Met Antonios (el-Souri): The Family is the Foundation of Society

 Arabic original here, originally published in an-Nahar, here.

The Family is the Foundation of Society

We have come to be in a time when humanity is under attack through the distortion of the ontological reality of the human being. "God created man, male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27). This reality, from which results the perpetuation of humankind has been put into doubt. Indeed, there is an attempt to demolish humanity according to the image in which God created it, that man is both male and female. In the West, they have started to teach the new generation that there is no longer what is called family, father and mother, since they have invented the new terms "Parent 1" and "Parent 2". Nature is self-evident and no one can negate father and mother as a comprehensive, essential human reality for humankind. There is a systematic global campaign to sabotage, demolish and distort the psychological structure and distinctive personality of man through destroying and erasing the essence of sexual identity.

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A person's psychological harmony comes from the balance of the relationship between the child and its parents, from the moment of conception to the moment of birth and the severing of the umbilical cord, to the stage of breastfeeding and weaning, that is, the severing of the psychological umbilical cord, then entrance into school, then crossing from the stage of childhood to adolescence, then adulthood. We do not have space here in this treatment to enter into an explanation of the roles of the father and the mother at each of these stages and elsewhere, but it is clear that the more balance and integration there is in the experience of motherhood, fatherhood and the child's nourishment and growth in the light of maternal tenderness and embrace and fatherly security and authority in love, the more the personality develops in harmony and balance and the sexual identity becomes clear and matures with consciousness and perception of man's true reality and the essence of life in communion and differentiation in love, which is the foundation of the completion of the authentic human personality.

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The work of the devil is to destroy man because he is proud and jealous and Satan has in the world henchmen to carry out his ideas and translate his intentions. What is called "civilization" today is headed toward cancelling the concept of the family on the basis of a distorted application of the principle of human freedom. There is an effort to end the role of woman as mother, on the one hand, and to spread a distorted idea of marriage, which is fundamentally the union of a man and a woman by the grace of God, through legalizing the marriage of homosexuals and giving them the right to adopt children.

In the name of freedom, humanity is violated and sexual relations are permitted without limits or controls that would preserve human dignity. There are infernal plans to snatch humanity away from its reality that comes from the image of God within it to deserts and jungles of carnal lust. The false civilization of today pushes man to betrayal of himself and enslavement to thoughts and passions imposed upon him through the media, social media and advertising.

Humankind destroys itself when it departs from the reality that man is created by God for a goal and purpose that man knows when he inclines, contemplating within himself, toward the infinite expanses sown within him through the divine image hidden in his innermost depths, veiled by the coarseness of lusts, complexes and mental and spiritual illnesses.

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Today before tomorrow we must wake up from illusions of false happiness that are being marketed by the civilization of consumption, the bodily pleasures acquired through the senses, and through thought, desire, vainglory and man puffing himself up over achievements on the physical and practical level. The essence of man is love and apart from love neither man nor his works have any value. Love is the image of God in man. He learns it and grows in it through the experience of living, from his formation in his mother's womb, with his parents and in his family, and afterwards setting out to expand this experiential knowledge, wherever he finds himself.

When the family is shattered, the mother is absent and the father not present, when the elements of the family are distorted, that is, when the existence of the father and mother is denied as the foundation of the family, humankind grows up distorted, beset with complexes enslaved to passions that press it, day after day, to become closer to bestial savagery with unlimited whims.

The family constituted of father, mother and children is the essential cell of humankind which, if we preserve it in the harmony and balance that come from the Creator, we will preserve man in his true reality and calling according to God's will, and which is an absolute good and inalienable joy and true happiness in love.