Two Ingredients for a Holy Family

Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
    Not long before Christmas, I continued a tradition from my Belgian side of the family to make Christmas cookies called lukken.  You start with a pound of melted butter (a great start to any recipe), then add 6 eggs, 2 1/2 cups of sugar, 2 1/4 cups of brown sugar, 8 cups of flour, and a shot of whiskey.  The dough sits overnight, and then is rolled into small balls, and the placed in a heated press, where they make thin cookies.  If you have ever enjoyed stroopwafel, lukken is basically the hard cookie without the caramel.
    To make the cookies I have to have the right ingredients.  But what are the ingredients that go into the recipe for a holy family?  Probably we think of basic human necessities: food, drink, clothing, a house, a job to provide for the family.  But there are two other ingredients that take a group of people, who could have their basic needs provided for, and make them a family, and those ingredients are love and obedience.
    Sadly, in my work as a Michigan State Police chaplain, I encounter families who have, in varying amounts, the basic human necessities, but lack the ingredient of love.  Children are treated as nuisances, or sometimes as ways to get more money from the State or federal government.  The parents, or often times a single parent, is more concerned about him or herself than about any other person.  Love changes a number of people living together into a family, even if sometimes that family is not related by blood, but related by adoption.

    Love helped make the family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph into a holy family.  And that love started with God.  Mary and Joseph both loved God, and so they were able to welcome God’s plan into their life, though it was quite different than a normal family’s life.  Mary conceived, while a virgin, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and Joseph and Mary never had marital relations with each other.  But they both accepted those realities as the will of God, and because they loved God, they were able to accept the incredible and unexpected.  And that love for God increased as they cared for and raised the Second Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ.  In feeding, clothing, cleaning, and protecting the Lord, Mary and Joseph loved God, even when that was difficult.  They loved each other, too, with a love strong enough to endure difficulties and struggles.  
    If we wish to have holy families, we have to have love: love for God, first and foremost; and love for each other.  When we connect to the love of God, the love of other family members, even when difficult, becomes more likely.  When we connect to the love of God we can endure things that, on our own, we could not.  And having the love of God first purifies our other loves so that they don’t become disordered.  A person can love a spouse too much (so that it bankrupts the family because a spouse wants certain material goods) or can love a child too much (like skipping Mass because a child has games on Sunday).  Of course, those are disordered loves that are not really love, but still, “love” can be the excuse for going beyond what God desires.  Love of the other is important, but should always be directed towards our highest goal: heaven.  If our decisions don’t help a person get to heaven, then we can’t really say we love that person.
    The second ingredient to a holy family is obedience.  Like love, obedience is first owed to God, then to other members of the family, with a certain hierarchy.  St. Joseph had to obey God when the angel told Joseph to flee to Egypt.  For a good Jew, Egypt was not the place to go.  Egypt was the place of slavery, and while there was a sizable Jewish community in Egypt, there were also many pagan gods and practices.  But St. Joseph obeyed God and kept Mary and Jesus safe from King Herod’s murderous decree.  We should always do our best, whether you’re the father, mother, or child, to obey God and follow His will.
    But there is also a certain obedience to each other.  The second reading seems to make the husbands the only ones who receive obedience.  But when we truly love one another, there is a way in which we obey each other, not just the husband or father, though there is a certain privilege of honor among fathers.  All the loving couples I know, if the wife said that something needed to happen, the husband would make sure it got done.  The husband obeys his wife, in that way, because of his love for her.  And parents, more often than not, obey their children, at least when they’re babies and crying because they’re hungry, or need to be cleaned, or simply want to be held.  Or I think about the many families who sacrifice great amounts of time and money to send their children to a Catholic school.  The child may not demand obedience in this way, but the parents obey what can be best for their child as far as their education.  And children should definitely obey their parents, as long as their parents are not asking them to sin.  But in the family, there is a certain obedience each member has to the others, which helps them be holy.
    The family is not meant to be only a group of people who live in the same place, or who share the same genetic material.  Those are often included in families, but do not complete the recipe for a holy family.  To be holy family means not only providing for basic necessities, but also pursuing love and obedience–first of God and then of each other–in order to be truly complete.  May the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph help each of us to grow in love and obedience, as we strive to be the families God has called us to be. 

