From Water to Sweet Wine

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

There he was walking down the aisle, a grown man ready to become a husband, a man ready to take the hands of his lovely bride and walk together before God: my little brother.

There she was, married, with her three children, sitting behind me worrying around her boys being slightly noisy during the mass: my little sister.

There I was a wife, a mother of six beautiful children, praising the Lord for the miracles he has worked.

I was there at the beginning, the shouts, the tears, the broken plates, the slammed doors, the walking out and the fear that things would never improve and that one parent or the other would not come back... the horrible silences after the huge storms, the suffering each one of us had to endure and bear individually and as a family.

In this world that is constantly trying to avoid pain and tribulations the answer for such a dysfunctional family would have been to dismantle it, to break it apart and I can guarantee you the temptation to think like that was at times very strong. 

The answer is in Christ, it was from Him that strength was drawn, it was from Him that hope came, it was through the ugliness of the Cross that we all knew life and fullness of joy had been won for us.

Yes it was ugly, yes it was hard and the suffering was immense at times while growing up, but it was in that very situation that we all met Christ, where we all discovered TRUE love, a love that forgives beyond forgiveness, a love that can give even when you think you have nothing left to give, a love that has endless strength to love.

Seeing my brother walk down the aisle was incredibly moving and seeing all of us embracing marriage with no fear was yet another victory of Christ. 

Through my parents' marriage, God spoke very clearly to us, He spoke of its indissolubility, He gave us His Mother to call upon and her Son who miraculously provided the sweet wine of Cana.

I was not afraid when I got married, the past was the past and Jesus himself said he came to make everything new... there was no fear in my sister when she pronounced her yes, she knew in Him there is life and life was what she was looking for. 

As my brother walked towards the altar there was no doubt in him that his  marriage would be a success: He took his bride and together they happily started their journey towards Christ.

Related posts:

The Most Splendid Flower-beds in the Garden of the Church

Large families are the most splendid flower-beds in the garden of the Church; happiness flowers in them and sanctity ripens in favorable soil. Every family group, even the smallest, was meant by God to be an oasis of spiritual peace. (Pius XII)

Another summer holiday has gone, another school year has started. The silence fills the morning air when baby is finally down for a nap and the memory of the summer seems very far away.

With Pierpaolo's new job which started last September we have had the grace to to enjoy a longer than usual summer break. Italy was our destination: Florence, Sicily and finally Naples.

The drive down to Italy was long but very enjoyable and the sight of the Swiss countryside with its mountains, rivers, lakes and fresh clean air was constantly shouting the greatness of The Creator. 

In Florence when we walked out into the famous square where the beautiful cathedral and baptistry stand, this time, the man made buildings were speaking of God in all His majesty. The Basilica and surroundings left everyone speechless and even though I have been to Florence many times the elegance and uniqueness of this city was refreshed in my memory. 

Assisi was our next stop. St Francis is the boys' favourite Saint and I was named after St Claire. Reading their story and speaking about their immense love for God was a great gift for the entire family. Everything here spoke of humility, simplicity and total self giving. We prayed for our friends and family and praised God for the many good things He has given us. 

We, then popped down to Sicily to say hello to my parents. It wasn't really on the way but because of baby Maria being only 3 weeks old, to be in a place I knew and was comfortable with seemed like a sensible idea, so off we went on the overnight ferry from Civitavecchia near Rome to Palermo. There we had a lovely time.

What we were all really looking forward to, though, was the last stage of our holiday: Naples or to be correct 'Poggiomarino'.

Poggiomarino is my father in law's hometown but also where one of Pierpaolo's sisters lives together with her husband and their 6 children. It is a really small town nearby Pompeii, with a tiny square, two churches, a lot of bars and ice cream parlours and not much else. There is nothing amazing about this place and yet the joy that this humble town has brought to us as a family is extraordinary. 

Poggiomarino is the base for all our summer family reunions. This year though it wasn't just a simple get together, we were all there to witness and celebrate the marriage of yet another young christian couple, another niece was going to get married.

Every time we are given the grace to spend time together there is only God to bless and praise for it. Put us together and we become a considerable number... God did say 'Go forth and multiply'... and we took His command seriously.

7 of the 8 brothers and sisters were present with their families, 26 out of the 29 cousins (3 of them with their husbands and children) spent the most wonderful week together in communion and continuity from the last time they saw each other. The arrival of cousin number 30 was announced.

There was something heavenly about it, there were people everywhere who all belonged to one family, people of all ages, no one was alone, everyone had someone to talk to, laugh with and every child had other children to play with, nursing mothers would nurse together and everything flowed in such a natural way.

