Time for family healing (Sabong News)
Author
Fr. Rolando V. De La Rosa, OP
Date
APRIL 10 2022
I like to think of Holy Week as Family Healing Week. It is the most opportune time to beg God to heal our families.
Many people think that healing applies only to the hurt, sickness, or wounds of an individual. But families, like individuals, also need healing. When you throw a stone into a pool, the ripples continue, long after the stone has reached the bottom. In like manner, the aches and wounds of the past, though perhaps cured at the level of the individual, continue to haunt a family and create needless worries and anxieties.
For instance, what’s the best way to heal the addiction problem of a family member? Kristin Young of the Herren Project writes: “It must be acknowledged that addiction is a family disease. A person usually starts to use drugs to escape a trauma suffered in a family. So, the people closest to him need to change and heal if the rehabilitation process is to succeed.”
Family therapy centers are sprouting everywhere precisely because many adults and children feel that they have to recover from the damage inflicted on them by family life. But even the best therapists admit that they can only go so far in healing broken families. As the noted psychotherapist, Karl Menninger, wrote, “therapy may cure the psychological trauma suffered by a family, but not the damage inflicted on it by personal sin.”
Sin destroys a family. There is no such thing as a purely private or individual sin. All sins, even those committed routinely or in secret, have a lethal effect on the family. So, unless the family, as a whole, receives healing, it would be very difficult to achieve lasting unity and peace within it.
The essence of sin is separation, a breaking away from a beloved. When sin reigns in a family, there is an experience of alienation or a lack of wholeness. In such an atmosphere, mutual suspicion makes communication difficult. Greeting each other, or just saying “hello” may even become excruciating.
The word “hello” is the modern version of the old English greeting “hail,” which is a shortened version of “be healed.” To say hello to someone is to wish that he be made whole, be forgiven. For, no human relationship can begin, much less flourish, unless we are first made whole.
One may ask: How can my small sins damage my family? If we come to think of it, no sin is “small” to someone who truly loves. A man does not say to his beloved wife: “I will hurt you only this much, okay? When it begins to really hurt, just yell at me.” When we love someone, we will not even think of hurting him or her. And if ever we do hurt that person, we don’t excuse ourselves by saying, “Anyway, that’s nothing.” We simply rush to that person’s side and beg for forgiveness.
No therapy center can serve as a substitute for the confessional. Why not go together as a family to a church and avail yourself of absolution? Sin destroys our ability to love sincerely. Only absolution can fully restore it. This is why in the Act of Contrition, we say: “I detest all my sins, not only because I fear the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but because I offended you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love.” It is love that impels us to forgive. It is also love that drives us to seek forgiveness.
