Loving Them in God

"He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me isn't worthy of me." If you are a parent, this verse can land like a punch. You spend your days pouring yourself out for your children — feeding, teaching, worrying, praying — and Jesus seems to say that this love, if it comes before him, disqualifies you. It feels impossible. It feels cruel.

But sit with it longer, and a different meaning emerges. St. Gregory the Great taught that Christ is not asking us to love our families less. He is asking us to love them in the right order — in God, not in place of God. When your child becomes your ultimate source of meaning, you place on that small person a burden no human being can carry. When your marriage becomes the sole foundation of your identity, any crack in it threatens to bring down the whole structure. Loving Christ first does not diminish family love. It stabilizes it. It gives your family a foundation that does not depend on any one person being perfect.

The Shunammite woman models what ordered love looks like in a household. She sees a man of God and makes space for him — literally builds a room. "A bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp stand." These are the furnishings of hospitality, and every parent knows that hospitality is one of the most demanding disciplines of family life. Opening your home to guests when the house is a mess, when the kids are cranky, when you are running on fumes — that is the daily cross of family life. And yet the Shunammite does it repeatedly, joyfully, without transaction. She makes space for holiness in her home, and holiness returns the favor: she receives a son.

The Catechism describes the family as a "privileged community" called to live communion and forgiveness daily (CCC 2205). Communion and forgiveness — the two things that require you to die to yourself most consistently. Every parent knows this. You die to your preference for a clean kitchen, your desire for an uninterrupted conversation, your fantasy of a well-ordered life. You die to your need to be thanked. You die, a dozen small deaths a day, and somehow the life that emerges from those deaths is richer than the one you surrendered.

Paul names this mystery: "We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life." In family life, newness of life looks like this: the teenager who suddenly opens up at the kitchen counter at eleven o'clock at night. The spouse who forgives the thing you thought was unforgivable. The child who comes home. These are resurrections — small, domestic, utterly real — and they only happen on the other side of the dying.

Jesus promises that whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones will not lose their reward. Every glass of juice poured, every sippy cup washed, every midnight glass of water brought to a child's bedside — these are not interruptions to your spiritual life. They are your spiritual life. The cup of cold water is the sacrament of family.

Today, love your family fiercely — and love them in God, so that your love has a source deeper than your own limited reserves.