Husbands love
your wives. He stores up
riches
who reveres
his mother.
Whoever honors his
father atones for
sins. Parents do not nag
your
children.
Children, take care of your parents when
they are old.
SIRACH and COLOSIANS
Christmas is a special time to reconnect and
recommit as a family. The Saturday before Christmas, all six of my
brothers and sisters and four brother-in-laws got together for a home Mass and dinner
– no gift giving. We have been doing it for many years. Because of some health issues in the group, this year we added the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. 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. Several of them 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 is strained and uncomfortable.
As a person who is still a member of a
family, 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 try it have my deepest admiration. Not having a family of
my own, I realize that I miss out on both the joy and the pain.
Several times, as I flip 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.
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 know.
When I was on vacation on a beach in Mexico a
few years ago, I was amazed at how many young couples were in the hotel with
one, two and three young babies and toddlers in single, double and even triple
strollers. Weighted down with diaper bags and stuffed animals, they struggled
to keep their brood together. Totally relaxed, with a margarita in hand, I was
secretly relieved, if not a bit guilty, that a vacation like their’s is
something I will never know……at least I hope not!
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 two blocks away. I ordered three 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 “boy friend” 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 he 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. She apologized to all of us and finally coaxed her
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 has by 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
like the “Holy Family” they 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 the
stories in the bible about the “holy family” with rose colored glasses, ending
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 it 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.
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 town 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 stall.
(3) 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
old pigeons, instead of the traditional, more expensive, doves. (4) No sooner
than they settled down in Nazareth than 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, Joseph crossed the border, becoming refugees in a foreign country,
until the coast was clear back home. (5) When Jesus was twelve years old, he
got lost on a trip to the big city, Jerusalem. His panic-striken parents spent
a few hellish days till they 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 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 varieties of new 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.
The readings today give us an impressive list
of “family values,” values that can guide and strengthen even modern families
in all their marvelous varieties: honoring your father and mother, taking care
of them in their old age, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness,
obedience, patience, forgiveness, peace, thankfulness and love, to name a few. Family is not something that we can take for
granted. 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 2018!
