Feast of the Holy Family

St. Benedict begins the thirty-seventh chapter of his Rule with a pithy bit of wisdom: Although nature inclines us to be compassionate to the old and the young, the authority of the Rule should also provide for them. We may feel that we are naturally loving, compassionate, and understanding, but experience shows that these natural feelings are not always reliable.  They may be natural enough with those who form our little circles of support, but the authority of the Rule or the command of God may be needed for those we can hardly care about.

This raises the question of what is natural to us?  When our actions, habits, attitudes are all working together, it can seem natural.  That it is a natural gift or even birthright.  But in fact, there is nothing in our nature that we have not learned and been taught.  We didn’t spring ready-made from the womb.  What we have accepted, interiorized, and integrated now becomes our nature.  Authority has already been at work.  Reality has always been this mix of what we are given and told, and what we have been willing to accept and integrate.

Our family is the first educational school we encounter, ushering us into the world of reality.  It has marked us with lasting traits from the gifts and wounds we have encountered.  Our nature is really a history of all those interactions that have been impressed in our memory and psyche.  I used to wear a sweat shirt with the inscription: If you met my family, then you would understand.  We bear our family of origin, even as it first bore us.  We may expand the range of our experience, but we never escape that first meeting with reality that our family is.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church moves to exalted language in describing the role and place of the family. The Christian family is a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit…The relationships with the family bring an affinity of feelings, affections, and interests, arising above all from the members’ respect for one another… The family is the original cell of social life.  It is the natural society in which husband and wife are called to give themselves in love and in the gift of life.

 We can wonder today if the family is seen as a natural society in our culture.  The catalogue of counter-signs is too well known.  The cultural dissolution of the centrality of the family makes it more important to underline and emphasize its place in natural life.  Human nature needs the direction and illumination of the authority of tradition, of the authority of the author of life when its natural instincts have been hijacked in the service of immediate gratification and pleasure.  Human nature may incline us, or it may be ignored and perverted.  It is pliable in the hands of the user. The efforts of commitment and consecration, of participating in the holiness of life can become incomprehensible and seen as obstacles to human satisfaction.  Do we know what it is we are looking for? Are we ready to be astounded at his understanding and his answers?

 The child Jesus in the midst of the Temple redirects our understanding and vision of what the vocation is that inspires our efforts to form human communities at all levels.  What is it to be in my Father’s house?  This is the house of creation, where God dwells among his people.  It is where He continues to speak to the hearts seeking communion and where he calls them children of God.  This is where humanity meets the holiness and Spirit of the Father.  A holiness which summons human nature to its full potential in living in communion, in the family of God. A holiness which is not satisfied with easy and facile answers about human nature.

The Holy Family of Nazareth is our family of origin.  Holy because it was moved by the Spirit of God, taught and led by his authority whether in anxiety or an inability to understand but trusting in the care and love which supported them.  This was the ground from which Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.