A New Year reflection inspired by Spy x Family[i]
By Zyra Lentija
The Safety of a Shared Secret
Anya Forger lives inside a lie, and somehow, that lie becomes the safest place she has ever known. Her “father” is a spy. Her “mother” is an assassin. Her “family” exists because of a mission, not because of blood or vows. And yet Spy x Family tells a story far deeper than its comedy suggests: Anya trusts her parents completely, not because she understands them, but because she does not need to. That small detail turns this anime into a reflection on trust, love, and belonging, one that feels especially relevant to anyone who hesitates to commit, step forward, or say yes while life remains uncertain. Anya is unusual. She can read minds, which means she knows more than a child should. She knows her parents are hiding dangerous secrets. She knows they are afraid, confused, and imperfect. She knows their lives don’t fully make sense. And yet, this is the heart of it, she stays. She leans toward them. She calls them “Mother” and “Father.” She trusts them with her small, fragile life.
Trust Without Certainty
We often assume trust comes from certainty: Once I understand everything, I’ll commit. But Anya shows us something different. Her trust is not built on complete knowledge. It is built on presence. Loid shows up. Yor shows up. They protect her. They feed her. They worry about her. And, clumsily and perfectly, they love her. That is enough.
This points to something important about how real relationships work. We tend to believe that love requires having things figured out: about the other person, about the future, about ourselves. We delay commitment until we feel confident, very stable, or “good enough.” We tell ourselves we’ll step up once the fear is gone. But personalist philosophers have argued that love doesn’t begin with perfect understanding. Instead, it begins with participation and acting together with others. As Karol Wojtyła famously observed, the strength of real love emerges most clearly when the person stumbles:
“One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults, and without in the least approving of them.”[ii]
Anya does not need a full explanation of her parents’ lives to experience their care as real. She trusts the relationship itself, not the resumé. What matters most is not what Loid and Yor can reveal, but that they keep choosing her actively, through actions. They come home. They stay. And in that staying, love becomes real; it grows.
Commitment as a Path to Wholeness
We hesitate to fully enter or keep relationships, or commitments, i.e., work, orgs, friendships, because we don’t feel complete. We worry we aren’t healed enough, stable enough, or strong enough. But Spy x Family quietly suggests the opposite: commitment is not something you do after you become whole. It is often how you become whole. Loid and Yor don’t start as good parents. They become parents by acting like them, awkwardly, imperfectly, and often afraid. Over time, their choices reshape them. Love forms them into the very people they were waiting to become. This idea has deep roots in philosophy. Thinkers from Aristotle onward have argued that we become who we are through the choices we repeatedly make. Character, insofar as a person’s relationality is concerned, is not built by waiting, but by the practice of friendship and shared life.[iii]
The Leap of Faith
There is also a deeper, almost spiritual truth here. In Christian Theology, trust comes before understanding. Faith is not having all the answers; it is stepping forward without them yet. Believers live inside a story that is still unfolding. They do not see the whole plan, but they trust because love has shown itself faithful over time.[iv] Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explains that this “risky enterprise” or “leap of faith” is the heart of faith, noting that “understanding follows belief, not the other way around.”[v] For the Forgers, the “perhaps this is real” becomes the avenue of communication that saves them from being shut up in their own secret worlds.
Anya’s trust is childlike in the best sense. It isn’t blind, but relational. She doesn’t deny danger. She simply refuses to let fear define her home. Romano Guardini suggests that the path to a truthful life begins with “patience– patience which is the deepest possible acceptance of things as they are.” He warns that we often use “arts of adornment and disguise, of play and masquerade” as “cunning efforts to slip out of one’s self.”[vi] For Anya, the “fake” family isn’t a masquerade to escape reality, but the very place where she chooses to stay and “accept things as they are,” not blindly but with a lot of faith.
Beginning a New Season
That is a powerful message as we enter a new year, a new semester. We often begin new seasons wanting certainty: plans, clarity, guarantees. But life rarely offers them. Relationships remain fragile and risky. Careers remain unstable. Even our own intentions are mixed. If we wait until fear disappears before committing, or until we feel fully ready, we may never step into the very relationships that could change us. Anya teaches us something quietly brave: You can belong before you fully understand. You can commit without being perfect. You can step forward while the story is still being written.
Sometimes the family, relationship, or responsibility you hesitate to enter is precisely where you will learn how to trust. As a new year begins, perhaps the question isn’t: Do I have everything figured out? Perhaps it’s much bolder: Where am I being asked to show up, even while I’m still afraid? Anya doesn’t know the whole truth, but she knows she is loved. And sometimes, that is the most human and the most hopeful place to begin.
Footnotes
[i] Cf Spy x Family, created by Tatsuya Endo, directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi, CloverWorks and Wit Studio, originally broadcast April 2022. Available on Netflix for viewing.
[ii] Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, trans. Grzgorz Ignatik (Boston: MA, 2013), 116-117.
[iii] Cf Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. II, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 1103a14–1103b25, and Paul J. Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 32–38. Wadell famously argues that life is essentially a group project. He suggests that we cannot become virtuous alone because we lack the perspective to see our own faults.
[iv] Cf Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 47–49. Ratzinger writes, “Thus faith is the finding of a “You” that bears me up and amid all the unfulfilled – and in the last resort unfulfillable – hope of human encounters gives me the promis of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it. Christian faith lives on the discovery that only there is such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like the child that knows all its questions answered in the “You” of its mother. Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the theses round which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion “I believe in You” (…).”
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Cf Romano Guardini, “Faith and Doubt,” in The Essential Guardini: An Anthology, ed. Heinz R. Kuehn (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1997), 87. Guardini discusses the human tendency to “disguise and masquerade” to avoid the truth of one’s being, arguing instead for a “patience” that serves as the “deepest possible acceptance of things as they are.”
Leave a Reply