Dec. 30, 2012: Holy Family
After all my Christmas masses, I went to Dallas to be with my parents and my sister’s family also came down from Baltimore. We were treated to a rare White Christmas for Dallas! It was too cold to go out, so my 7 yr. old niece, 5 yr. old and 2 yr. old nephews and I played inside all day long. At one point we played the classic board game, “the Game of Life,” which simulates a person's travels through his or her life, from college to retirement, with jobs, marriage, and possible children along the way. The 2 yr. old nephew spun the wheel for me. In less than an hour, I was working as a police officer, fell in love and married, got twin babies, went to night school to become a doctor, got a baby boy, and then retired with over $2 million dollars in retirement. There were some challenges along the way: such as losing a job, paying for college tuition, and medical bills, but these challenges didn’t cause me suffering, like in real life. These were simply deducted out of my net-worth. Wouldn’t we want our real life to be free from suffering and making difficult choices like in the board game?
Certainly, no parent wanted to face what happened to all those children in Newtown, Connecticut. My brother-in-law said the tragic news hit home particularly hard for him; he even cried when he heard the news. He is a father of three little children with one in elementary and one in kindergarten. He empathized with the parents grieving their loss. Then he did something unusual; he took the next day off from work. In the morning, he ate breakfast with his children, took them to school, then went back to school and ate lunch with them, played with them when they came back from school, and ate dinner with them. He wanted to slow down his life for a day, to cherish the family that God had given him.
The family of Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, also faced day to day joys, challenges, and sufferings of being a family. Just look at what transpired on Christmas. Mary, 9-month pregnant rides 75 miles on the back of a donkey over bumpy, dusty roads, and ends up having her baby in a stable full of dirty, smelly animals. Quickly after birth, the family has to pick up and flee for their lives, seeking asylum in a foreign land. A few years later, the now adolescent son goes missing for several days, and there ensues a conversation characterized by no little emotion. Joseph is a saint, Mary is without sin, Jesus is God incarnate, yet there are still challenges, difficulties, tense moments, and opportunities for misunderstanding. Sounds like a real family. Yet, we call them the Holy Family. So it is possible for even us, whose household may not be perfect, may even be broken, to imitate the Holy Family.
There seems to be three virtues that form the pillars of a holy family as our Second Reading suggests: patience, kindness, and forgiveness. The driving force of a holy family is love. Love will inspire you to become a patient person. When you choose to be patient, you respond in a positive way to a negative situation. You are slow to anger. You choose to have a long fuse instead of a quick temper. Rather than being restless and demanding, love helps you settle down and begin extending mercy to those around you. Patience brings an internal calm during an external storm. Patience helps you give your spouse or children permission to be human. It understands that everyone fails. When a mistake is made, it chooses to give them more time than they deserve to correct it.
Kindness is love in action. If patience is how love reacts in order to minimize a negative circumstance, kindness is how love acts to maximize a positive circumstance. Patience avoids a problem; kindness creates a blessing. Kindness means that you are gentle with your family. You are never being unnecessarily harsh. Kindness also means that you are helpful; meeting the needs of the moment. Instead of being obstinate, reluctant, or stubborn, you cooperate and stay flexible. Kindness thinks ahead, then takes the first step. It doesn't sit around waiting to be prompted.
The toughest virtue of the three is forgiveness. Rupture or hurt is inevitable in the family; sometimes this rupture or hurt lasts many years. Love motivates a family member to deliberately take risk in forgiving or seeking forgiveness from another in order to mend and to heal. What's at stake is not about winning or losing. It's about freedom and letting go. For the one who is struggling to forgive, you release your anger and the responsibility for judging the person to the Lord. For the one who is seeking forgiveness, you humble yourself that God who is infinitely patient and kind with you is asking you to humble yourself and admit that you have hurt another. A holy family is not created by people who never hurt each other, but only by people who choose to keep no record of wrongs. Don't we pray multiple times a day the following line: "Forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive those who tresspass against us"?
The board game of "Life" is measured by net-worth at the end of the game. But the real Life is measured by holiness. How does your family measure in patience, kindness, and forgiveness?
