Glimpses of the Divine
Over the last few months at Liguori Publications, we’ve been developing a new parish program designed to help couples prepare for the sacrament of marriage. The program includes a video of interviews with couples. Some have been married a couple of years, some for decades.
In each interview, the husband and wife sit on a sofa and talk candidly with an interviewer about their lives together. In the video they are at turns engaging, funny, and moving. The couples are always inspiring, and they glow when they talk about their children.
You can see in every interview how the spouses create—together—something meaningful, important, and holy. And you can see how couples arrived at that place in their own ways, whether those ways are straightforward or convoluted.
That leads me to the theme of this issue of Liguorian: “family,” a word that in the secular world has a sprawling, complicated definition, and it’s not getting any simpler.
When I was a child, my limited perspective (and, possibly, my TV watching) led me to believe that all families were pretty much the same: Dad is the breadwinner, mom stays at home, the marriage is their first and only, and they share the same religion and race.
That kind of family is less common than it used to be, and demographers say that families will continue to become more diverse and complex. There are now more families where both parents work, where mom is the breadwinner and dad stays home, families with spouses who are divorced and remarried, single-parent and blended families, ones with adopted kids, families comprised of mixed religion and race, and so on.
The reality of the changing composition of families is the backdrop for the upcoming World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia this fall, which Fr. Matt Allman, CSsR, reports on in our cover story.
Elsewhere in this issue, Michael Marchand offers ways parents can share their faith with their teens. Lisa Grey’s meditation comes from the heart of a stepmother. Columnist Kate Basi gives us faith-grounded tools to answer difficult questions from children.
These articles led me to the same conclusion I came to after watching and listening to the couples on the sofa. Candid discussions about being a Catholic couple or a Catholic family give us glimpses of the divine at the heart of families.
**********
If you have thoughts on how we can make Liguorian a more meaningful part of your life, please send me an email at publisher@liguori.org. Thanks.
