Joseph Wood
Joseph Wood: We are members of earth families but also of another holy family, the one that requires our decision in faith for eternity.
We associate Advent with penance and with family. The Church’s waiting for the Lord is a time of penitential preparation for the great feast of Christmas.
For those whose families include difficult personalities, even in years without pandemics and elections, the notions of family and penance fit together easily, no effort required. Christ guides us in Matthew to leave “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children.” (Luke and some translators of Matthew include wives, which can reasonably also extend to husbands). This might seem At least a short break from argumentative (or worse) relatives might be a welcome start to that hundredfold return He promises. a welcome instruction that would indeed yield a hundredfold, at least in terms of holiday quiet.[RR1]
Others wish they had a family, any family, contentious or not, to share the seasons, joyful and penitential, of the liturgical year, and the ups and downs of life.
The Other Holy FamilyThe Church holds up the Holy Family at Bethlehem and Nazareth as our model for family life. The family is recognized as the most fundamental natural relationship is recognized as a reality from Aristotle to Scripture, Edmund Burke to Winston Churchill.
Those not given a gladsome family life may be painfully aware that the Holy Family was atypical. The mother and wife did not harbor the effects of original sin;, the stepfather and husband received convincing dreams that his betrothed was faithful both to him and to the great plan of redemption;, and their son was God.
That’s a model that fallen mortals find hard to follow, even in the best of cases. But the Church is right that our greatest earthly joy comes in seeking to live that model faithfully, in close families and communities, and that those who lack such love suffer greatly.
Click here to read the rest of Dr. Wood’s column . . .
Image: The Holy Family (of Francis I) by Raphael (and his workshop), 1518 [Louvre, Paris]
Source: The Catholic Thing. Fwd by Fr. Christ Myers
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