Dear Parish Family,
During the Octave (eight days) of Christmas we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. The significance of the Feast unfolds when we come to understand the deeper truths it reveals. It teaches us about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph- and about each one of us and our own families. St. Pope Paul VI used to call it the lessons we learn at “The School of Nazareth”. Jesus spent 30 of his 33 earthly years in Nazareth. Some spiritual writers have called these the "hidden years", because there is so little written about them in the Gospel narratives. However, they reveal the holiness of ordinary life and show us how it becomes extraordinary for those baptized into Christ.
When we think of Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus in splendid, nuclear isolation, we forget two things. First, no family in first-century Palestine lived disconnected from their network of relatives. Second, and more important, their family life was lived as part of the larger family life of Israel’s covenant life with God. The passage from Sirach demonstrates the way Israelite family life was considered an expression of covenant life. Each statement Sirach makes about living the parent-child relationships refers to what those relationships mean about one’s relationship with God. Indeed those relationships are described in liturgical terms. For example, “He who honors his father is gladdened by children, and when he prays he is heard” Or again, “He obeys the Lord who brings comfort to his mother.”
It is first and foremost in our relationships, our families, our friends, that God is encountered, that faith is given flesh that our theories of justice are tested out, that our prayer is made real, that dreams are actualized. It is here that we learn to empty our selfishness and put others first. Even the great mystic teacher St. Teresa of Avila insisted on that truth: when people came inquiring about the heights of holy prayer, she would ask how their relationships were going. Our most profound sufferings, our greatest heroics, our most significant encounters with God are here with these people we know and love, in their goodness, in their weakness. The Church’s insistence on Family encounter of the Eucharist as a family is a wise instruction culled by years of experience.
Today in the Gospel we read how the Family of Nazareth was fleeing from violence against them. In our own times, the family unit is in peril, chased down and slain by the Herods of modern culture. Television has almost no shows that depict successful families. Advertising pushes us to fill our own personal needs, to load up on pleasure, to buy products that make life easier, to eliminate being bothered. ‘The use and discard culture’ that has pervaded our habits of consumption has also entered into our relationships. Being in a family is no easy job. All parents are amateurs when they start off. What can they do about today’s great assault on family and Christian/human values? For one thing, be willing to spend time even when it is scarce. Be willing to give up some of our own fascinations for the sake of others. Commit and do not relent. In other words, imitate the Holy Family. Get to know and to love the others in your family, whether they have grown up and left home or not. Every value-rooted family builds another entrenchment against the ghastly degradation of this most important foundation-stone of human life. We all want to be part of the great web of love that is God’s presence on earth. It is played out in the foibles and fun of ordinary family life. God is there. Holiness sprouts, grows and bears fruit in this garden of the family.
Fr. Thomas Kunnel C.O.