Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
The man and the woman
The Lord God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.”So the Lord God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them ….. The man gave names to …. but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man. So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs ….The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib …. he brought her to the man, the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body. The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame. Gen 2,18-25
When we talk with our sons Gianfilippo and Gianluca, who live as single persons, the first in London and the second in Caserta, we take this opportunity to ask to them what is the forecast for their marriage. They have not to be married to make their parents happy, but it would be good that they fall in love with a good girl, and that they would marry her, because “it is not proper that the man lives alone”, he needs “an help close to him”. Each of us needs to love and to be loved, to have a relationship, to procreate sons to the life, to dream and to design together with another himself his future. A person who lives alone is lacking of reference points, he is lacking of someone impeding him to make mistakes and to be addressed to wrong routes, but, mainly, he does not know the joy which derives from the marriage union and from the family. By the beginning of the today passage of the Genesis, the man was “alone”. “ Then, the Lord God shaped from the soil every sort of wild animals and of all the birds of the sky and he brought them to the man, to see how he would have called them”. To give the name, in the Mesopotamia civilization of those times, it was equivalent to give a purpose, a sense, a target and consequently to exert a dominion. However, the man was not glad to be the owner of the nature and of the things, he was needing of an help similar to him and with which he could live in communion of thoughts, of feelings and of purposes. Then God took a part of the man, one rib, he made from that a person equal to him and so the woman was created. As Adam saw her, different but complementary to him, shouted because of the joy: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called “woman” for out of “her man” this one has been taken”:In fact in the Hebrew language the words which indicate the man and the woman are “ish” and” isha”, masculine and feminine of the same reality, called to be “one only flesh” in the love. This becoming again one only thing is sublimated by the fact that the man and the woman were ”naked and they were not ashamed because of it”. Naked in the body, in the thoughts, in the feelings, in the dreams, in the projects and in each manifestation of the spirit and of the life. Today the situation is somewhat different: this perfect union has to be discovered again and recaptured in a path of faith.