Holy, Not Easy-Living, Families

 Feast of the Holy Family
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The Book of Job is one of the great books of the Old Testament.  The main message of the book is that one can do everything right and still have bad things happen.  It was the prevailing wisdom that if good things happened, God was blessing you, and if bad things were happening to you, God was punishing you for something you did wrong.  
    I think that we can often fall into that same mindset: if something good happens to me, then I must have done something good, or God is rewarding me.  If something bad happens to me, then I must have done something bad, or God is punishing me.  This can certainly creep in to our understanding of family life.
    It can start with even searching for a good spouse: if I cannot find someone to love, someone with whom to spend my life, then I must be doing something wrong.  If I fall in love and the other person reciprocates, then I must have done something right.  Honestly, sometimes finding the right person takes time, and God can allow you to go through lesser relationships in order to learn more about yourself, or about the qualities that you would want in a spouse.  The key, of course, is to be willing to commit your entire life (better and worse, sickness and health, prosperity and poverty) to a person whom you will help to get to heaven.  And some couples who look perfect together sometimes are just infatuated, which they hopefully find out before the enter into the life-long commitment of marriage.
    It can continue with trying to have children.  Over the past two years, I have become more aware and more sensitive to the realities of miscarriages.  Whether it’s my best friend and his wife, family friends, and/or parishioners, I have come to understand better the deep pain and heartache that come from a miscarriage.  I have spoken with mothers who simply want to have a child, but it doesn’t seem to happen; mothers who love their unborn baby, but whose baby, nevertheless, dies in the womb; mothers who try to avoid all the things that could lead to a miscarriage but who still have to go through that agony.  How easy it can be to ask the question, “Why is God punishing me?  What have I done wrong?”  In the midst of that pain and heartache, we know that God would never kill a child to prove a point, or to get back at a parent.  Why some miscarriages happen or why God would allow it can remain a mystery.  But we know that God walks through that valley of the shadow of death with parents, and never leaves them without His consoling love.  
    Or, it can happen when the children are grown and are making their own decisions.  Despite the best parenting, children can make bad decisions and choices.  It is so easy for parents to take those decisions and choices personally, and presume that the bad choices are because of bad parenting.  But even in the best of circumstances, people can sin and can do things that they shouldn’t.  Look at St. Peter: he was one of our Lord’s closest friends, the leader of the apostolic college, and had great zeal for protecting the Lord.  And he still denied that he even knew the Savior during His Passion.  Would we accuse Christ of skipping over something that He should have taught Peter?  Or not loving Peter enough?  Of course not!  Children, especially adult children, have free will.  We can give them every good thing, and they can still walk away from those good things.  I think especially of the uncountable number of Catholics who have walked away from their Catholic faith, even though their parents did their best to give them a good foundation in the faith.  Or consider an adult child who, while being raised to say no to drugs and underage drinking, makes a choice to try a controlled substance or decides to drive drunk and ends us dying.  Free will is meant for us to say “yes” to Godly things, but it can also be misused to say yes to death and no to the life God offers.  
    So what do we do as families?  Do we give up?  Do we let our lives be governed by fate or the pagan idea of karma?  No.  We give our families the best chance of success by being strong in our faith in Christ.  We hold fast to the Church, trusting that, if we do our best, then hopefully others’ free will can be used for God’s purposes.
    If you’re seeking a spouse, we pray, like Tobiah and Sarah, to find the spouse that God wants for you so that you can come together, not out of lust, but out of doing God’s will.  If you’re seeking a spouse and not having much success, you might recognize that God wants you to grow in your trust of Him and His plan, rather than forcing things with your own plan.  You trust that God will reveal, at the right time, a person who can help you grow in holiness as a married person, if that is God’s plan for your life.
    If you’re married and trying to have children, by all means, use the knowledge of the human body that God has given to doctors and scientists.  But if your attempts at conception are not fruitful, or if you have to mourn the loss of your child who did not survive outside of the womb, know that the love that you have for your child is not wasted.  God is love, and so the love that the child in your womb received was a participation in God, and God will help you, either to conceive a child, or God may call you to adopt and share that love with a child whose parents could not support that child that they conceived.  Don’t give in to the temptation to play God by in vitro fertilization or surrogacy, which are both gravely contrary to God’s plan for human conception, but seek God’s will and God’s plan for sharing the love you have for a child.
    And if, after having children, they wander away from a virtuous life, whether the human virtues or the theological virtues, don’t give up praying for your children.  Don’t blame yourself, either.  Free will allows us to love, but when used poorly it can be very painful.  Still, it is better that we can love than not to be free.  Do your best to draw your children back to a virtuous life if they have strayed, and lead by an example of joyful and loving obedience to the truth.  Use prudence on when to protect adult children and when to let them experience the consequences of their actions.  But love them always, even if that love has to be from afar.  

