Feast of the Holy Family

Dear Friend,

In conversations and at penance services around the area during Advent, I meet mothers, fathers, sons and daughters facing challenges of all sorts - economic, social, physical, spiritual. In some cases, relentless enforcement of immigration laws has forced painful decisions and traumatic displacement. That people show up to community gatherings, including to celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation, in all these circumstances is, in my view, among many other things, a testimony of living faith and hope.   

On the feast of the Holy Family celebrated yearly on the Sunday after Christmas, Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus are presented to us as an image of the Gospel of hope that bears close prayer and examination. In his probing and at times very densely written book on hope, the Jesuit William F. Lynch points to the danger of misunderstanding hope as simply an absolutely “deep inward resource, which has the strength to save us once we succeed in tapping it.” He writes that hope is related to help in such a way that you cannot talk about one without the other. Too often, he writes, we associate a sense of shame with the need for help. Going further, he writes about psychological research on the basic need for food. The importance of the object itself is clear, but as important and often not so clear is the “total human situation, the how given, and by whom given.”

Parents “honored” by their children’s care, our “bearing with one another” in forgiveness, Mary’s acceptance of Joseph’s help (and her own going out to Elizabeth during her own pregnancy) - sacred scripture affirms and dramatizes Lynch’s insight that all real “life” does not simply come from “within.”  The Holy Family might teach us that our need for help is “identical with our human nature.” It is good and holy!

Gratefully,

Father Dan