Holy Family 10.1.21 Mutual love
In Heaven there are no quarrels; no raised voices; no angry tones; no jealousy.
This is where we are meant to be, and in the meantime how we are supposed to interact with each other.
On earth we try to make things as much like Heaven as they can be, to establish peace and harmony between people in whatever form of community they live; also in the process, to establish an inner peace of soul whereby we are being made ready for our own dwelling in Heaven.
Today we honour the Holy Family, a model of family life, and of any attempt by people to live in community, be it a family, a parish, a city, a nation, the whole world.
We might protest that the Holy Family was too holy for us to imitate, that we cannot be expected to live as they did. Maybe we will never be that good but we can always improve on wherever we are now.
We draw both inspiration and strength from the Holy Family.
God has established family life as a way of teaching us that there are others besides ourselves.
We are tempted to be selfish and individualistic in our approach to life.
We can develop our individual identity, and we should do that; but not in such as way as to see others as a burden, or to stifle their individual progress.
We see from the life of Christ that God wants humans to be able to give to each other. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (Jn 15,13); Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant (Mt 20,26); Love one another as I have loved you (Jn 13,34).
This learning to love others is a major part of our own salvation. If we do not love then we get this… Go far from Me, for I was hungry and you gave me no food (Mt 25,41-42)
We need the communal element to finish the individual element.
We are judged as individuals, but our relationship to the whole Body is a crucial indicator of what sort of individuals we have become.
Families can help even when not functioning well. Even if others fail to play their role and let us down we can still learn from that, becoming stronger in the process.
We are moulded like gold in the furnace (Proverbs 17,3)
Our Lord prayed that we all be one (Jn 17,21). This can be taken to mean one faith, one religion, but also one in the more general sense of getting along together, no raised voice, jealousy etc.
We must all see ourselves as part of the living Body of Christ, the Church. This requires a lot of give and take as there are so many points of view involved.
A little humility, a little trust, and we can each move closer to Christ, to the heart of the Holy Family, the heart of the Church. Gathered in faith and charity we cannot fail to make progress. One faith, one Body, one hope of eternal life.
Heaven will be free of all discord, something we might find hard to imagine, yet it must be so.
God is a family of Persons Himself, and the unity between those Persons is of an intensity we cannot imagine - yet somehow we are part of it.
May the fire of divine charity burn away all that is false in each of us, and bring us, individually and communally, into that heavenly paradise.
No comments:
Post a Comment