Dear Friends,
The feast of the Holy Family has the potential to make us
stop to think. TV programs and ads, writers and preachers love to extol the joys
of the perfect family, i.e. husband,
wife, 1.79 kids and a dog, all sitting in their spacious dining room enjoying
the evening meal in tranquility.
We say, “That’s not us! That’s not our family.” In the face
of the supposed ideal, discouragement threatens us, or the unwillingness to
accept ourselves as we are. We need to fix us!
The good news is: that’s not the Holy Family, and not us
either.
Today’s Gospel shows Jesus, about Bar Mitzvah age,
exhibiting great chutzpah toward his parents. He simply stays behind in
Jerusalem for three days and didn’t seem terribly remorseful when found. Frankly,
Mary and Joseph could have saved themselves a lot of frustration if they had
made concrete arrangements ahead of time. This is not to put down the Holy
Family, but they did make a mistake in assuming rather than communicating. We know
the feeling.
Luke tells us that when Mary asked the found Jesus for an
explanation, she did not understand what he was saying. She had to mull it
over.
Once we understand that God in the person of Jesus has
experienced our imperfect family life, maybe we can accept our own situation
and not feel that we must apologize for it or disown it.
A much-loved, insightful Native American, Sister Jose Hobday,
author, and lecturer in the last decades of the 20th Century, wrote
that her favorite prayerbook was her family photo album.
“Three or four times a year, I get it out,” she says. “I
look, I remember, and suddenly I am seeing how God has been with our family all
these years. When all my other efforts at prayer fail, I bring out my family
album.”
The story of Jesus, lost and found, doesn’t end in Jerusalem.
We are told that Jesus went home to Nazareth with them where he was obedient
and where he grew in wisdom, age and grace. This is what we are also called to do
in a family: to grow, each in our own way but together with one another.
Our Gospel account today holds a deep lesson for family life
in this time of stress and unravelling. Despite our failure at connecting or
clear communication or recognizing one another’s pain at family disfunction, we
can still become tender-hearted as we work at resolving our differences.
In this age, when some people worry that concern for the
family is on the decline, a feast like this is important. It makes us take
stock and take heart.
The ethician James Nelson puts it this way: “Each of us
needs a place where the gifts of life make us more human, where we are linked
with ongoing covenants with others, where we can return to lick our wounds,
where we can take our shoes off, and where we know that within the bounds of
human capacity – we are loved simply because we are. Because that human need
will not die, the need for the family will not die.”
On this Holy Family Sunday, I hope we can recommit ourselves
to work for a loving family life and growth in whatever context we find
ourselves.
~Sister Joan Sobala
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