"Even externally, a large, well-ordered family is a kind of visible shrine: the sacrament of Baptism is not an exceptional event for them but something constantly renewing the joy and grace of the Lord. The series of happy pilgrimages to the Baptismal font is not yet finished when a new one to Confirmation and first Communion begins, aglow with the same innocence. The youngest of the children will scarcely have put away his little white suit among the dearest memories of life, when the first wedding veil appears to bring parents, children, and new relatives together at the foot of the altar. More marriages, more Baptisms, more first Communions follow each other like ever-new springtimes that, in a sense, make the visits of God and of His grace to the home unending." (Pius XII)

I am myself the eldest of 3 children, so my husband's family was for me the first experience of a large Christian family. 

When I was younger and thinking of my future I could see myself as a business woman who would eventually marry maybe in her late 30s and have one or two children (possibly a boy and a girl).  I look at my life today and I can tell you that the plan that God had for me is far more exciting than the one that I had for myself.

When I met Pierpaolo's family I had never experienced anything like it before, they did things differently, they thought differently and their priorities were very different from the rest of the world I was in contact with. There was order although they were many, everyone would take care of each other, they would all work together, have fun together and the dignity around the dinner table was amazing. Pierpaolo was a fruit of all this, I was in love with him and wanted to be part of it. I was full of admiration for Pierpaolo's parents where it all began. 

They were an ordinary young couple (my mother in law was only 18 when she got married, my father in law 25) and by putting their lives in the hands of God had the courage to say yes to His plan and were guided to start something extraordinary, come out of their comfort zone and give their lives up for each other and for their children... 

There is a serenity of spirit to be found in parents who are surrounded by a rich abundance of young lives. The joy that comes from the plentiful blessings of God breaks out in a thousand different ways and there is no fear that it will end. The brows of these fathers and mothers may be burdened with cares, but there is never a trace of that inner shadow that betrays anxiety of conscience or fear of an irreparable return to loneliness. Their youth never seems to fade away, as long as the sweet atmosphere of a crib remains in the home, as long as the walls of the house echo to the silvery voices of children and grandchildren.(Pius XII)

Yes! There is something special about a big Christian family and it is something I discovered from the outside before it became my reality too. 

I took my camera out to capture some shots of what we were living then, I praised God for allowing me to be part of this. I was filled with gratitude towards my parents in law who risked everything in order to build together with God something out of the ordinary.

In Poggiomarino every single person there originated from the crazy choice of one couple. It was truly a glimpse of heaven.
I kept looking around at all the people there, we were around 40 plus a few relatives and friends, then I realised that the gift of each other was also a gift that was naturally extended to whoever was happy to share it with us. The two old neighbours spent the whole week with us and many other people were warmly included in the fun and the celebrations.

Children in large families learn almost automatically to be careful of what they do and to assume responsibility for it, to have a respect for each other and help each other, to be open-hearted and generous. For them, the family is a little proving ground, before they move into the world outside, which will be harder on them and more demanding. (Pius XII)

I came to the conclusion that a large family is a richness not only for its members but also for the people who marry into it and the ones who come into contact with it. A big family is not exclusive, it has compassion for the poor and the lonely and moreover always has space for one more. 

We experienced the grandeur of God in so many different ways this summer, in nature, in the ingenuity and artistry of man but most of all in the gift of the family.

As Pope Pius said: "Large families are the most splendid flower-beds in the garden of the Church."

Top 10 Quotes for the Catholic Family

We are parents always on the run who rarely have the time to read long articles, let alone entire books all in one go... we like to read blog posts here and there and certainly enjoy a good quote.

There is nothing like a good, concise and well put phrase to accompany us and move us to a deeper thought!

Here are our 'Top Ten Favourite Quotes':



1. Do not be afraid, open wide the doors to Christ!
JPII

The number one quote... An encouragement not to be afraid and to let Christ into our life, to let Him work in us as individuals and together as a family, with no reservations. To open wide the doors is to receive Christ's self giving nature who held nothing back... 
'Do not be afraid' family life is one challenge after another, made of continual 'firsts' first child, the first teen, the first communion! With Him we can face all these unknowns without fear. 


2. Love is Not a feeling; it's a decision.
. Mother Angelica.

I recently Tweeted this on the occasion of the death of Mother Angelica and somebody replied that they didn't agree with this quote because 'one certainly feels a lot when is in love'. The love to which Mother Angelica is referring to is not the infatuation that belongs to the first stage of courtship! I still remember the butterflies in my tummy and that light-headed feeling of first love when I started dating Pierpaolo... 
The love spoken about here is far deeper...  It is to Love till it hurts like Christ did. 

In Marriage as in the family there are many times when loving the other is not an easy task, where to love, to forgive, to accept humiliations and injustices is a supernatural graced decision not a feeling! Christ decided to Love us unto death and so in the family as in marriage we are constantly asked to make the same decision to truly love one another.


