The survival of the nuclear family is at the crossroads. Two-parent households are on the decline in the United States as divorce, remarriage and cohabitation are on the rise.
In the reading today, Ezekiel’s vision of God restoring life to the dry bones serves to remind us that even when we feel we are without hope, God can restore us to new life.
For the Israelites, the dry bones represented their spiritually dead condition. For us, they may represent our family or our church. In this time of lockdown, your church may not have had masses or if they did, you had to sit in alternate pews, and you couldn’t sing. It may seem like a heap of dry bones to you. Or, your family may be less enthusiastic about family prayer since their experience at church has changed.
Just as God promised to restore his nation, he can restore any church or family, no matter how dry or dead it maybe. We can’t give up, we must pray for renewal, for God to restore our spiritual enthusiasm. The hope and prayer of every family and church should be that God will put his Spirit into it. In fact, God is at work calling his people back to himself, bringing new life into families and churches.
Today Jesus is inviting us to let God breath new life into our lives. Rather than worrying about all we should not do, we should concentrate on all we can do to show our love for God and others. Loving God and loving your neighbor are ways of naturally living out a life of Christ. It begins from our own nuclear families and reaches to our extended families and neighborhood families.
How can we be more open to let God breath this new life into us?
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.jpg "Father Pinto Paul, C.S.C.")