This year the arrival of the feast of the Holy Family so immediately after Christmas highlights a fundamental relationship between the two truths they celebrate, almost as though the two truths are inextricably linked.
The first is the reality of God’s love. At Christmas those of us who tend to lose sight of it during the rest of the year are reminded of God’s love and its redemptive power. Religious Christmas cards restate it with the words of John’s Gospel: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life”. Even seasonal holiday cards with their secular tidings of peace and joy implicitly (albeit unintentionally) recall for us this pivotal event in history, the Incarnation. God, who is Love, became one of us so that we might be reinstated in the life for which He created us.
The second truth approaches the supremacy of the first. It is the paramount position and purpose of the family. Deeply rooted in scripture, the concept of the family appears with Adam and Eve in the very beginning of the book of Genesis and is a constant factor in both the First and Second Testaments. “The scandal of particularity” is a phrase which refers to God’s selecting the Jews as His Chosen People. Here is a related thought. One can imagine that an almighty God could decide to save a fallen world in a myriad of epiphanic ways. He chose, however, to do so by becoming one of us, one of his creatures. What’s more, He did so not as a majestic conqueror appearing on clouds of glory but as an infant born into a humble family. If God’s choice in doing so is shocking, it could rightly be called ‘the scandal of familiarity’.
The presence of divine love, physically manifest in that Bethlehem stable, is born, nourished and shared in every family. It is within the embrace of a family we first experience the balm of relationship. It’s where our rough edges are smoothed; where we learn our ego is not the center of the world and that meaning – and even joy – are found in service to others. It’s where we discover the peerless power of love.
How timely it is that this year the feast of the Holy Family follows so closely the feast of the Nativity. We appear to be forgetting, indeed even gainsaying, civilization’s time-tested conviction that the irreducible unit of society is the family and not the individual. The scourge of solipsism may threaten the world’s sanity and well-being. The easy allure of nihilism may corrode our foundations. But, the intimate linkage every seven years of these two feasts will be an antidote for all of us, even those of us who mark Christmas with holiday cards.
On behalf of the Trustees of the National Catholic Community Foundation I extend our best wishes for a healthy new year, one which prospers all of the NCCF community both spiritually and otherwise.