Dear Friends
Feast of the Holy Family--December 29

This week we’re putting the proverbial cart before the horse: Matthew tells us that the Magi had already departed from their visit to the Christ child, even though we don’t celebrate their arrival in Bethlehem until next week, the Feast of the Epiphany. You really can’t leave a place before you get there, right? But now that we’re in the latter half of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany cycle, we’re not dealing with a day-by-day account of the activities of the Holy Family. In fact, today, the Sunday between Christmas and the actual Feast of the Epiphany focuses our attention on the family itself. Commonly called, Holy Family Sunday, it marks the very real fact that Jesus grew up “in a family.” I’ve put those words in quotes for a reason. There is no actual word family in the ancient languages of the Bible--Hebrew or Greek. There are specific words for “household” “tribe” or “kin” but no specific word that would designate what we’ve come to designate today as family–mom, dad, and the 2.2 children (of statistical fame).

When you consider it, the entire idea of a family is perhaps just as fluid today as it was in the time of Jesus. When Jesus lived, a typical family consisted of one’s biological parents along with extended blood relatives (on the male side), cousins (by our modern biological definition), and slaves and servants (at least for the elite in the first century Roman world).

I’m so old that I grew up watching Leave it to Beaver, a situational coming-of-age comedy where Ward Cleaver was a white-collar professional who came home from the office every day greeted by his wife June, an archetypal 1950’s homemaker—always dressed appropriately with a simple pearl necklace even while baking cookies. Wally was the teenage older brother of our hero, the Beave (whose real name was Theodore). The biggest challenge in their TV family life was Wally’s best friend, the hooligan Eddie Haskel. Wally’s greatest transgression was to taunt the Beave to use such phrases as “gosh-darn-it.” The comedy ended each week with Beaver having learned a valuable lesson. Such an idyllic TV “family” simply did not exist in America in the 20 ^th or now the 21 ^st century.

Today we have a wide variety of definitions of what constitutes a family. There is the nuclear family, the single-parent family, the blended family, the extended family, the no-children family, and yes even the grandparent family (4.5 million American children are being raised by 2.4 million grandparents). Whatever way YOU define family, the root of such a configuration is ultimately whom do we love, and by whom are we loved in the most intimate of ways? And, when you think about it, isn’t that the very root of what constitutes our belief in God, most especially in this Advent-Christmas-Epiphany season? We are celebrating the very fact that (to quote John 3:16), “God so loved the world, he sent his only Son.” God didn’t have to do that, now did he? God was perfectly fine being God. But he really did like human beings. (Remember, he didn’t have to get involved in Abraham’s dysfunctional family life way back when, but he did). And God so loved the world that he did send his Son–who became one like us. And if God was really going to be one like us–well, you guessed it–that means he had to be born, grow up in, and be loved by his own family (again, however you want to define this concept) and then, in turn, love others--which he did by dying on cross for you and me.

This is why we’re consecrating our families this weekend to the Holy Family. No, we’re not praying that everyone acts like the Cleaver family (of happy illusory TV fame). And no, the Church isn’t telling you how to be a family. But we are praying first, that you are loved by someone else, and secondly that you in turn share that love with at least one or (more hopefully) many others. I realize that this can be difficult in our highly mobile digitalized culture where commitments are challenging, if not downright difficult for many of us. But today we pray that you have (or will find) love. Maybe it won’t be the biologically-based traditional connection, but there is someone (or many someones) who are ready to love you. They are your family. And it’s never too late to share that love with someone (or again, many someones) to bring a new family into existence. Let us then consecrate (which means “bless”) those who love us, and those whom in turn we love now or will begin to love in the future.