Feast of the Holy Family – 31 December 2023
An article was published around this time last year by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schulz, “What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found is the Key to a Good Life.”[1] As the authors pointed out, since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. It started with 724 participants and has now had more than 1300 descendants of the original group. The authors claim that it’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life, ever done. And what is the key to health and happiness? What we know already deep in our hearts: good relationships.
The trick is, however, that those relationships must be nurtured. As they go on to observe, we don’t always put our relationships first. Exactly how much time do we spend with our family members or a good friend? Are we spending time with the people we most care about? Is there a relationship in our life that would benefit both of us if we could spend more time together? We can spend more time alone than we realise.
Our connections are the most important element in our life. And yet we know also they are fragile. Family life. Itself, is more complex than ever. New forms of family have emerged. Our relationships themselves are not straightforward as an increasing number of blended families come into being. Perhaps, indeed, every one of our families bring questions to the fore. All of us know the many pressures that can make family life difficult.
What’s more, we know that the romance of marriage is not easy to maintain. Marriage is a relationship that requires a constant decision, and even though it may have been love that led us into marriage, it is not love – at least as a feeling – that keeps us married. Life changes, we change, pressures arise . . . to stay together can be hard work. And of course, in many instances we know it can’t work, and a marriage dissolves – and there can be many different reasons for this, and it is very difficult to make a judgement.
Notwithstanding, in all this struggle and opportunity, we say marriage and family life is a living icon of the Divine Life, the Trinity itself. In other words, if we want to understand God, we need to look at a couple given to one another in marriage. They are our best teachers about God. Their self-giving and mutual reception exercised in such a way as to create a relationship of its own nature and life, mirrors what happens between the Father and Son which itself generates its own living entity, the Spirit of God. For this reason, we understand marriage as a sacrament: the means by which God’s very being and life become manifest in our world.
For this reason, the first feast we celebrate after Christmas, is that of the Holy Family. It is not simply a celebration of the family of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. It is also importantly, a celebration of our family as that by which God’s very life becomes manifest in the world.
When we look at our family, we may not be inclined to think of things too divine. No family is perfect, every family has its struggles. Ironically, at Christmas time we become only too conscious of the vulnerabilities and fragility of our family experience. When we look around, we may not be dazzled by a divine glow emanating from the midst of our nearest and dearest. As I have often remarked, we are never so close, nor so distant, to others as with the members of our own family.
Yet, it is by the complex struggles of family life that we come to God. We can only touch the living God through the to and fro of our family life just as it is – with all its possibility and all its hurts, in the hope for love that it represents and in the failure of love that can be experienced. It is through our families, complex though they may be, that we learn of our need for love, our hunger for love, the possibility of love, the gift of love, the fear of love, the hope for love, the hurt of love. Families, precisely in their complexity, till the soil of our hearts and make them aware of love’s power – even in the absence of that love. And if God is love, then families – for better or for worse – become the very school that prepares us for all that God is.
And in this school, the most important words we learn are: ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Sorry’. Three essential words!”. As Pope Francis has observed, “In our families when we are not overbearing and ask: ‘May I?’; in our families when we are not selfish and can say: ‘Thank you!’; and in our families when someone realizes that he or she did something wrong and is able to say ‘Sorry!’, our family experiences peace and joy”. Let us not be stingy about using these words, but keep repeating them, day after day . . . The right words, spoken at the right time, daily protect and nurture love.[2]
Families are holy. The fact that they are not perfect does not make them less holy. They are holy because of the way they teach us that we can never not be son or daughter, that is someone defined by relationship and made for relationship.
Yes, the experience of our family life may be quite ambiguous. But we would not be here with hearts open to the Lord of life without them. So today let us offer a simple word of thanks for this mysterious but wonderful way by which God reveals himself to us.
[1] Robert Waldinger and Mark Schulz, “What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found is the Key to a Good Life,” The Atlantic, 19 January 2023.
[2] Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, The Joy of Love, Post Synodal Exhortation, 19 March 2016, (n.133).
