FAMILY VIRTUES

One of the choices for the second reading for today’s feast of the holy family is from Colossians 3:12-17. It begins this way:

¨Brothers and sisters: Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another...¨

 Paul describes here the kind of virtue that it takes to make a family truly unified. Most of these qualities are pretty familiar: kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience and so on. But I would like to look at the first virtue on the list, “feelings of compassion.” Both of these words are very powerful in the original Greek.

First, some background on the word for ¨feelings¨ splanchna. The Greeks considered the internal organs of the abdomen (intestines, heart, spleen, etc.) as the seat of the strong emotions. We still describe certain situations as "gut-wrenching" or "heart-breaking." For the Hebrews, however, these inner organs were identified more with compassion and mercy. 

The Greek word for the parts of the body involved in emotions is the plural noun splanchna. The King James Bible translates it as "bowels," while modern bibles usually translate it, depending on the context, as "affection" or "compassion." In Philippians, for example, the  KJV has "If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels (splanchna) and mercies…" The New American Bible has "If there is any encouragement in Christ, any solace in love, any participation in the Spirit, any compassion (splanchna) and mercy… (Phil. 2:1)" So the writer of Colossians has chosen Greek's strongest word to express feelings of compassionate love, of being moved in the depths of ones "guts."

The second word, ¨compassion,¨ oiktirmou, comes from the verb oikteiro, which means, according to my dictionary “to have pity a feeling of distress through the ills of others¨. The noun form is used of God in Romans 9:15: ¨For he says to Moses: “I will show mercy to whom I will, I will take pity on whom I will.”

It is very easy, it seems tome, to feel “sympathy“ for someone, because you are standing safely outside of

the situation, a safe distance from their actual pain. But our word here, “empathy,¨ is different. When I feel empathy or compassion, I am  not just an observer sharing the other person’s pain. I am trying to get inside what that person is experiencing, and feeling it myself. 

So when the sacred writer combines these two words, splanchna and oiktirmou to mean ¨feelings of compassion,¨ they form a powerful picture of how we are supposed to act toward others: Allowing ourselves to be moved to the depths of our being by someone else’s suffering by identifying with that other person and feeling their pain as much as they feel it. 

And this little two-word phrase is at the head of the list of behaviors that it takes to make a healthy and life giving family.

So today we ask Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the members of the holy family, to help each of us to imitate their selfless love for one another in their family.