Whatever age we are, the feast of the Holy Family provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the role of family in our lives. For most of us no other group of people shaped us more than the family in which we grew up.
We tend to idealize Jesus, Mary and Joseph as the perfect family, but as today’s gospel reveals, their lives were filled with stress and strains, joys and sorrows, along with misunderstandings and the need for reconciliation. Yes, they had their share of heartfelt human experiences.
Having never been awakened by a crying baby in the middle of the night, I won’t claim to be an expert on family life, but like the sportswriter who has never played football, I can offer some worthwhile insights.
Blood ties alone do not create a family. As a pastor, I have unfortunately encountered many examples of relatives who refuse to communicate with one another. What transforms a group of people into a family is love. That is why John urges us to love one another. Without love, there is little to really bind a family together. But what does love mean to you?
In one of his favorite lines concerning his love for Bing Crosby, the late Bob Hope often said, “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for Crosby, and there’s nothing Crosby wouldn’t do for me. But that’s the trouble. We spent our lives doing nothing for each other.”
By chance, is Mr. Hope describing your family? In your family, is love for one another expressed verbally or visually? Or is this love simply taken for granted, that is, never spoken or demonstrated?
When was the last time you told your spouse, child, parent, sibling or other relative, “I love you?” Failing to express love now can spell trouble down the road. Many marriages have failed because the love that once brought couples together grew silent over time.
Our children especially need to see and feel that they are loved. Many teens who feel unloved make their needs known too late by committing either suicide or a serious crime, sometimes even in the home, in the very place where they expect to find love. PD James put it this way, “What a child doesn’t receive, he can seldom later give.”
Dr. Lee Salk, author of numerous books on parenting, told of a moving interview he had with Mark Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon. At one point, Chapman admitted, “I don’t think I ever hugged my father. He never told me he loved me. I needed emotional love and support. I never got that.” If he could ever be a father, Chapman added, “I would hug my son and kiss him and just let him know, he could trust me and come to me.”
In his book, My Father, My Son, Dr. Salk wrote, “Don’t be afraid of your emotions, of telling your father or your son that you love him and that you care. Don’t be afraid to hug him and kiss him. Don’t wait until the death bed to realize what you’ve missed.” What is true for fathers and sons is equally true for mothers and daughters, and for that matter, mothers and sons along with fathers and daughters.
In the gospel, we witness just how real Joseph, Mary and Jesus are. Like any of us, they experienced great anxieties of family living. Still, they demonstrate with love, respect encouragement and affirmation for each other that every family can be holy yet real.
In the coming year, I invite you to think of your family as a garden. Planting those four values will bring forth a harvest of abundant life. I am not much of a green thumb but I have learned the law of a fallow field; if a garden is neglected, it will always revert to weeds. If nothing of value is planted, then nothing of value will be harvested.
Like any garden, the garden of one’s family needs time and attention if love is to be cultivated along with the sunshine of laughter and affirmation, which help to deal with the tense moments caused by anxieties and differences that are bound to arise like rain and thunder. Its soil of hardness, created by envy, bitterness, and anger often needs to be turned with tools of forgiveness and understanding.
Maybe you aren’t a green thumb either, but I invite you to plant and cultivate these 18 rows in your family garden:
• Six rows of p’s: perseverance, politeness, praise, prayer, patience and peacemaking.
• Four rows of “let us”: let us be faithful in word and deed, let us be unselfish, let us be loyal, let us love and respect one another.
• Three rows of squash: squash gossip, squash criticism, and squash indifference.
• Five rows of “turn ups”: turn up on time for events with your kids. Turn up for family gatherings. Turn up with a better attitude. Turn up with new ideas and the determination to carry them out. And turn up with a smile.
Any family’s survival depends on the shared sensibility of its members. If you plant and nurture these values in your family garden, you will bring to harvest a real family as well as a holy family.