10 Love each other like the members of your family. Be the best at showing honor to each other. 11 Don’t hesitate to be enthusiastic—be on fire in the Spirit as you serve the Lord! 12 Be happy in your hope, stand your ground when you’re in trouble, and devote yourselves to prayer.
Reflection
What did Paul mean when he wrote to the Romans “Love each other like the members of your family.” Loving the members of your immediate family can be a challenge sometimes. The grievances against our brothers or sisters may be traced to sibling rivalry, or they may run much deeper and involve harmful or criminal actions. Loving our brothers and sisters goes
through many changes as we grow up, become adults with minds of our own, deciding to marry or remain single, making a living, choosing where to live, and raising a family or not. The choices today are more diverse than ever before, and we may or may not agree with the choices our family members make especially if they negatively impact our own lives.
When we expand the concept of “family” beyond our blood relatives to include the entire human family, loving people of different cultures, faith traditions, ethnicities, and nationalities it makes my head spin! The Bible tells us repeatedly to “love one another.” We live in a time when people are more likely to fear people who are different from us than to love them like
members of our family. As our knowledge of the world has expanded, we seem LESS likely to step out of our comfort zone than to courageously offer a hug, a welcome, or a hand of friendship.
As I reflect on this single verse, I also include all of God’s Creation as members of our family. We cannot survive without the air, the water, the soil, as well as the creatures of the water, the sky and the land. We must love them, too, as members of our family.
I have been reading John Philip Newell’s most recent book, “The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home.” In it he shares his own family struggles with his son Brendan, who suffered a major psychotic breakdown at the age of sixteen. Like so many men and women struggling with mental illness, Brendan was unable to cope with
living in a world driven by fear and hostility. Newell writes “They are manifesting the symptoms of an unwellness that is ours as a world and as nations…. Healing comes not in isolation but together. … We will not be truly well as a society until these young ones are well, and that they will not be truly well until we as a world are well. … The healing that has come in
Brendan’s life, as is the case with the healing that comes for any part of the whole, whether that be the healing of life-forms that are struggling because of what humanity is doing to the environment, or races that are suffering because of the widespread sickness of racism in our world, or families that are enduring the cruelty of poverty because of the prevailing inequities of society, these are healed not in isolation but in interrelationship. …”
by Kathleen Stolz
For Pondering and Prayer
John Philip Newell shares Brendan’s story amid a chapter on Julian of Norwich. She lived through the Plague which prevailed in fourteenth century Europe and is known for her phrase, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” I have used this phrase as a meditation, but I never thought of it in the way I have since reading
Newell’s book:
All shall be well. (I shall be well)
All shall be well. (We shall be well)
And all manner of things shall be well (The world shall be well)
Prayer: In a comfortable prayer position, focus your thoughts on a situation that is
unsettling to you, to others and to the world. Meditate as you are comfortable.
PRAY for YOURSELF as you bow your head and clasp your hands together in a child-like prayer position.
SAY the words: “All shall be well.”
PRAY for YOUR LOVED ONES as you picture your family and friends and open your hands with palms up turned.
SAY the words: “All shall be well.”
PRAY for the WORLD as you look up and imagine the diverse, hurting world you live in and lift your hands above you.
SAY the words: All manner of things shall be well.”
Tikkun Olam (which means repairing the world in Hebrew) Amen.