"We Are Challenged to Look at What It Means to Be Family."

Deacon Greg Kandra's homily for tomorrow's Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is frank yet beautifully hopeful:

I’m struck every year by the timing of this feast, celebrating the Holy Family.

It comes on the first Sunday following Christmas, when a lot of us have started to overdose on family.  In fact, after the parties and cooking and visiting and obligations and expectations and disappointments, some of us have had about as much “family” as we can take. Parents are wondering when the kids go back to school. A little togetherness goes a long way – for every generation.

But then comes this feast.  We are challenged to look at what it means to be family.  And our eyes turn toward the Christmas crèche, the nativity scene.

During this time of year, we tend to sentimentalize the Holy Family – they become figures of plaster and paper, not flesh and blood. But we forget: they weren’t that different from us.  They were holy, yes.  But they were also human.

The story of the Holy Family is the story of life not always turning out the way you expected.  It’s the story of a teenage mother, conceiving a child before she was married.  It’s the story of an anxious father, confronting scandal, planning on divorce. It’s the story of a family forced to become refugees, living as immigrants in the land that once held their ancestors as slaves.  As we heard in today’s gospel, it’s the story of a missing child, and days of anxious searching by his parents.

But there is even more.  Mark’s gospel describes an incident in which the relatives of Jesus were so alarmed, they thought he had lost his mind, and set out to seize him.  Not long after came his violent death – one his mother watched with helplessness and almost unimaginable sorrow.

This family was holy.  But it was also human.   We need these reminders.  Especially now.

The Church calendar shows us that the Christmas season is one of light – but also of shadow.  The day after Christmas, we celebrate the feast of the first martyr, St. Stephen.  Then a couple days later, we mark the feast of the Holy Innocents, the children slaughtered by Herod.  The joy of Christ’s birth is suddenly tempered by tragic reminders of what the Incarnation cost.  And the Holy Family shared in that.  I saw that, vividly, just after Christmas.

A parishioner posted on Facebook some images of our Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.  They were beautiful. But I was struck by something that hadn’t occurred to me. In the pictures, I noticed, the light shines brightly on this nativity scene—the Holy Family and baby Jesus.  But a few feet away, very close, it shines just as brightly on the crucifix, and the dying Christ.  In the stable, the mother Mary looks down at a life beginning; at the foot of the cross, she looks up at a life ending.  It is just a few steps here from the wood of the manger to the wood the cross.  But in so many ways, the two singular events are inseparable.   One led inevitably to the other. Joy and sorrow are almost side by side, linked by sacrifice, by faith, and by love.  It is the story of our salvation.  And it is the story of the Holy Family.

The juxtaposition of those two images in this church, the crèche and the crucifix, serves as a powerful lesson for this feast. We realize that when we speak of the Holy Family, we speak of a family that struggled and suffered, like so many of us.

But: this family also knew profound hope.

They trusted completely in God.

Do read the rest.  

Fractured and dysfunctional families seem today to be the norm sadly.  So very sadly.

Deacon Greg is in essence offering a roadmap out of the brokenness.

One not easily followed, to say the least, but a roadmap nevertheless.

Might God miraculously move us to take the journey, to follow that roadmap.

Steadfastly.  Stridently.

Faithfully.

Amen.