FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY

Ecclesiasticus 3:2-6,12-14
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold wet day.⁽¹⁾

Do you remember the boy sitting with Sally staring out the window with nothing to do? "All we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit." Then there was a bump and in strolled the Cat in the Hat. The cat assured the children that he could show them fun and games and tricks. "Sally and I did not know what to say. Our mother was out of the house for the day." The fish warned, "No! No! Make that cat go away!" The children would wish that they had.

Do you remember how you felt when you first read the book? Anxiety, perhaps? You'd have to be a pretty slick talker to convince me that you liked the cat, especially if the first time you read it was as a child. The mischievous cat creates havoc and chaos. There's a sense of impending doom. The children would agree.

The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother's return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment. ⁽²⁾

In a recent New Yorker article, Louis Menand wrote that the cat's so-called

'fun' is only a distraction from the reality of separation and abandonment. Pink snow, and those personified genitalia, Thing One and Thing Two, are no substitute for what we have lost. We don't want to be amused; we don't even want to amuse ourselves. We want to be taken care of. ⁽³⁾

The real horror of the story is that mother and father are gone; they've absconded; no one is caring for one another; disorder and malaise ensue.

Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, published his book in 1957, seven months before Sputnik, which caused something of a crisis of confidence in our country. Most policymakers assumed that the Soviets beat the United States into space because they had a superior educational system. There was concern not only that we were lagging behind the Soviets in the sciences, but also in basic language skills, such as reading. Phonics became the rage for teaching Johnny to read, and millions of children learned to read from books like The Cat in the Hat. These books were conceived and written to facilitate reading through phonics. You could argue that these books helped to tear down the Wall, especially if you were Houghton Mifflin, the publisher.

The Cat in the Hat is also a classic period piece for another thing that it suggests about our culture. Its apparent glorification of disorder and mischievousness was a harbinger of the succeeding decades. Since then, things have become less stable and predictable. 'Ozzie and Harriet,' order and structure, are in far less vogue than the Ozzy Osbourne family and 'deconstruction.' Parents are not minding the fort as closely. As Menand concludes, "Cakes on rakes are everywhere. A million cats cavort frantically for our attention. Even the fish has been co-opted. . . 'Enjoy!' cries the fish. 'Consume! Everything will be fine when your mother gets home.'" ⁽⁴⁾

Implicit in The Cat in the Hat, though by way of reversal, is the assumption of the holiness of the family, its sanctity. The family provides order and care and nurture - love, and not only for the children, but also for the parents. Menand guesses that the mother of the children in The Cat in the Hat has been out cheating or committing a murder. ⁽⁵⁾ The point is that things go awry without family life. Today's feast celebrates not only the Holy Family of Jesus, S. Mary, and S. Joseph, but the sanctity of all family life. A family exists to nurture human beings, parents as well as childrens; it helps us to mature, to look beyond ourselves, to assume greater responsibility in life, to teach us to love, and so to be like God. The welfare of the individuals is the goal of family life. Really the end of family life is supernatural, specifically the giving of life and salvation to parents and children. It is to nurture our growth and union with God. We need a family, whether it is a so-called 'traditional' nuclear family, which in the history of humanity has never, ever been the strict norm, not even in the 'Ozzie and Harriet' '50s, or whether it is a group of people trying to live together in a permanent union and hopefully with sacrificial love.

We become who God wants us to be through our families. We see this in our Lord's life. He became who he was through his familial union with Mary and Joseph. In a way, Mary and Joseph completed him because their family shaped his humanity. Mary not only gave Jesus his physical body, but also she and Joseph helped form his soul. The Immaculate Mother of God not only gave Jesus her flesh, but she and Joseph provided his formation. They reared him. Their faith, their obedience to God, shaped our Lord. Their example and teaching helped to form our Lord's heart and mind. For Jesus "to develop in a perfect filial relation to [God] the Father, [it was] necessary that his mother's relation to the heavenly Father should be one constantly filled with grace [and] not clouded by alienation." ⁽⁶⁾ That is why we know that Mary was Immaculate, without sin. That is why we so honour Mary and Joseph. For our Lord, at least his human nature, must have learned sacrificial love from his mother and father.

Sacrificial love is a distinguishing characteristic of the ideal of Christian family. When we behold the Holy Family, we see characteristics of family life that we hold as our standards. But let us be realistic. Every family, Christian or not, is dysfunctional. Christmas gatherings tend to remind us of that! Maturity and grace, however, help us to overcome these dysfunctions and to grow in love despite them. Our standard for family life, like our standard for all of our moral life, is higher than we achieve, but we hold to it. We can not expect to have the harmony and perfection of the Holy Family, but we may have it to some extent, and we need to shoot for it. If it is any consolation, today's gospel - Jesus running away from his parents - reminds us that even in our Lord's family, there was consternation and anxiety, shock and sorrowing, misunderstanding and stress.

The Church believes the family is holy, permanent, and founded upon a monogamy and love. When the Church bestows its blessing upon a married couple, she elevates and sanctifies that new family. For the relationship between husband and wife is like that of Christ and the Church. S. Paul exhorts, "Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her. . . . Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself." (Eph 5:25) This is not to imply that the husband is superior to the wife. Not at all. Unlike almost every other society and civilisation, the Church insists upon the equal dignity of men and women, and of husbands and wives. Both have equal expectations of fidelity, and equal responsibility and accountability to the other. The two become one, and complete the other. Their love is not merely sensual, which tends toward the selfish; their love is not merely sentimental, which is also selfish. Their love and affection come from appreciation and affection for personal qualities, the expressions of the mind and of the heart. ⁽⁷⁾ Their love, their union, produces new life. Love is about creation just as God is love and God is creator. God, creation, love, life, are all words suggesting the same thing.

All love expresses itself like Christ's love for us. In the intimate and long relationship of a husband and wife, as their less noble and lovable qualities inevitably surface, as their child rearing involves great trials, it is essential for love that is not selfish, love that does not make conditions or expects anything in return, love that sacrifices the self for the larger union, for the new life. ⁽⁸⁾

So family life, and again not just the so-called traditional nuclear family, all family life can shape character and help us grow in Christ's image. That is one of the reasons why we talk about the parish as being a family, a parish family, a place where people can learn to live in union with one another, and to sacrifice for the good of the whole, a place where there is tenderness and compassion, a place where there can be some trust and care. In this way we become a blessing to one another, we become a blessing to our community, we become a blessing to all of the world.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat, Random House (1957).

2. Louis Menand, 'Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us,' The New Yorker, 23 & 30 December 2002, p. 148.

3. Ibid., p. 154.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, p. 148.

6. John Macquarrie, Mary for All Christians, p. 73

7. The Catholic Encyclopedia (online version), 'Family,' article by John A. Ryan.

8. Ibid.