The foundational building blocks of any society are the family. As a society, systemic racism, and unchecked capitalism, are everyday factors. For example, a system that is focused solely on profit:
- That continues to abuse the bodies, minds, and spirits of men, women, and youth through excessive hours;
that requires those who are mostly the Black, brown, and white poor to work multiple part-time jobs to provide a basic family survival wage. - That requires the continuing arrest and incarceration of Black and brown and poor white bodies to maintain a highly profitable police, court, and prison system.
- That has created through the introduction of drugs and guns into poor communities of color a premise for over-incarcerating Black men, totally devastating the core Black family and placing extreme stress and financial burdens of people of color.
- That, by extension, limits the amount of time that parents can spend to nurture, peacefully discipline, and love their children as they — both children and parents — deserve and require to add their unique gifts and value to society.
Celebrate Parents Supporting Youth
In the midst of all of this, I celebrate the parents who every day do their best to offer their children every support they can. Yet they are often limited by the pressures of society and being raised in families where there was little or no love, where drug abuse, abusive language, and actions were absent.
When I think of Jesus’ words from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” I think of parents who are often blamed for the actions of their children. Yet they never themselves experienced love, sacrifice, what a good education and livable, safe housing look and feel like. At the same time, I find it unforgivable for those who have benefitted from the infliction of this spiritual, physical, and emotional disempowerment on parents and youth. As well as those with political and economic power who continue to turn a blind eye to the damage they have done and continue to do in the name of power and greed.
Support Whole Families
At St. Agatha-St. Martin de Porres, we support whole families in many ways. We try to support the physical, emotional, and spiritual growth of our youth. At the same time, we connect with parents to affirm and support them in their care for themselves and their children. Recently, I was told that many of the younger brothers and sisters of teens and young adults in our News School Journalism Program needed coats, hats, and gloves.
We started to put these items together and asked that parents would bring the children to receive these gifts. Many of the teens told us that their parents would not likely make the time to show up with the younger children. This seemed incomprehensible to me. Yet, at the same time, it made me realize that the pressures of single parenthood and societal pressure have caused a disengagement of parents from their children and from the people who want to support them in their parenting.
Care for the Youth
If we truly care for our youth, we need to find ways to actively engage their family support system. We need to help the whole family unit, in its many societal forms, to not only survive but to flourish in such a way as to assure that our youth know real, ongoing sacrificial love. They need to know that the home is a place of safety, a place where communication is encouraged.
Home is where conflict is dealt with peacefully. Where forgiveness happens between parent and child, child and parent. It’s where a child/youth experiences authentic, unconditional love, breaking the abusive cycles of the past and offering the norm to be passed on to their children and their children’s children.
The youth deserve to know and feel what a healthy family should be. Our parents deserve any support we can give them to feel love for them to extend that love that is already in them, although often constricted by layers and layers of generational trauma and the multiple forms of trauma inflicted by systemic racism.
As a Community
As people of faith, as a community, this is what we are called to do and to be for them and their children, to empower them to be the best parent and child/youth they can be(come). And they empower us by allowing us to do what we should be doing, sharing our gifts to accompany them in that support. Love is not a one-way transaction. We are all in this together.
We live together, survive together, thrive together, and succeed together. It begins with faith and faithfulness. Faith in the God who lives in each of us, offering us the power to develop and share our uniqueness and value with the world; and faithfulness to honor the gifts God has given each of us by daily doing our best to bring the light of love into a world so much in need of that love.
By Fr. Larry Dowling
Featured Image Courtesy of Lynn Friedman‘s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Inset Image Courtesy of Amber Wilkie‘s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
