There is no perfect family. We have no perfect parents, we are not perfect, do not get married to a perfect person, neither do we have perfect children.
We have complaints about each other. We are disappointed by one another. Therefore, there is no healthy marriage or healthy family without the exercise of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is vital to our emotional health and spiritual survival. Without forgiveness the family becomes a theatre of conflict and a bastion of grievances. Without forgiveness the family becomes sick. Forgiveness is the sterilisation of the soul, cleansing the mind and the liberation of the heart.
Anyone who does not forgive has no peace of soul and communion with God. Pain is a poison that intoxicates and kills. Maintaining a wound of the heart is self-destructive action. It is an autophagy.
He who does not forgive sickens physically, emotionally and spiritually. That is why the family must be a place of life and not of death; an enclave of cure not of disease; a stage of forgiveness and not of guilt.
Forgiveness gives joy where sorrow produces pain; and healing, where pain caused disease.