Holy Family—C2003
Luke 2:41-52
Deacon Lee Hunt (St. Monica)

Become a Holier Family

I am reading a spirituality book titled The Holy Longing by popular author Fr. Ronald Rohlheiser. He states that the air we breathe today is not conducive to interiority and depth. He goes on to say that this is because we are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. We are habitually too preoccupied to have God, depth, or spirit show up on our radar screen. We are too preoccupied, excessively focused on work and achievement, and excessively trying to experience too much of life.

Rohlheiser’s assessment fits exactly with why today’s Feast of the Holy Family was established 110 years ago because at that time families were becoming worldlier and less holy.

Today, our families are even more vulnerable to worldly trappings. Our society offers us too many opportunities to participate in worldly things.

Today’s gospel reading puts things into perspective for us. Mary, being perturbed by not being able to find Jesus for three days, says, “Son, why have you done this to us?” Here is Jesus’ reply from the original Greek in which it was written: “Did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs?” In essence, Jesus is saying that God has priority over his earthly family.

A holy family is one that puts God first in its activities. This is a hard balancing act, because as humans we are automatically part of the world. However, we are not automatically a holy family. We must choose to become a holy family and then work at it.

A holy family is more apt to stay connected with one another. The alternative isn’t attractive. Here is the status of the average marriage in Oklahoma:

1/4 of marriages end by their 2nd anniversary and 1/2 by the 5th to 6th anniversary. This results in
o Children of divorce having multiple parents and grandparents
o Fatherless families becoming economically vulnerable
o Fatherless children desperately needing adult males to help them figure our what it means to be a responsible, caring man.
o Children leaving home because they cannot cope with their families for various reasons.
o Children growing up thinking that this environment is normal. This can lead to multiple divorces, drug addition, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and teen suicide.

What’s the solution to improving our success of staying together as a family? My suggestion is that we connect our family better with our parish. It is here that we establish a closer relationship with God and we find support from others so as to recover an awareness of our moral values.

Coming to Mass on Sunday is the bare minimum. And a large number of Catholics don’t come that often. How can one hour a week, or less, make us more holy when we spend the rest of the week immersed in worldly affairs?

If our family is minimally connected with the parish, we can change that by getting involved in a parish program. With this start, we will learn about other parish programs that we can get into later as our family situation changes. We must make the move toward finding a parish program; the program is not going to find us. Check the Sunday bulletin to find out what is going on.

To become a holier family, get better educated about your Catholic faith. Too many people are undereducated about their faith. After obtaining three college degrees, I rested on my high school knowledge of my faith for forty years. Hello! What’s wrong with this picture? As primary educators of our children, we adults must continually learn about our faith so that we can express it at an adult level rather than at a high school level. Our parish has programs to educate adults and our Archdiocese has college-level courses for audit or credit.

I personally believe that the easiest way for adults to learn more about their faith is in small groups. Our parish has small groups that meet for two six-week periods per year as part of RENEW. I have been in a similar group, called a small Christian community, for 15 years and everyone in our group has grown immensely in faith.

The gospel reading today is a resurrection story because of its similarities to Jesus’ passion. For Luke, being lost is being dead. Being lost for three days is also the length of time Jesus spent in the tomb. Being found, for Luke, is coming back to life.

In a way, our society has been lost when it comes to the family. But, we do have opportunities to bring our families back to life.

God has to move to the top of our family priorities if we are to become holier families. We can make this happen through greater involvement in our parish, which probably also means becoming less involved in worldly affairs.

Do you want to be a holier family?