Don't be disappointed that your family was not like this picture! Neither was mine! Neither was any family I have known! Neither was Jesus's family!
Husbands love
your wives. He stores up
riches who reveres his
mother. Whoever honors his father (and mother) atones for sins.
Parents do not provoke your children. Children, obey your parents and take
care of them when they are old. Even if their minds fail, be considerate of them.
Sirach
and Colossians
Christmas is a special time to reconnect and recommit as a family. Three Saturdays before Christmas, all five of my brothers and sisters got together for lunch instead of dinner this year. Happily, we stopped the stressful gift-giving years ago. We have been getting together like that for many years. As a single person with no family of my own, it is my way of connecting to a sense of family. Like always, we had a great time laughing and talking and telling the same old stories from growing up years. We do have one very strict rule - absolutely no mention of politics!
Several of my siblings pointed out how lucky we are just to be able to get together. Some families we know cannot even get together because of divorces, hard feelings and old grudges. If they do get together, the getting together atmosphere is tense, strained and uncomfortable.
As a person who is still a member of a family of six siblings, but who does not have a family of his own, I pay attention to families. I take notice. The thing that I see most is that having a family brings both joy and pain. Those who attempt it have my deepest admiration. Not having a family of my own, I realize that I miss out on both its joy and its pain.
A couple of times, as I have flipped though the channels, I have been compelled to stop and watch one of those live birth experiences that you see once in a while. I am not ashamed to admit that I usually get choked up and watery-eyed when I watch new parents at the moment of birth of their children. While I am proud that it can move me so much, I am very aware that what those new parents are experiencing is a thousand times more intense. It is a joy that I will never experience.
Not all families are "happy" families! A few years ago, about 10:00 at night I realized that I had not eaten supper. The closest fast-food restaurant to my house is a White Castle about five or six blocks away. What can I say? I was desperate! I ordered three cheese hamburgers and a diet coke and sat down to watch a fascinating show that only happens late at night in a White Castle. No sooner than I sat down than a distressed young mother with a toddler came in and asked the women behind the counter to call the police. Her “boyfriend” had locked them out of the car and was threatening them in the parking lot. She paced back and forth, one minute trying to appease her whining child who needed to go to bed and the other minute peeking out the window to see if her boyfriend was still out there. Sadly, like many abused women are wont to do, she went back to him before the police got there. A few minutes later, a wild-looking young woman, probably bi-polar, came in and ordered some cheese fries and ate them standing in the middle of the floor, spilling some of them and stepping on them, while muttering to herself. Before she finished, an older woman, her distressed mother, came in telling her that she had been combing the neighborhood looking for her to take her home. Her mother apologized to all of us and finally coaxed her daughter into the car and left. As I left that night, I realized once again how many things some families have to deal with. Anyone who is trying to hold a family together these days has my deepest admiration.
Today is the Feast of the Holy Family. It is not the easiest feast to preach about. In a world where family life is a painful experience for so many, I have always shied away from those romanticized and idealized sermons that I grew up with. They certainly did not describe my experience. Because my family was not at all like the “Holy Family” our nuns and priest talked about, I always left church feeling defective as a family. My religion teachers of the past were so driven to hold up the “holy family” as a model for all families that they may have read about in the bible. They were obviously reading those stories about the “holy family” with rose colored glasses because they ended up with a religious version of a 1950s TV family. Because their reading of the stories was so idealized, by the 1960’s, people began to reject that brand of piety, and even laugh at it, as totally unrealistic and impossible.
A few years ago, I came to realize that maybe the real “holy family” is more like today’s families than we have traditionally become accustomed to think. The facts show that the “holy family” was not that sugary little family that we use to hear about growing up!
We only have a few stories about Jesus’ childhood and the family from Nazareth, and none of them would be what you would call "nice and sweet."
(1) The family started out with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Mary and Joseph were engaged, but not yet married when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Joseph came within a hair of divorcing Mary, but backed off because of a message from God in a dream. (2) When it came time for Jesus to be born, Mary and Joseph were called out of town for a census. Away from home, Mary and Joseph end up having to deliver their baby in a barn, right there in a donkey stall. (3) No sooner that their baby was born, a maniac king tried his best to kill all the Jewish children he could get his hands on. To protect Jesus from that fate, Mary and Joseph crossed the border, becoming refugees in a foreign country, until the coast was clear to come back back home. (4) When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple for his circumcision, they were so poor that they had to make an offering to the temple of two common pigeons, instead of the traditional, more expensive, doves. (5) When Jesus was twelve years old, he got lost on a trip to the big city, Jerusalem. His panic-stricken parents spent a few hellish days till they finally found him. (6) On one occasion, hearing some of the things he was preaching, his family came to do an intervention on him because they really thought he had lost his mind. (7) A symbol of all sorrowing mothers, Mary finally had to witness her son, stripped and beaten, being executed as a common criminal.
No, this holy family was no “goody-two shoes” family that I had idealized for me as a child. This family had problems, big problems, but they managed to remain faithful to each other and to God through it all. I think this family has a better chance of being a model if we simply accept the fact that they were like us in so many ways.
This feast does offer an opportunity to say a few words about family life. The problems are easy to list, the solutions are not so easy to come by. The most obvious fact facing us is that families have changed. There is no use pretending they haven’t or wishing they hadn’t. They have! Instead of pretending or wishing, we need to develop new ways to help and support modern families, including single parent families, blended families, adoptive families and the many other new varieties of families.
Families and couples cannot take anything for granted. The forces against family life are hard at work. Families must be intentional about being family if they have any hope at all to work against the forces that are trying to pull them apart. To let things slide in marriages or families is to invite disaster. Families need all the support the community and church can give, not judgment and condemnation. You certainly have my support! I don’t know how you do it!
The readings today give us an impressive list of
“family values,” values that can guide and strengthen even our modern families
in all of their marvelous varieties: honoring your father and mother, taking
care of them in their old age, offering heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility,
gentleness, obedience, patience, forgiveness, peace, thankfulness and love, just
to name a few of the “family values” listed in our readings today. Family is
not something that we can take for granted these days. It is something that
must be wanted and worked for. Whatever family you have been given or whatever
substitute family you have pieced together, may the Holy Family bless you
abundantly in 2024!
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