By Eric Girten
Catholic Kitchen
My brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ,
We’ve just celebrated the feast of the Holy Family (Dec. 31). This celebration is tucked in between the celebration of the birth of our Lord, Jesus (Dec. 25) and the Solemnity of Mary (Jan. 1).
In every family, there is an awareness of those days that have special significance (weddings, anniversaries and birthdays). So, too, it is with our church family. The Church lifts up the Holy Family as a model for us to emulate. Any parent will tell you that there is no guidebook for raising a spiritual family in a secular world, but if we prayerfully step into the Holy Family and look around a bit, we begin to receive guidance and insights. We clearly see examples of humility, obedience, faithfulness, holiness, hope, trust and love between Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and it is these qualities that are necessary for a family to survive and thrive.
We lift up not only the family but also celebrate each member of that family. The Solemnity of Mary recognizes that our Lady is indeed set apart from all others because of the active role she plays in salvation history. When we attempt to model the efforts and values of the Holy Family and of Jesus, Mary and Joseph individually, we cannot help but lift our eyes toward Heaven in our aspirations.
This is not to say that we will always succeed, but it will root and ground us in the priorities that are truly important in this life. And when we are truly rooted in the soil of God, we will have an impact on culture, society and civilization that goes far beyond the present or our own family. It is in our own holy families that we pass on these moral Truths from generation to generation, far outstretching the fleeting fads and fabrications of the present. It is the family unit formed properly in the Faith that has held society together through the centuries, despite the constant bombardment of the culture (of that particular present) that incessantly wishes to (and has always wished to) assimilate the Truth to a lower form of personal and relative morality.
It is from the family formed properly in the Faith where queens and kings and prophets and saints will spring forth to take on the confusion of the future. It is both the perseverant parent and trusting child who are the notes on the pages of this great Catholic symphony.
This is a story as old as time; this epic tale of the human effort to rise above its animal instinct to accept and understand its higher calling by God to simply accept His gift of eternal love. And it is a story that needs to be continuously retold in our families; our domestic churches. In so doing, humanity will never yield to the evil of the day but will increasingly accept that most simple fact … that God, our creator, longs for our gaze to meet His own.
Over the past several months, I have posted sections of a first-century document called the Didache. My initial exhortation was to read it in order to understand what it meant to be a first-century Christian and then to reflect on that a bit. I would recommend a full reading of the document to gain a contextual understanding of it rather than partial sections as I have provided here due to space constraints. In that vein, I submit the next chapter…
Chapter 5. The Way of Death
And the way of death is this: First of all it is evil and full of curse: murders, adulteries, lusts, fornications, thefts, idolatries, magic arts, witchcrafts, rapines, false witnessings, hypocrisies, double-heartedness, deceit, haughtiness, depravity, self-will, greediness, filthy talking, jealousy, over-confidence, loftiness, boastfulness; persecutors of the good, hating truth, loving a lie, not knowing a reward for righteousness, not cleaving to good nor to righteous judgment, watching not for that which is good, but for that which is evil; from whom meekness and endurance are far, loving vanities, pursuing requital, not pitying a poor man, not labouring for the afflicted, not knowing Him that made them, murderers of children, destroyers of the handiwork of God, turning away from him that is in want, afflicting him that is distressed, advocates of the rich, lawless judges of the poor, utter sinners. Be delivered, children, from all these.