A proper spirituality of family (Wendy Wright)

   A proper spirituality of family… is about intense, intimate community, bodies intermingled and conjoined, the noise and busyness of providing, care-taking, and stewarding, the complexities of intergenerational struggle, the love of particular persons.  It is about dwelling in one place for a long time with a community of not always like-minded people, about immersion in the conflicting, sometimes soul-devouring dynamics of the social, political, and economic world…

   The spiritual lessons of family are thus derived from the experience of being very much in the world, not apart from it.  Those lessons are legion.  They include, among others, the spiritual arts of welcoming and letting go and of intimacy and otherness, the enactment of rituals of mutual need and nourishment, the contemplation of the is-ness of things, and especially, the continual practice of radical forgiveness.

--Wendy Wright, Ignatian-Salesian Spirituality and Familied Life

Image source 1:  Rembrandt, Simeon and Anna Recognize the Lord in Jesus (1627)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Rembrandt_-_Simeon_and_Anna_Recognize_the_Lord_in_Jesus_-_WGA19102.jpg

Image source 2:  Francesco Rizzi, Holy Family with Simeon and John the Baptist (late 15th-early 16th c.)
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/holy-family-with-st-simeon-and-john-the-baptist-francesco-rizzi-da-santacroce.jpg