Readings: https://bible.usscb.org/bible/readings/122924.cfm
We live with the burden and the wonder of maintaining and nurturing relationships in families while we live with all the demands of living in this world [work, school, etc.]. With the demands of family life, we sometimes miss the Joy and Hope that Jesus offers us in our families.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus responds to His Mother, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” My wife and I are blessed with five children [four sons and one daughter plus ten grandchildren]. One night one of our sons a teenage at the time asked me to borrow the car, “I asked where are you going?”
He said, “Dad you’re on a need-to-know basis and you don’t need to know.”
“I responded if I don’t know you don’t need the car.”
Bill Keane created The Family Circus cartoon strip believed “… that the family that loves and respects each other is the happiest place in the world.”
Each year we celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Today we do well to take some time to celebrate Family Day and thank the Holy Family for their example.
In our first reading from Sirach we learned that prayer is important to family life and that we can honor God by honoring our parents. I appreciate now more than ever this instruction found in the Book of Sirach “… take care of your father when he is old….”
According to the Jewish Talmud, at the end of our lives when we find ourselves at heaven’s door, whether we are admitted or not depends on our answers to six questions.
God will ask us:
Did you make time to learn?
Did you take care of loved ones?
Did you deal honestly with others?
Did you maintain hope?
Did you partake of all the legitimate pleasures that came your way?
Were you true to yourself?
If you live so as to answer “yes” to these questions in this life, you need not fret about the next.
[Life’s Exit Interview Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Spirituality & Health, January-February 2017; Connections 2024.]
I think God might, also, ask how did you live in your Family Life: loving your parents, your siblings, most importantly God? God, the Word made Flesh, entered history in a Family to teach us the fundamental and essential place of Family as the basis of God’s plan.
Family life is sometimes a struggle, sometimes a surprise, sometimes a joy, sometimes a burden and many times a place of warmth and acceptance despite what is happening in the world. The Holy Family faced difficulties; so, did Adam and Eve, Moses and his family, Noah, and his family.
Families today face bewildering challenges from abortion, euthanasia, attempts to remove the rights of parents over their children, gender identity issues and other policies that promote the breakdown of families.
Family life has been and will continue to be under attack.
So, what can we do?
1. Pray
2. Be nourished by the Sacraments, particularly The Eucharist.
3. Attend Mass faithfully and participate fully.
4. For those with adult children who have strayed from the Faith; every second Tuesday of the month St. Teresa’s in Hellertown hosts St. Monica’s Holy Hour for pray.
In 2015 Pope Francis preached in Philadelphia at the Meeting of Families. He offered insights and advice, then, that is pertinent for us today. “In families, we argue; in families, sometimes the plates fly; in families the children give us headaches. And I’m not even going to mention the mother-in-law. But in families, there is always, always the cross. Always. But, in families as well, after the cross, there is the resurrection…. The family is, forgive the term I’ll use, it is a factory of hope, of hope of life & of resurrection. God was the one who opened this path.”
For minutes reflect on how you can help strengthen family life in your family, in our Church and in our nation.
May God Be Praised.
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