The Feast of the Holy Family

Today as we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family, I have to confess that every time this feast comes around, I feel somehow inadequate to the task. I am, after all, a professional celibate. What do I have to say to you? I don’t have a spouse, children, or grandchildren. As a Jesuit, I suppose I can admit that I do have a dazzlingly diverse array of brothers, crazy uncles, and cunning nephews, but that’s just not the same.

My own family was and is, to put it politely, post-nuclear. My parents split up early, in the 1950s, when good Catholic folk didn’t do such a thing.  A lot remained, remains to this day, hidden and unspoken. Our holiday table never looked like a Norman Rockwell painting; there was a lot of anger, and alcohol, and high drama. My one dear sister and her husband adopted three kids; one nephew died from his addictions at 33, another is wandering about as a cook, and recently my unmarried niece finally left her deadbeat boyfriend, and moved home with her two year old daughter, who, incidentally, is the cutest child in the entire universe. My sister and her husband are typical sandwich generation parents:  looking after daughter and granddaughter and caring for my brother in law’s 93 year old mom.

If I asked you your own family stories, there would be a similar but different catalogue of joys and sorrows, of trials and little victories, of losses and gains.

So what have I got to share with you today?  One small insight that is not as cynical as it might sound on first hearing.  After reflecting on my own family, and counseling many people over the past 30 years as a priest, I can assure you of one thing:  Anybody who tells you their family is perfect is either a liar or delusional. Ditto for anyone who claims to have a fully functional family. Today’s readings bear out that insight. Listen to these stories of disfunctionality.

Today we hear about the family of Abraham and Sarah, our parents in the faith. In his old age, Abram heard a strange call from a God he did not know to leave his pleasant and prosperous estate at Ur on the Euphrates, and go into a new and promised land, full of uncertainty and danger. Childless, the couple obeyed. Fearing extinction, Abram took Hagar, his wife’s servant, as his concubine, and had a boy child, Ishmael. Then God gave Abram and his ancient, barren wife their own son, Isaac, whose name means “God Laughs.” Hagar and Ishmael are sent away, to become the ancestors of the Arab peoples; Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel become the parents of the Jewish people. That family split still afflicts us to this day.

For all we try to make them Sunday school cutouts, the Holy Family of Nazareth was a troubled family from the beginning. Mary, betrothed to Joseph, is pregnant, but not by her intended husband. Crisis marks the beginning of the story, followed by a humiliating birth of this questionable child in a stable surrounded by animals, and then straight away, the family became refugees, exiles in a foreign land. The mother is promised that her son will be great, son of the Most High, destined for the rise and fall of many, yet a sign of contradiction, contradiction that will pierce his mother’s heart. The son grows in age and wisdom, then abandons his home and family for a crazy mission, and ends up on a cross on a Friday afternoon with his mother at his bloody feet.

Yet it’s that very scene that gives us hope. A mother brokenhearted yet faithful and forgiving; a son who has moved on, but who still accepts and is enfolded in her love, even to the last.

Disfunctionality may be the default human condition. It is so easy to push our family’s buttons because we know exactly where they all are: we helped to wire them up in the first place. Yet we also know deep inside that love, generosity, forgiveness, and mercy are only remedies for the disfunction we all experience when dealing with our families. We cannot cure all our family’s ills, fix our family once and for all.  What we can do is hold onto each other lightly. Lightly.  Not in a chokehold, but with lightness, in the light of forgiveness, in the light of mercy. Not one of us is perfect; everyone who lives, lives in need of forgiveness and forgiving. I suspect that Jesus had our families in mind when he taught his friends the second half of the Lord’s prayer: forgive us as we forgive. 

If you make no other New Year’s resolution, make this:  resolve to forgive your family and yourself for not being perfect.  That’s a first, huge step towards the healing of our disfunctionality, towards happiness and wholeness. 

Thomas M. Lucas S.J.