    As we celebrate the Holy Family, it can be easy to think that if we simply do the right things, life will be easy and without burdens.  But look at the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: Joseph died before Christ was 30 years old, making Mary a widow; Mary had to allow her son to perform His ministry of preaching, which led to His death on a cross; our Lord did everything right, and yet was rejected by His People, and even abandoned by most of His closest friends.  If the Holy Family had struggles, even though two out of the three of them never sinned, then we, who are sinners, will also have trials and tribulations.  But, like the Holy Family, bring them to our loving Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, world without end.  Amen. 

The Old Rugged Cross

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Sometimes, in writing a homily, an idea just pops into your head by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and He makes a theme known.  As I read over the readings for today on this past Monday, in preparation for writing the homily, there were so many things that I could preach on: from the first reading I saw the theme of the wisdom of God as opposed to the wisdom of the world; from the second reading I saw the theme of the fraternity of Christianity which excludes no one, not even, from St. Paul’s times, slaves who were considered property; from the Gospel I saw them theme of the cost of discipleship and whether one is strong enough to follow Jesus.  So I was wondering in which direction the Holy Spirit wanted me to go.

Then, on Wednesday, as I was driving in my car, I was listening to my iTunes, and I just felt drawn to listen to songs from an album called “How Great Thou Art: Gospel Favorites Live from the Grand Ole Opry.”  And I was driving a song came on which focused my attention for this week.  And that song was “The Old Rugged Cross.”  To me it became clear that the Holy Spirit wanted me to preach about the cross.

We don’t often think of the cross as beautiful.  It was the worst punishment that the Romans had devised to torture prisoners and foreigners.  It was so harsh that it was only applied to those who were not citizens of Rome.  And yet, Jesus says today, “‘Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.’”  Whoever does not carry his own ignominious symbol of defeat, cannot be a follower of Jesus.  That’s not the sort of thing you do to gain a large following.  No one wants to daydream about hanging, naked as the day you were born, in front of soldiers who are jeering at you, while your arms and legs are attached to the cross by nails.  No one wants to aim for being suspended on a rough piece of wood, the weight of your own body causing your lungs to slowly fill with fluid until you can no longer even breath.  And yet, as Christians, that is what we are called to do.

In the song, “The Old Rugged Cross,” the second half of the refrain goes, “I will cling to the old rugged cross and exchange it someday for a crown.”  It so easy to try to forget the cross part, and go straight for the crown.  Who doesn’t want to share in glory?!?  Who doesn’t want the reward?!?  And yet, the only way to do that is through the old, rugged cross.  St. Rose of Lima, the first canonized saint of the Americas, whose memorial we celebrated on 23 August adeptly related an experience of the Lord, who said to her, “‘Let all men know that grace comes after tribulation.  Let them know that without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace…This is the only true stairway to paradise, and without the cross they can find no road to climb to heaven.’”  If we wish to go to heaven, then we must not only know the cross, but embrace and cling to it.  It may seem harsh, but it was the only way that our Master showed us, who only gained the resurrection after his crucifixion.

It’s also very easy to give the cross lip service.  We’ve become so used to it that we think we can utter beautiful platitudes about carrying our cross.  But when the cross comes into our lives, do we cling to it, embrace it?  Some crosses are big.  I think of the families in our parish who have miscarried, or who have lost a child shortly after birth.  What a cross.  Those families have certainly experienced the dying of Jesus in their lives, and, as much as they have united it to Jesus, will also experience the resurrection of Jesus.  Some crosses are small.  I think of those who talk about co-workers who get on their nerves; family members who always seem to be in trouble or looking for help; drivers who cut you off; the plans that fell through; the professor with whom you don’t see eye to eye; and the list goes on.  Those are also crosses, and more often than not I don’t think we embrace them.  We tend not to thank God for annoying co-workers, bad drivers, ruined plans.  And yet, that is the cross the Lord is presenting to us to carry.  That is what we should embrace.  St. Thérèse of Lisieux is a perfect example of this.  There were a few sisters in her convent who annoyed her to no end (I’m sure Sr. Dorothy and Sr. Liz have never experienced this): one with the sounds she made during prayer; another with her attitude.  What did she do?  She willed to love them and smile to them.  There was food that was prepared that she could not stand, but she smiled every time it was placed in front of her, because she saw in it the cross that the Lord had given her.  And, she smiled so much at that cross, that while she was dying with Tuberculosis, the sisters made some especially for her, thinking that it was her favorite!

To embrace the cross seems foolish.  St. Paul himself says, “but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.”  Isn’t that what our first reading is all about: the wisdom of God? God gave us His counsel, His wisdom, in Jesus, who teaches us to take up our cross and follow Him, so that we who share in Jesus’ suffering and death might also share in His resurrection.  May our words and our very lives be the second half of that refrain from “The Old Rugged Cross”: “I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it someday for a crown.”