Friends,

This month, I would like to invite you to make your families more alive with tenderness. By definition, tenderness is an expression of warm, compassionate feelings. Tenderness is gentleness, or is feelings of warmth and affection for someone or something. It can be conveyed by touch, words, tone of voice, facial expression or other body language.

Psychologists writing for The School of Life, claim that the childhood needs for comfort and security remain with us into our adult years. “We may long to be held and reassured” with gentle touch, a soft voice and kind eyes. They insist that these ”needs are real” and should not be considered a sign of weakness.

In the culture in which I grew up, it was not common for a mother to kiss an adult son. So, after 30 years, I still remember clearly the day that my mother kissed me as an adult. It was at the end of my novitiate after I had taken my first vows. She held me and kissed me on my cheeks for the first time in my adult life. I could feel her tenderness, warmth, affection and appreciation.

Pope Francis says the opposite. In his homily for the solemnity of Mary, Most Holy Mother of God, (01/03/2017) he claims tenderness is “a virtue of the strong.” His example is Mother Mary. He says: "By her motherhood, Mary shows us that humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong." (HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS, Vatican Basilica, Sunday, 1st January 2017)

Mary was humble enough to listen and ponder things. Luke says: “Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart!" She listened to the heartbeat of her Son with tenderness, unconditional love, self-sacrifice and hope of a mother. However, she was also strong enough to be involved in the beginnings of the first Christian community. Luke says she met with Jesus’s disciples and brothers and certain other women as they devoted themselves to prayer following the death of her son.

In this homily, the Pope warns that the lack of “physical contact in our virtual world is cauterizing our hearts (cf. Laudato Si’, 49) and making us lose the capacity for tenderness and wonder, for pity and compassion.” The lose of this capacity “makes us forget what it means to be children, grandchildren, parents, grandparents, friends and believers. It makes us forget the importance of playing, of singing, of a smile, of rest, of gratitude."