Feast of the Holy Family 10.1.10
This feast teaches us a lot about the way that God thinks and the way He works in our world.
Once we get used to the idea that God Himself would come down from Heaven and take on human nature we can then consider how He would go about doing that.
The normal way of doing things from our worldly way of thinking, would be to get things moving as quickly as possible and sort out the biggest trouble areas.
If I were coming as Saviour of the world I would arrive as quickly as possible and get straight to work.
Look at what Our Lord does. He comes as a baby and even that depends on finding the right woman to be His mother. He has to get her consent and then wait for nine months to be born, and then have to flee to another country to avoid being killed. This all seems very indirect.
And then when back in safety He waits till He is thirty years old before embarking on any public disclosure of who He is and what He has come to do!
But Our Lord’s apparent slowness in rescuing us could not be for any reason of indifference on His part. There must be something deeper at issue.
He has come to save us and the long preparation is to instil in us the necessary virtues and attitudes to how one is to be saved.
He wants to teach us how to be kind, forgiving, generous, patient and all the other virtues associated with everyday life (and especially everyday family life).
If we can learn those things then we are nine tenths of the way to being saved. If we do not learn them then no amount of miracles or sermons will save us anyway.
By way of teaching us this long process of getting ourselves in order He presents us with Himself, Mary, and Joseph making up the Holy Family. A very holy household, not a sin from one year to the next!
Out of the reach of most households? Not so far out as we might think.
There are many spheres of human talent. There are people who are good at many different things. The people who are the very best at certain things exhibit their talent and the rest of us pay money to go and see them.
So we might go to a concert to see someone playing the piano and he is a master at it and one of the best in the world. Or we might go to see the very best football or cricket teams.
I might wish I could do that as well as they can, but I know that I could never be that good. I just don’t have the talent, and in any case I would not have the time to practise, and furthermore it is not God’s will for me to do that anyway.
In those cases, true, I could never play the piano like that or kick goals like that... but I CAN learn to be kind gentle, forgiving etc, the attainable stuff of family life.
Many things are beyond our grasp but not these things, the things of everyday life. And they are definitely and certainly God’s will for every single person.
We can learn to be kind, forgive injuries, put the other person first... these things are within our reach, with time and application. And they cannot be dismissed as belonging only to saints.
They are achievable, and also essential. Especially are they important in the family setting where so much of our lives are spent.
By giving so much attention to family life Our Lord is signalling that this is a high priority area for us. Maybe we cannot be as holy as the Holy Family but we can at least grow in holiness, becoming more like them.
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