“The hardest people to evangelize are our own family members.”
That statement may not reflect a state
of national calamity but I seem to be hearing it more and more frequently these
days.
A nun friend embarrassingly admits that she cannot do anything to talk
sense to her womanizing brother.
“When I visit the family, it’s like a family reunion, everybody seems
very happy and well behaved, but behind closed doors my mother and my
sister-in-law take turns in updating me about my brother’s exploits. I try to jokingly bring this up with
him, but all I’d get is ‘Huwag kang
maniwala don, tsismis lang yon!’
I know it’s not mere tsismis
but what else can I do to help his family when he himself doesn’t want help?”
A lector from our parish thinks she has a bigger problem: her ward, a
teenage niece, still single, is openly sexually active but goes to Mass and
receives communion. “I can’t be
sure but I don’t think she even goes to confession. When I try to politely remind her to confess, and to inform
her about waiting for the right man, all she says is ‘Yes, tita,’ but I know
she only says that to shut me up.
She has one boyfriend after another, and one time she opened her bag in
front of me, a foil-wrapped thing fell out—I know it’s not candy, it’s a
condom. Without hesitation she put
it back in her bag and didn’t seem to care that I’d seen it.”
A married friend who is very active in Marriage Encounter laments that
her cross is her 30-something daughter who has stopped going to church, has
split up with her husband and has a daughter with her live-in boyfriend. She says, “In all aspects she’s okay,
she’s smart, enterprising, independent, but when it comes to the issue of her
boyfriend she melts down, and she talks like it’s nobody’s business! How can it not be our business when her
daughter is my granddaughter? What
example is she giving to her child?
It shames me to think my husband and I are respected in our group but
can’t lead our own daughter to the right path.”
From a middle-aged priest comes this expression of disappointment with
his younger brother: “He is
gay and can’t help it. I see how
‘kilig’ he gets around men, how he flirts with them with his eyes—and sometimes
I suspect he fabricates reasons to visit me in the seminary because there he’ll
surely see a lot of young men.
He’s 29, has never had a girlfriend and from the looks of it he’ll never
want to have one. He hangs around
with his BFFs, gays who talk about their “boylets” and who idolize Vice
Ganda. Once I tried to tell him
that perhaps God wishes to show him His love, for him to enjoy a chaste and
celibate state even as a lay person in order to show his gay friends another
way to be happy, but I gave up. My
talk was obviously way above his head.”
Another priest tells of his family’s burden, a younger brother aged 27,
who has finished college but doesn’t show any ambition or aspiration to grow up
and live his own life as an adult.
The family is well off—thus nobody seems to mind that he’s unemployed
but just lives from day to day ”getting high” and bumming around with his
friends. “God know how else he
supports his drug abuse; he has an allowance from our parents. I dread to think he’ll grow old that
way, aimless and carefree, when
our parents are gone. Once he
seemed sober, so I had the courage to ask him about his plans for his future. He just smiled and said, ‘Father, don’t worry about me. Iba
ka, iba ako.’ What would you
have said in my place?”
It’s been said that family means being there for one another, but as
these situations show, some family members may not want you to be there for
them at all. What are we to do
when the concern and compassion we offer—which might be our only treasure worth
sharing—is rejected by our loved ones?
Tough question, indeed.
At times we think our “God talk” is better heard by strangers than by
our own families. At such
frustrating moments when we feel discouraged, angry, or impatient, and don’t
know what to do, it’s good to take a deep breath and gaze at (or think of) the
figure on the crucifix, and ask ourselves, “What would Love do?” If we truly want our families to know
that our God is a loving, living God, there is only one thing we can do:
silently love, love again, love on, and on, and on, and on. And that’s the truth.
