Sunday December 27th 2020: Read Br Michael’s Gospel Reflection

The Feast of the Holy Family

The Feast of the Holy Family

Hopefully our festivities with our families and in parishes to celebrate the birth of Jesus went well. We hope that our families met as best they could and that people gathered in their local parish church to pray with and for each other at this most sacred time of the year. Looking back on my own childhood, I have very fond and happy memories of Christmas with my family. Even now as an adult, I consider myself blessed to have spent recent Christmases with different members of my family. Perhaps at this time of year, our hearts soften and we reach out to those around us with more love and affection, especially those closest us – our family. In an ideal world our homes and families are the places where we learn to love, show mercy and compassion. Our families are the places where we are called to forgive and experience forgiveness. It is has been said that our family is the place where everyone knows who we really are and still love us!

Today, I am strangely reminded of the Prodigal Son. He treated his family, especially his parents badly and left home. Realising the huge mistake that he had made, he had only one place to which to return for help and healing – his family. As he was a long way from home, his father and hopefully his mother, were standing at the gate watching, waiting and hoping for his return. They were not disappointed and on seeing him, they warmly welcomed him home and back into his family.

Today we celebrate and honour the Holy Family – Mary, Jesus and Joseph. Many of us will have received Christmas cards and hopefully at least some of them were what we call ‘Religious’ ones. They will have shown angels announcing Good News to shepherds in the fields and the Magi arriving with their gifts. Some of them will have shown a poor homeless couple in an animal shed with their newborn child – this is the same ‘Holy Family’ that we remember and honour today.

Perhaps when we hear the word ‘holy’ we think of things that are sacred, special and solemn. Maybe we are drawn to ‘holy’ music, impressive churches or large cathedrals – things that are rare and perhaps out of the ordinary. Yet when we look into a crib in our church these days, all that we see is in fact is a very ordinary family. On the surface, there seems to be nothing ‘holy’ about them at all. Again, I am reminded of another piece of scripture, this time from the Old Testament; God says, ‘My ways are not your ways, as heaven is high above the earth, so too my ways are above yours, my thoughts above your thoughts.’ (Isaiah 55.8). Clearly What God considers being sacred, special and solemn is obviously very different from ours. Through the birth of Jesus, God breaks into our world and daily lives in a very ordinary and unassuming way; God becomes one of us and lives in a family. The Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh wrote that ‘God is in the bits of every day.’

These recent months have been a great challenge for all of us. Sadly we were unable to meet our friends and families as we would have liked. We may not have met as many of our family this Christmas as we had hoped, but they are none the less in our prayers,  thoughts and hearts. None of our families are perfect, but all our families are holy, sacred and special. As God entered our world through a family, maybe now more than ever this is where we will hear and experience God today – in our own ‘holy family’. ‘God is in the bits of every day – and every family.

Take a minute today and simply say prayer of ‘thanks’ to God for your own holy, sacred and special family.

– Br Michael Moore OMI