Feast of Holy Family - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

With all the hype surrounding Christmas, I gather it can be, for a lot of people, a time of stress. I must have been lucky as a kid. We didn’t have a great lot of rellies, and the adults got on OK together. Some I found a bit boring … and I was a bit scared of one of my cousins. But no great tensions.  

The Gospels, generally, don’t give families a good press – natural families, that is. Even with regard to Jesus’ extended natural family, the record is not really crash hot. They tell how, at one stage, his mother and his brothers worried whether he had gone mad; and his brothers, as they were called, didn’t believe in him – at least before he died.

So there’s family – and there’s family! Unfortunately, families can be set-ups where children learn how to criticise, how to hate, how to never forgive, how to keep the score, how to be dishonest, to pretend there’s no elephant in the room, how to communicate without really communicating – where boys, particularly, but also girls, grow up without ever having been healthily fathered, or mothered; or where girls have been unfairly crushed by unquestioned, often unrecognised, patriarchal attitudes and behaviours, where domestic violence and sexual abuse go on, and nothing gets said.

I have read, and am inclined to believe, that it was the grandmothers in Northern Ireland who held the memories, brooded over for decades, that fanned the flames of sectarian distrust and hatred. Even worse in Serbia and Albania where the siege of Srebreniza was, apparently, pay-back for a humiliating defeat suffered six centuries beforehand – and never forgotten.

That’s not the whole story, of course, and for most of us, please God, our experience has been wonderfully different because there exists, also, the Christian family. The Christian family is not simply a culturally conditioned construct, but a constant work in progress. It is never a given, simply there, static, unquestioned reality. 

It’s a product of deliberate decisions, of constant effort, and of hard work – where everyone, particularly mum and dad, consciously practise love, forgiveness, honesty, openness and welcome. If we think that’s easy, or comes naturally, we haven’t tried it.

The good news is that it’s worth the effort … and God is on our side. And, if we’ve made mistakes, and are living with their consequences, forgiveness is possible, as is self-acceptance, and the ingenuity to make the best of whatever’s real.

Christian family is always a work in progress, and comes in lots of shapes and sizes, and often sporting a few band-aids.