3. There is no greater force against evil in the world than the love of a man and a woman in marriage.
Cardinal Burke

 In a world where love is constantly redefined to suit the latest trend and life is under constant threat ... Cardinal Burke puts it very nicely... This creative love that naturally belongs to a man and a woman united in marriage is the key to defeat evil.
The children value highly this love and will always see and recognise the hand of God in their life and will want it for themselves too.

Today more than ever the family is under attack, the unitive and procreative love, tangible, fruitful and co-creational is such a powerful force that the world constantly tries to undermine it. 


4. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
GK Chesterton

GK...What a legend! He is not a Saint yet, but we are all praying as a family that he may become one! As a practicing Catholic family, going against the stream seems all we ever do, but what is important is for the children to understand is that we are not going against the crowd just to be rebellious or alternative...No! What we have received, what has been entrusted to us is far more precious than what the world has to offer. 



5. Waste time with your children so that they can realise that love is always free.
Pope Francis

When we were a young family and we only had the boys, I was always comparing my self with other mothers who were always busy taking their children to this and that class... I soon came to the conclusion that they didn't need me to be a taxi driver, they needed me and my husband to be their parents and 'waste time' with them... to stop doing what we were doing and pay attention to them, to sit down on the sofa to watch a silly cartoon with them, to kneel down on the floor and have a cuddle, to go out for a 5 minute walk around the block... they did not need much, only for me to stop and really 'be' with them without asking for anything in return because it is exactly in the family that the children experience and have the first encounter with the love of God, which is generous and gratuitous! 

6. Do small things with great love.
Mother Teresa

There is nothing like the experience of giving birth... I will never forget my first time, that sense of achievement, of fullness and of having survived something amazing! Once the excitement is over comes the struggle. 

There is always the temptation for us mothers to feel that changing nappies, feeding the family, cleaning the house, waking up several times during the night... the list is endless... is just not fulfilling enough! 

We think that we should be doing GREATER things than these. 

Wrong! I keep on falling for this over and over again... and it is only in the moment in which I embrace this service for my family and receive the grace through prayer to do it with love that I have experienced fullness of joy and have clearly seen the greatness of God's plan for me.

6.

Jesus

Although we are not of this world we live in it and many times the things that the world seems to offer tend to be VERY appealing...  Money, a bigger house, a better paid job, a good private school for the children... and yet this passage has always been before me... by doing the will of the Father first, the wisdom that we need in order to get closer and closer to our heavenly home will be given to us!

7. I would not pin my soul to any man's back.
Thomas More

Thomas More was a just man and even when, to deceive him they told him that Bishop John Fisher had signed the document against the Pope... this is how he answered! Although it is very important to have the support of the Catholic community it is vital for us to have a deep knowledge of the teaching of the Catholic Church and to stand firm in it no matter what others say. 

Many times looking at some of the 'older brothers' in faith I have found myself a bit shaken and said..."Well if others can behave like that then also I..." Once again...WRONG! When unsure... always go back to the original teaching and to put yourself these questions... "What does the Church say?", "What would Jesus do?" "What did Jesus do?"... most of the time the answer is not exactly what you would want to hear, but it is certainly liberating! 

8.For it is in giving that we receive.
St Francis of Assisi

Although not always easy, especially when tiredness takes over, there is nothing like giving yourself with no reservations... whether to your husband/wife, children, parents, neighbours... the graces that we gain are always greater and more fulfilling!


9.Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.
Saint Francis of Assisi (allegedly!)

Most of us are very good at talking and giving advice to those around us... but what I always say to my children and often need to remind myself is that 'actions really do speak louder than words'. For this reason it is vital for us Christians to be a TRUE example of Christ's love and God's Mercy. 

Living the Gospel in the family and acting with coherence in our everyday life, whether at work, at the doctors or at the supermarket is what will draw people closer to God, not because we are great people  (not only we are not but we constantly need the help of the Father), but because in us they will see the hand of the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life and because they have tasted it and will want it for themselves and will find the way that the Father has prepared for them.

10.What does it take to become a saint? Will it.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

We have been created for greatness. In baptism we have been claimed for Christ and have become Children of God. We are all called to sainthood! In the family we constantly need to be reminded of it...  Are we ready for it? Are we willing to take on the call? Most of the time my attitude is closer to the infamous quote from St Augustine... 'Lord make me pure, but not yet'!

What is your favourite quote and why?

Plan your Family with God

I’ve often noticed that one of the main objections to Natural Family Planning comes from very committed Catholics themselves. They look on NFP with a faint air of suspicion and say something like: “I don’t really practice NFP because I leave it all up to God.”

