A Spirituality of Care, Consolation and Incentive
321. "Christian couples are, for each other, for their children and for their relatives, cooperators of grace and witnesses of the faith".383 God calls them to bestow life and to care for life. For this reason the family "has always been the nearest "hospital".384 So let us care for one another, guide and encourage one another, and experience this as a part of our family spiritually. Life as a couple is a daily sharing in God's creative work, and each person is for the other a constant challenge from the Holy Spirit. God's love is proclaimed "through the living and concrete word whereby a man and the woman express their conjugal love".385 The two are thus mutual reflections of that divine love which comforts with a word, a look, a helping hand, a caress, an embrace. For this reason "to want to form a family is to resolve to be a part of God's dream, to choose to dream with him, to want to build with him, to join him in this saga of building a world where one one will feel alone".386
383 Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity Apostolicam Actuositatem, 11.
384 Catechesis (10 June 2015): L'Osservatore Romano, 11 June 2015, p.8.
385 John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio (22 November 1981), 12: AAS 74 (1982), 93.
386 Address at the Prayer Vigil of the Festival of Families, Philadelphia (26 September 2015): L'Osservatore Romano, 28-29 September 2015, p.6.
