Today’s readings: Ecclesiasticus 3, 2-6. 12-14; Colossians 3, 12-21; Matthew 2, 13-15.19-23.
Family is where we are born and brought up. It is where we are first loved and learn to love. Family is our first image of what the world is like, our first encounter with life and existence as it is. Family gives us the gift of belonging to a broader human family. If in life we find all this, then we are blessed. If this is lacking, then we will be marked for ever. This is what makes the family so important and why it should be at the center of society’s concerns and interests.
Celebrating the Holy Family every year at this time reminds us of where and how our families need to be planted. What is special about the Nazareth family is that it provided the human sacred space through which God entered the history of humankind and manifested Himself. Otherwise, we know too little about this Nazareth family, and the little we know positions it, culturally speaking, light years distant from our family realities today.
Yet the virtues highlighted in the Scripture readings today remain the same virtues that should be the solid foundation of any family in whatever time and culture. Life as we live it today is becoming elusive, fast, more dominated by technology. Relationships are becoming more abrasive, less permanent, more subject to outside pressures and even more fragile. So much seems to be changing that we can be tempted to think that nothing any more holds ground even where our very being is concerned.
Love should be the same as it has always been, but even here, perhaps it is not. The way we love and are loved, what we expect from love and by loving, how we love and show our love, all this is changing. With this, our perspective on life itself changes and this has its deep repercussions on what we understand by family and what type of construct the family becomes. In this fluidity, even where the family is concerned, we need to spot the constants which in the midst of change moor our being, define more clearly who we are, and explore deeply the need to belong to a family.
It is in this sense that we need a refounding of the family. We need to go back to the roots not in the sense of referring back to the past but by referring to what makes solid ground under our running feet. Honestly enough, in our talk about the family it does not help at all today to keep referring to the past as if the magic formula lies there. We acknowledge the blessings we received from those before us and we may also enjoy being nostalgic about how life used to be.
But our challenges lie all ahead, and it is mainly vision rather than nostalgia that we need when talking about the family. Going back to the roots means rather exploring and understanding the soil where we are planted, cultivating it to produce fruit, and creating fertile ground where a true sense of family in sync with this day and age can grow and serve as a scared space where people are born, bred, and can grow up in love.
It is precisely this that demands that the Church nowadays gives priority to the pastoral approach over doctrinal tenets. On one hand there is the reality of a diversification of families in the making, which we need to face, without, on the other hand, denying or ignoring that there are also ideals that we still need to proclaim. The reality today is diversified and complex. There is no longer a fixed, static formula of what a family is and a yardstick to define what absolutely constitutes a family.
In a society that is so fluid even in such basic things as love and relationships, it is understandable that the physionomy of the family becomes more complicated. What for the Church should matter most in this fluidity is authenticity, that people, whatever the set-up of family they construct for themselves, keep seeking to grow in a healthy relationship.
The pastoral demands in such contexts are daunting, and in these situations the Church, much more than we can imagine, mostly needs just to be there for whoever seeks guidance and help. In the past the Church defined the sacramentality of marriage in terms that were predominantly canonical and legal. The framework that defined the family and marriage was too rigid and static. But, at the end of the day, what is it that constitutes the sacramentality of marriage?
Basically it is God’s presence, which manifests itself not through legalities but where people are authentic seekers. God’s gratuitous grace and love manifest themselves where people deeply cultivate their love and nourish their relationship in a healthy partnership of life. This is what fundamentally makes marriage a sacrament and a family holy. The refounding of the family today is the project the Church is called to embark on, pointing to the basics without which a marriage cannot be sustained, and providing the good soil where families can be rooted and take shape.