Picking the Fruit of the Tree of the Cross

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Very few people I know like to get in trouble.  As children (and sometimes as adults) when we have done something that we shouldn’t, something for which we could get in trouble, we tend to run away and hide.  We don’t like to admit that we’ve done something wrong.  If there’s a broken anything in the family house, it was never one of the kids who did it; it was always done by someone named Idont No.  

We probably get this from our first parents, Adam and Eve.  Back in the Garden of Eden, they were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit, to disobey God’s command.  And they both did it.  But then what did they do?  They hid because they were ashamed.  They didn’t want to face God and what the consequences would be.  To admit that they were wrong was to admit that they were naked, totally seen, by God.

We like this first part of the Gospel today, John 3:16.  This passage may be one of the best know passages in all the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  We see it at sporting events, especially football games from people in the seats behind the goal posts.  And it is powerful, and needs to be spread more.  It is important for us always to carry this message with us, that Jesus came as the result of God’s love so that we do not have to perish, to die eternally, but so that we can live eternally.  If you read this passage, you’ll notice that it’s not in quotation marks.  This isn’t some that Jesus said (at least according to modern reading of this passage), but is rather John’s commentary on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.

But St. John also says something important later in this same passage: “the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”  St. John, having spent three years with Jesus in His public ministry, the same disciple who was beloved by Jesus and leaned on his chest during the Last Supper, was keenly aware that people prefer darkness to the light that Jesus brings.  And why?  Because we think in the darkness we can hide our sinfulness and get away with it.  We don’t want to get in trouble.  We don’t want God to see our imperfections.

But St. Paul reminds us in our second reading that response to sin is not to hide in the darkness, but to run to the mercy of God.  He writes to the Ephesians that God wants to, “show the immeasurable riches of his grace.”  God sent Jesus not to condemn us, but to forgive us.  But to be forgiven, we have to come into the light.  We have to come and admit our sins which cause spiritual death so that God, who is rich in mercy, can forgive us and raise us to new life.  God’s mercy and forgiveness are the fruit of the tree of the cross, the fruit that God wants us to pick regularly and consume.  And God encourages us and pushes us there.  But only we can pick that fruit of mercy, just as only we can pick the fruit of disobedience like our first parents.  

We shouldn’t want to sin and to do bad things.  But when we do, God encourages us to come running to Him, rather than running away from Him.  God wants us to come to the light, rather than to hide in the darkness.  And the funny thing is that God already knows what is in the darkness.  He knows the ways that we have distanced ourselves from Him.  But when we bring it into the light we find not condemnation but mercy.  We are only really in trouble if we continue to prefer the darkness to the light and hide from God.  Because when we hide from God we show that we do not really believe in Him and His power to forgive.  And, while St. John says clearly that, “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,” he also says in the same sentence, “but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.”  

We can all help to promote people coming to the light, especially in our families.  Yes, there will be negative consequences for making bad choices.  That is the nature of bad choices: there are bad things that follow.  But what a beautiful thing it is when a child or a spouse comes forward to admit that he or she has done wrong.  In that moment, even though there is often hurt from the wrong done, especially if it’s wrong done to a person, there is also, or should also be, joy in having the wrong come into the light.  To put it concretely, you may still punish your child for stealing $20 to help them to understand that stealing is wrong.  But at the same time there should be some mitigation for that child coming forward in honesty to admit the wrong he or she has done, because that child had the courage to come into the light so that he or she could receive mercy.  When we come into the light and reveal our sins to God (who knows them already), He is merciful to us.  Hopefully we can also live that way and show God’s love by being merciful when a wrong is brought into the light to us.