When we first got married this is pretty much what we decided to do. We hoped for two children very close together and decided we wouldn’t look into NFP until after our second child.

Although there was nothing wrong with this, looking back I think we really missed out. Reading Love and Responsibility by Pope John Paul II clarified many things for us in our marriage. We tried reading it during our engagement and frankly found it incomprehensible. The language is very philosophical and I always find that unless I can think of a real-life example to which a philosophical idea applies, it just doesn’t stick in my mind.

After two years of marriage we were in Sicily for our Summer holidays and had an extremely unusual week of rain. When it rains in Italy everybody just stays in the house and the boredom was intense, so we started re-readingLove and Responsibility. There were some real eureka moments because now we could relate the philosophy to our lived experience.

This was particularly true where John Paul II speaks about what it means to be a co-creator with God of our children. He says that when animals mate they do so for procreation, but it is an instinctive act rather than an act of will. Human beings on the other hand have an intellect and a soul and therefore free will, so their actions are of a different order. When a married couple come together they exercise that free will. When they give their intellectual assent to the possibility of remaining pregnant, they become co-creators with God of a new life. This assent is difficult to maintain in a general way and becomes clearer and more meaningful when we know with precision what is happening during the woman’s cycle.

In order to emphasise this John Paul II turns received wisdom about NFP on its head and gives us what I believe is the correct perspective. He says that the cycle of fertility and infertility has not been given to us by God so that we can know when not to conceive but rather, has been given to us primarily to know with precision when we can conceive… To see it from this perspective is to exorcise NFP of the contraceptive mentality. Too many Catholics think that NFP is acceptable for the Church because it ‘doesn’t work very well’ and every time it fails God’s will comes into play. I can’t help feeling that is a rather reductive view of our dignity as intelligent beings and of God’s will that he should want to act in our life through mistakes, chance or ignorance, how much better it is when we invite him to act with our whole being.

NFP is not therefore primarily about spacing children, rather it is about joyfully and excitedly, with full intellectual and spiritual consent approaching that moment when as a couple you pray: “Father in heaven, today we come together as husband and wife, open to becoming co-creators with you of a new life. Thy will be done!”

The marital act in those moments when we had discerned that it was time to have another child took on a completely different dimension. Something of a different order than the ‘generally open to life’ situation we lived in the early years of our marriage.

God wants us to be involved physically, spiritually and intellectually in this act of co-creation and NFP allows that to be lived to the full.

Meeting Christ in a Miscarriage

We are coming up to Holy Week again which is an especially poignant time for our family. 15 years ago we were expecting our second child. We had been invited to a wedding in Jerez de La Frontera, a beautiful town in Andalusia, Spain, famous for its wine and horses. It was Holy Week and we were enjoying the wonderful night-time processions full of drama, fire and music, Catholicism at its most visceral.

It coincided with a visceral experience of our own. I was in the 16^th week of pregnancy and while in Spain realised something was wrong. Providentially a family member was a midwife at the local hospital and we were seen within minutes of being admitted, only to be told that the child I was carrying was no longer alive.

It was a shocking realisation! Until then everything had seemed so easy. We’d fallen pregnant with our first child on honeymoon and I’d sailed through the first pregnancy, our son was born two days off his due date and everything went like clockwork. Suddenly life seemed much more fragile and uncertain.

What could have been an empty, tragic moment for us as a family was filled with meaning as events unfolded in parallel with Holy Week. The shockingly realistic and gaudy statues that were carried in procession through the Spanish streets, showing the sufferings of Christ and his Blessed Mother covered in blood and tears, suddenly seemed less distant and spoke to us in that incarnated way that only Catholicism can manage. We felt surrounded by the Christian community as never before. We were staying with a priest friend in the Bishop’s residence and the first person who came to see us after we’d been told the bad news was the Bishop of Jerez who arrived with the biggest box of chocolates we’d ever seen, the family gathered around and my parents were there from Italy to meet us when we got back.

We arrived back in London on Good Friday and went straight to hospital for an induced labour (the most painful one I have experienced even though the baby was only small) birth and a D&C operation. It was the first time we had ever missed any of the liturgies of the Paschal Triduum yet we felt closer to the events of Easter than we ever had. The hospital was great yet in a bizarre example of the relativism of our age, asked whether we wanted to treat the baby as a child or essentially as medical waste. Once we opted for the former the mortal remains of our little girl were treated with incredible dignity and buried some weeks later in a beautiful cemetery not far from her great grandmother.

It was a sobering experience for a young couple and since then every pregnancy has been lived with gratitude and in fear and trembling, conscious that the Lord giveth and He taketh away, Blessed be the name of the Lord.

We called the baby Anastasia which means resurrection in Greek and hope to meet her again when we pass from the Passion of this world to the resurrection of the next.