Archive for December, 2008|Monthly archive page
THE FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY
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What are we celebrating on this Feast of the Holy Family? Certainly and most obviously, we celebrate the family that is Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Each is a person of profound faith, called by God to trust God’s call and to live out the implications of that call. The Family is an icon before which we sit to be drawn into the mystery and so be transformed. Icons tend to be placid depictions of extraordinary beings rapt in prayer and seeming to be totally other. That is, until we look deeper. So is it here.
Responding to God’s will involved struggle for Joseph who had to let go of what he had planned for his future, to trust when the young woman to whom he was engaged was found to be pregnant. Breaking the relationship was his first inclination. The angel told him to trust hat what was happening was God’s will. So he took Mary into his house. Because he was of the House of David, Caesar’s mandatory world census set them on the road to Bethlehem late in Mary’s pregnancy, caused him the humiliation of not being able to provide a decent place of the birth of the child, and the, when it seemed that the child was in danger, he had to leave hearth and home and flee to Egypt. The magnitude of Joseph’s faith mirrors Abram’s in the first reading. Abram had to believe and trust in God’s promise to him with nothing tangible to support that faith. And so he became Abraham, the father of many nations.
Mary. At most she was thirteen when Gabriel said to her: Hail, Full of Grace. She too struggled to find God’s will in the Angel’s invitation, needing assurance, needing a sign so that she could know that nothing is impossible with God. Simeon says to her in today’s gospel: And your own heart a sword shall pierce. She will have to struggle to understand who the son she bore is. The sword is the word of God. Her heart is where she thinks, prays, and ponders that word.
Jesus, too, struggles as he comes to understand that his work is to do the will of the one who sent me. And following that will will take him to Calvary and the brink of despair as darkness threatens to envelop him in abandonment. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
As extraordinary as the three individuals who make up the Holy Family are, the icon they become on this feast is meant not only to inspire but also to challenge us to do what they do and be family as they are. Really? I think so. It is a sad fact of contemporary living that many families are fractured. Single parent homes are not uncommon. Ideally, husband, wife, and child(ren) live in a community of life and love. The guiding ethic Sirach puts before us spells out how that reality is to be lived. The mutuality of mother and father’s authority is one thing. The responsibility of the children to be guided by that authority is another. The obligation to care for each other, especially children for parents as parents’ faculties fail, all these come together as something pleasing to God and meriting being with God forever. God hears the cry of the just. And the grace that animates all this merits sins’ forgiveness.
Single parents. Widows. Widowers. Single people. What about these? The icon of the Holy Family is something that each one may enter and thereby be transformed. Openness to God’s love and grace is the calling of every person of faith. Trust in times of difficulty rises out of that faith. Respect for each other enfleshes that faith and helps the other to experience God’s love through the acts of kindness and respect.
There is more. What about the parish? What about the Church? Doesn’t the icon apply there too? Oughtn’t the parish be family? Shouldn’t the Church as the people of God inspire each member to love, honor, and respect every other member and to live with the desire to put into practice the unity that is ours in Eucharist, the unity that is ours as the Body of Christ? We are family. There is mutuality among God’s people who are loved by God as God loves Christ. That’s one of the effects of Baptism and our being drawn into the community that is God. One of the catch phrases that came out of Vatican Council II was the call to all the faithful to full, active, and conscious participation in the Liturgy. That meant that one’s being a passive spectator, if you will, at Sunday Mass did not fulfill the obligation. Nor is the obligation fulfilled if one becomes totally self absorbed in private devotions, the rosary and the like, thereby effectively being walled off from the rest of the community gathered at the Table. The Eucharist is action and all are to be part of it. Then, having eaten and drunk, they are to be sent to continue the action of Eucharist where ever they go in the market place until all are fed and have drunk.
Paul writes to the church at Colossus. Listen to what he says as he speaks to a community broader than the individual family. The community at large is called to put on, as god’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. …Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. …And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
In other words, it seems to me, the feast we celebrate today is meant to put before us a model of every coming together of people. The Holy Family is a model for how the human family is to live. If that profound respect, that sense of responsibility for each other were to captivate the human imagination and motivate us, what differences would soon become apparent. Sure it is idealistic. But what if that is God’s will for us?
What does heartfelt compassion mean? To be compassionate is to suffer with. Heartfelt compassion goes even deeper. The suffering of the other is your own. In that embrace you find Christ.
We have been blessed with beacons of compassionate response. We call them saints. Dorothy Day. Thomas Merton. Mahatma Gandhi. Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. They tend to prick the human conscience and make us marvel all the while wondering how anyone could live so selflessly. We shudder to think that their call might be our own. Put on heartfelt compassion. That is not a suggestion. That is a directive. That’s an easier word to accept than command. There is only one way. Christ. Accept the implications of Baptism and live the priesthood of the baptized. That’s all.
But imagine what would happen if we really believed we were all family, God’s family, the world peopled with our brothers and sisters. Imagine.
Sincerely,
Didymus
