Building Family

‘Family’ is a word that always elicits a response. It is both richly evocative and deeply fraught. There are intimations that even the Noailles family, closely knit as it was, had a shadow – the eldest son is hardly mentioned. But the overwhelming impression is of a warm, loving, trusting relationship between parents and siblings.

Pierre Bienvenu knew he was loved, so it is not surprising that found the key to his spirituality and ecclesiology in the concept of ‘family’.

His loving, awe-filled self-giving to ‘God alone’ led him to contemplate the infinite interchange of love among the three Persons of the Trinity.

The Holy Family of Nazareth, where the mystery of the Incarnation was realised, became the core of Pierre Bienvenu’s spirituality. When he received the inspiration to found a ‘holy family’ on earth, an Association of Christians that would live as the early Christians lived, he proposed Jesus, Mary and Joseph as models to its members.

In the vocabulary of his day he prayed,

Jesus, Mary, Joseph, you whom we love to contemplate in your humble nature and in your close union of hearts as the sweet image of the ineffable mystery of one and the same God in three persons;  you who had here below but one mind and one heart, fill us with the same spirit and the same love so that we may communicate them to all.

Is not this quality of relating

with All as members of one family

the heart of what our world longs for?