Holy Family:
This is actually important. (Duh!) Contemplation of the Holy Family was part of my re-evaluation in the middle of my life.
(Wish me luck, I’m going to try to keep this short, but I make no promises.)
(I) You don’t have to read John of Damascus to get that the Incarnation makes a kind of fissure through which holiness enters creation. These poor bodies of ours were created good. (Check my grammar!) I even like to imagine what an un-fallen tick would be like. Maybe they would hang from our ear lobes like jewels and their bite would heighten our perception of the loveliness all around.
But when the Holy spirit conceived our Lord in the womb of her who by that was shown to be the Panagia, Theotokos, the All Holy Mother of God, then human life, human sexuality, gestation, parturition, nursing, changing diapers, the whole deal was made holy.
Having read a very little in early 20th century books on child-rearing, what I sense is a certain shame about family. Children and domestic life are all very well, but all that belongs in the background, and one shouldn’t make too much of it.
Contrast this with what we learn from Scripture. Need I say more? Isn’t one aspect of the dark side of capitalism and industrialization precisely that it has tended to take fathers from their families and chain them to machines or to desks? Isn’t it generally conceded that a disastrous aspect of “The War on Poverty” was that it was far easier to get benefits if there wasn’t a husband around? Aren’t we still reeling from the social, and personal, consequences?
(II) The family, generally, in those cases, at least, where the wife is not the ever-virgin Mother of God, reflects the complementarity of sexuality. That in turn shows that our bodies are not, so to speak, freight or tare-weight but rather are part of what a human IS, and part of who we are as individuals. Even as the riotous hormones of my youth decrease, I am still stuck with being a guy. Yeah, I can change a diaper with the best of them and I appreciate the miraculous softness of a baby’s cheek. But I do so as a guy, a remember it and talk about it as a guy. I sin as a guy and I sacrifice as a guy.
I am particular, not general. So are you. My particularity and yours has been formed by the way we were made and in dynamic relationships — for me, with “old guys” (My father, teachers, coaches, trainers), guys like me (friends and teammates), and young guys (my little brother, kids I babysat for or taught swimming and sailing.) Not only can I not escape from the particularity of myself, it is only in a specific sense that I would even want to. Should I be given the grace to renounce myself and follow Christ, it will be a guy doing all that.
And mutatis mutandis for all of you as well.
As in point (I) above, we see around us a society struggling to affirm particularity only in trivial things but to deny it in general — under a notion, as the Pope says, that we are really only creatures of will and desire who can and ought to determine ourselves according to our whim, rather than discover ourselves according to the will of him who made us.
The Holy Family celebrates the sanctity of particularity: the way Mary shook out her hair when she awoke, Joseph groaning and stretching before he put on his sandals — these little things were made glorious because they were loved by God the Son of God.
He sets the solitary in families. So he invites us to holiness.
Today is the feast day of the Holy Family, but also every family's feast day, since the Holy Family is the patron and model of all Christian families. Today should be a huge family feast, since it is devoted entirely to the Holy Family as a model for the Christian family life. As Rev. Edward Sutfin states: