Family Virtues

“The Holy Family” & Life

(The church is cross shaped with a left, center and right row of pews with the altar in the middle.)

“The Holy Family feast day is as much about them as it is about our lives, in all its fullness.  Let’s use Scrooge’s three ghosts as our barometer.  This Left side is ‘Christmas present’ with all its wonder and woes; the Center (the largest) is ‘Christmas past’ because it’s the largest and longest as we age. The right side is ‘Christmas future’ because the Right side is always Republican because they are always ‘right’.  No!?

The Cost of Family Love

C. S. Lewis in a famous essay on love says that if you want to protect your heart from pain, you must give it to no one. You must enter into no serious relationships, not even with an animal. If you can isolate yourself from all relationships, your heart will not feel pain. In time, however, it will become incapable of feeling anything. If we choose to withdraw ourselves from relationships, we also choose to isolate ourselves from love and from life. What C. S. Lewis makes clear is that in the movement by which we open ourselves to love is the same movement by which we open ourselves to pain. You can’t have one without the other. Both thrive in family.

Mary discovered this in today’s gospel, which we just heard on this feast of The Holy Family. She and Joseph bring the child Jesus to the temple and Simeon rejoices that he sees the Lord’s Messiah. He then says to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul.” Simeon is telling Mary, “This child will hurt you.” Why? Because Mary was a mother, and the same movement that opened her to a mother’s love, opened her to a mother’s pain.

RELATED HOMILIES

• A Promise to Simeon and Us
• Simeon’s Bucket List

Being a Holy Family

In our natural competitive attitude, we are tempted to look at the Holy Family as an ideal we cannot realize in our families. But, Jesus, Mary and Joseph had their share of struggles. The trust which is fundamental to a marriage was challenged by the pregnancy. Joseph must have felt terrible when he had to bring his wife to a stable to have the child. Living in a foreign land, Egypt, away from family and traditions, was far from ideal. Still, the Holy Family made it through the difficulties of their family life for one reason only: they had great faith. Joseph had faith in the angel of his dreams and treated the pregnant Mary in an honorable way. He had faith that God would help him protect the child, and he moved the family to Egypt. Mary had faith both in the angel and in God’s working through Joseph. Jesus, having emptied himself of his divinity, had faith in his parents to care for him. Some of the pious Christian works of the second and third centuries didn’t understand this. The apocryphal gospels, which have never even remotely been considered Sacred Scripture, would present the child Jesus performing miracles to help his family even in everyday chores, like changing rocks to bread so Mary would not have to bake. (By the way the apocryphal gospels also had Jesus doing distinctly unchristian actions like beating up the local village bullies.) The child Jesus didn’t need to perform miracles. He had all the miracles he needed in parents who cared for him.

Here in the Christmas Octave, the Church bids us to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. On the old calendar, it falls later (the Sunday after Epiphany), which makes a little more sense as the Gospels appointed for the feast often take place far forward in time from His birth. The Gospel this year is only forty days into the future (as compared to other years, when the gospel takes place twelve years into the future), but it is still well past the Feast of the Epiphany, which we have yet to celebrate.

On this Feast of the Holy Family, let us consider marriage and family along three lines:

Today the Church celebrates the solemn feast of the Holy Family of the child Jesus, Mother Mary and Blessed Joseph. The Holy Family is a model for all families. From their life together, we can glean some beatitudes for family life.

Clergy E-Notes

“…if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being.”

— Pope Francis

The Child Grew and Became Strong

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily during a Mass for Diocese of Little Rock seminarians at the House of Formation in Little Rock on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2014.

In today’s Gospel Luke gives us a very brief description of Jesus’ youth: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” Notice that when he was a boy, he was a real boy. He was not a man in a boy’s body. He came to manhood gradually like any other kid. Luke mentions that he grew in size, strength and wisdom. That he grew in size was obvious, so let’s look at his growth in strength and wisdom.

Saintly Seniors

Bottom line: Our society needs saintly seniors desperately – and so does our Church. They can have a role in supporting families.

In the Gospel we see two other seniors with extraordinary faith. An 84 year old widow, Anna, had spent the greater part of her life near the temple, fasting, praying and worshiping God. Considered a prophetess (Gr. prophetis, inspired woman) she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. (Lk 2:40) An elderly man named Simeon also waited for the “consolation of Israel.” He had the incredible joy of holding the Christ child in his arms. In the process he has left us the beautiful prayer which priests, deacons, religious and many others recite before retiring: “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace…”

With Mary and Joseph Turned Towards Jesus

Today we reflect on the Holy Family of Nazareth, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph because we all grow up in a family and the Holy Family has much to teach us about family life. In the Christmas pictures and in the crèche/crib, we see Mary and Joseph turned towards the baby Jesus. Next, we see the shepherds beside Mary and Joseph also turned to Jesus. I think we could see our families in the place of the shepherds; we are with Mary and Joseph turned to Jesus. The only way for peace and love and happiness in our families is to be with Mary and Joseph and turn to Jesus. How do we do this? Through prayer. 

God Made Flesh

It is fitting that the holiness of the family also be celebrated at this time. For it is only by the ordinariness of being born, nurtured, and taught, so frail and dependent upon those who have welcomed us into their lives, that we ever grow in strength and grace.

God enters these intimacies, too, just as surely as God wants entry into all of human history. And so the wisdom of the father and the authority of the mother and reverence of the child reveal the splendor. Sometimes the wise old ones in our midst, like Simeon, help us name the glory. Other times, it is the prophetic ancient, like Anna, who sees the truth of our ordinary radiance.

Choosing to be a Holy Family

Whether we had a joyful Christmas or a difficult Christmas this year, the feast of the Holy Family comes at a good time. We are invited to remember what a holy family looks like. For St. Paul, in our second reading, it looks like a family that is kind, humble, compassionate, gentle, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. Notice that Paul doesn’t say that a holy family looks peaceful all the time. Families without frustrations do not exist. The Holy Family had their moments of frustration too. If you think families without frustrations exist, you have probably been drinking too much egg nog. For St. Paul, holy families look like families that, despite the frustrations, nevertheless choose (that is the operating word here, “choose”) to be kind, humble, compassionate, gentle, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, over and over and over again! It looks like husbands, wives and children caring for each other more than they care about themselves. I think the Gospel demonstrates a Holy Family wonderfully, a family that trusts in God despite the dangers they face in life.

No Homily Available