The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is familiar to many of us. The moral of the story, as most of us know it, is to bestow love and kindness to others as we would to ourselves and our kin.
Sometimes, however, our kin are the problem! Few of us can confidently say that we’ve lived a family life untouched by discord, loss, or pain. The consequences of sin can create great distance amid families, to the point where members are unrecognizable to each other.
I bear scars from the generational wounds passed down in my own family. These wounds have, at times, made family members feel unreachable and differences seem irreconcilable. To protect myself, I placed myself above them, prioritized my pain over their humanity, and blurred their faces in my heart until they seemed like little more than a stranger in a crowd.
I extended kindness to every new person I met and reserved all my vitriol for the family I deeply loved but claimed not to know. It was easier to give the love I longed to share with my family to a stranger. And while for some, a permanent distance is the only path to healing and peace, I knew that treating actual strangers better than I treated the people I loved was extending the life of these wounds I desired to heal. So I chose, with humility and by the grace of God, to be the Samaritan to those people I’d pushed so far away. I asked God to help me see past our differences and to help me develop compassion for them as I discovered our common ground. From this, forgiveness and reconciliation could flow.
Today’s Gospel and the parable Jesus tells remind us loving others – especially those closest to us whom we’d rather not – is a powerful and necessary way that we love God with all our heart, being, strength, and mind. Let us bravely and boldly choose love over division in our families today, and may the Lord be our strength.
Perpetua Charles works as a book publicist in Boston, Massachusetts. She loves the Lord, TV, Disney princesses, books, 90s-00s teen pop, and the color pink. Say hi on Instagram!