THE Family

Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina.
O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.

Yesterday, January 13, the First Sunday after Epiphany, was the celebration of The Holy Family.
As the attacks on the God-instituted sacrament of marriage and the destruction of the nuclear family gathers momentum, it was a perfect day to make note of the perfect family, Our Lord's human family.

In our weekly church bulletin was a "Reflection on the Holy Family' by Dom Gueranger, the compiler of a fifteen volume series on the liturgical year, a classic.  It follows here:

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    Guided by the Holy Ghost, and looking ahead as a good mother, Holy Church has judged it opportune to invite the generations of our times to consider today the mutual relations of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, to gather the lessons they teach and to profit from the help their example offers.

   The feast of the Holy Family rightly finds its place in the Christmas cycle of the liturgy, for what do we find in the mysteries of the Savior's birth and His revelation to the Gentile world but the presence of the Holy Family? Devotion to the Holy Family is born in Bethlehem and displayed at the Epiphany.

   The Holy Family is one of God's great mysteries. Already as an infant, Jesus voluntarily embraces the dependence His state demands: He willingly abandons Himself to Mary and Joseph, those two creatures whom His Father has appointed as His guardians. They in their turn adore this Child from whom they receive their authority and all the duties their sacred mission imposes on them.

   The Gospel in speaking of the life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph at Nazareth expresses the mystery this way: And He was subject to them. And His mother kept all these things in her heart, and Jesus grew in wisdom, age and grace before God and men (Luke 2:51-52). However brief this sacred text, it offers us the luminous vision of order and peace in the authority submission, dependence and mutual relations within the Holy Family. The holy home of Nazareth thus offers us the perfect model of the Christian home.

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Think about this. Our Lord, God incarnate, humbled Himself to His creatures. And who was head of the family? Not the Virgin Mary, free from original sin because she was chosen by God from eternity to be Mother of the Son, but the lesser, but also chosen member of the family, Joseph - husband and foster-father. It was Joseph who proclaimed the name of Jesus, who performed the fatherly duty of circumcision, who made decisions for the family, taught Our Lord a trade, protected Jesus and Mary, and was faithful to all the duties of husband and father until the day he died.  Joseph is the model for all husbands and fathers. It probably was Joseph who taught Our Lord to read, to recite the psalms, which the family undoubtedly prayed together.

Mary was the perfect wife and mother. Of course she looked after Joseph and Jesus, kept their household, did all the things a wife in those days did, and probably better than any of the rest of us!
But she was also a follower of her Son, knowing what was to come one day and accepting that her heart would be pierced by sorrow. She was, for the most part, as the title of a narrative poem I read once "A Woman Wrapped in Silence." Joseph died sometime before Jesus' public life began. Mary is mentioned, though, and it isn't difficult to believe that Jesus took His mother with him, to look after her, as he journeyed to choose his disciples and "be about (His) Father's business." She was, after all, with Him in Cana and quietly put Him on the path of His public life with her admonition to the servants at the wedding, "Do whatever He tells you." She was with Him in Jerusalem, during His passion and at the foot of the cross.  She stayed and was with the disciples, in the care of John, on Pentecost. He was a loving and caring Son. She was a faithful and long-suffering mother, knowing, more than most mothers the fate of her child.  I wonder sometimes, because it isn't mentioned in the Bible, how their reunion was after the Resurrection. Our Lord gave her to us as our spiritual mother, with the beloved disciple, John, representing the whole of mankind.

We have a model for our own families, imperfect as they are.  We should strive for mutual love, care, fidelity, perseverence, courage, justice, all the virtues displayed by the most perfect family.