Feast of the Holy Family (28.12.14)
The Crucible That Is The Family
The Feast of the Holy Family, commemorating the home life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is celebrated on the Sunday within the octave of Christmas. This year it is December 28th.
A family’s home life can be compared to life in a crucible. The word ‘crucible’ identifies a non-porous container in which metals or other substances are safely heated to a very high temperature. Crucibles made from materials able to withstand extreme temperatures have been around since the fifth/sixth century BC.
The word is also used to identify a safe place or condition enabling people to face difficulties with a measure of security, where they can heal, grow and develop.
A crucible does not interact with the contents within it nor does it contaminate them, though the contents themselves may interact and change in the process of being heated. In essence, a crucible protects what is within it from incineration and outside contamination.
A family home has crucible like aspects. Within it, people related by marriage and/or blood, or friendship, or commerce such as room-letting, share a defined space. There is, often, friction that can generate intense ‘heat’. In these testing circumstances personalities are both formed and also reformed, though frequently not without pain.
In the crucible of family life are many competing elements. There are claims on affection, finance, food, security, personal possessions, personal space, anger, forgiveness, non-forgiveness and so much more. Each family will have its own ethos. In some households music dominates, in others sport, in others academic life and so forth. What, for you, principally identifies the home in which you grew up? Is your remembrance a source of joy or regret or a mixture of both? Are your memories consciously reflected in your adult conversations or boxed up and packed away in an emotional attic?
At our Christ-likening, our Baptism, we are gifted with the Holy Spirit. The Baptised individual determines for her/himself the Spirit’s effective presence. The level of determination is contemporaneous with the individual’s emergence as an adult of faith.
The Holy Spirit’s interaction with us is always dependent upon our free choice to collaborate. In collaboration, the Spirit can hold us together in our testing moments while allowing us freedom to make profound changes affecting not only our life but also the lives of others.
Within the single crucible of a family’s life are mini semi-porous crucibles, as it were, wherein are the individuals belonging to the extended family unit. When we choose to allow ourselves to be nurtured within the family crucible by the Holy Spirit, we are protected from contamination by Satan.
The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph was, in one sense, no exception but, in another, was uniquely exceptional. It was a crucible of family life wherein God-made-Man was born and raised, wherein a sinless, Immaculate, Mother exuded ‘a love beyond all telling’ and where a selflessly loving husband and foster-father, known to us as Joseph, helped shape and protect his and our salvation.
The Holy Family would not have been physically fragile. The rigors of life under a cruel occupation forged a necessary sturdiness. Think of the hazardous, demanding journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem with Mary in an advanced stage of pregnancy. What stamina-sapping was experienced by the couple’s urgent search for any sort of shelter in an overcrowded Bethlehem? Then there was the heart-stopping prediction of Simeon and Anna in the Temple when Mary and Joseph took the eight-day-old infant to present him to the Lord. Scripture reveals only a few highlights, including the visit of the Magi and the middle-of-the-night flight into Egypt.
But the real strength of The Holy Family was invisible to the human eye. It was God the Holy Spirit, hypostically united with Jesus, dwelling within and then with the “full of grace” Mary and her holy husband, Joseph. The Holy Spirit was that family’s infinite resource. The Holy Spirit longs to fulfill this role for families that share faith in Jesus as the Son of God made Man.
A freely chosen, lived and valued Sacrament of Matrimony is like a crucible of grace that can hold a family together in our perilously unpredictable exile existence. In fact, each of the Seven Sacraments is a further crucible enabling our pilgrimage from conception to birth and on, through the stages of life, to death and resurrection.
The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is the subject of many famous paintings and sculptures. While their beauty is universally agreed, these representations do not reveal the spiritual ruggedness of the Holy Family. Is our 21st century, where ‘the family’ is under such attack, in need of a contemporary representation of family spiritual robustness?
At the core of a wedding needs to be be the personal holiness each brings to the other, the personal holiness that underpins the words of the Promises exchanged.
If invited to do so by both bride and groom, the Holy Spirit will guide them not only to interiorize sufficiently the in-depth meaning of the promises they exchange but also to be assured of his enabling presence in their daily struggle to bring those promises to fulfillment. This is the purpose of a guided preparation for couples intending to celebrate the Sacrament of Matrimony.
The quality of the love, support and forgiveness family members desire to freely share with one another is a reflection of their individual holiness, their at-oneness-with-God, because such unselfish love has only one source.
‘Holy Family’ Sunday calls us to pray for the personal holiness of all family members. This is true for us here in the UK where disintegrating family life punishes so many, particularly the young.
The prayer from the Mass for Our Lady of Walsingham contains these words: “ … in the mystery of the Incarnation the Blessed and ever Virgin Mary conceived your Son in her heart before she conceived him in the womb, so may we, your pilgrim people, welcome him into our hearts ..”
Amen.