, friendship, unlimited concern for the others and our community be the environment where each one may overcome her fear and get all that, according to the psychologists, a person needs to feel well, to give the best of herself and to project herself to the mission in the best way.
«Nobody gives what he does not own.» Let’s continue engaging ourselves so that our communities be really spaces of life and each one may receive from me the best, the constructive and what God has done through me. And all that we’ll project to the families with whom we share our life and mission, telling them that it is possible to forgive, because I have been forgiven and granted the mercy of God and of my sisters and, at the same time, I am sorry for their little mistakes; that it is possible to serve because, in my community, we are one at the service of the other; that it is possible to sacrifice ourselves for the goodness of the other because “we take turns” in carrying each one the burdens of the other; that it is possible to feel well in the family, because people who sees us realize that in our community we care about the sisters most vulnerable, sick, sad, in mourning or in crisis, knowing that, sometime, we all go through these situations.
Furthermore people notes that we are growing up and how we protect each other! We are also growing in the belonging feeling proving that our roots are like those of the ceiba, a tree green even in times of drought, because it takes water from an inner source: it does not need to be watered since it lives from inside. When our communities drink water from the true source that is God, they keep always alive and reflect the green of hope that only He can provide us.
The family life that our Father Luis glimpsed for the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters when he founded us, inspires us and leads us to work with families, as our Constitutions say in No. 61: “The example of the Family of Nazareth encourages us in our daily life and in our apostolic labor, urges us to create a family atmosphere and to pay special interest to the Christian promotion of families”.
One of the congregational dreams is that each local community live as a true family of sisters, accompanying the families and praying for them. We continue walking under the watchful eye and constant protection of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, in communion and solidarity with the families of the world.
Sr. Lilia Celina Barrera Ramirez TC