What the Holy Family means to my family

Christmas comes, and the Church wants us to linger within the loving eyes and arms of the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph. Meditate a bit more, the Church seems to whisper, upon this little holy family.

It is love, the best love and the purest. In the center — him, still so small, a swaddled babe, but still the Word through whom all was made. “Heaven and earth in little space,” so the anonymous medieval hymn goes. That’s it; that’s what we’re invited to contemplate and see. Here held within this little family: this mystery. That’s what the feast of the Holy Family is all about, celebrated so soon in this new Christmas season, this small beginning of the redemption of everything.

The wiser and the humane have always known what good families are for. Plato eventually saw that good families were good for the state; it’s what Aristotle saw better, that without the family “love will be diluted.” This is the natural good of the family, and it is still good.

Such is why the wiser and the humane continue to support what we call the “institution” of the family. Attacked by forces and undermined by factors both left and right, the natural good of the family is still worth fighting for. Civilization depends upon it. When the Church stands up for the family, it is not doing anything all that religious. The Church is simply defending a natural good, defending what is only and properly human. That the Church so often stands alone is a tragedy, signaling the danger we’re all in as more and more people and politicians (again, left and right) forget the natural good of the family. It also signals the heroism of the vocations of mothers and fathers who choose to have families — “those great adventurers of the modern world,” Charles Péguy called them — in the face of a world that ironically, ignorantly and scornfully thinks them a burden.

But this is not what the feast of the Holy Family is about. And that’s because grace perfects nature. The Word became flesh. The reason I bring up the natural good of the family is to point to the beauty of what God does in Christ, the beauty of Christmas. The natural good of the family has become the site of supernatural good — heaven and earth in little space. And this for the sake of a new family of sisters in brothers in Christ, more than are countable, all bound sacramentally in faith in the body we call the Church. Just as a natural family in its descendants become families, so too do the descendants of the Holy Family become the family and People of God. This is the mission for glory; it’s why the Father sent the Son.

Families’ supernatural vocation

And it also gives families their supernatural vocation. Families still serve a natural good, a social good. Aristotle was right: as the family goes so does society. But with the birth of Christ, believing families also serve a supernatural good and ecclesial good. That is, now the task of the Christian family is to make saints — sons and daughters of the Holy Mother Church and citizens of heaven. Christ now elevates the family’s purpose. Now it’s not just Jesus’ family that’s meant to be holy, but your family too. This is the Catholic task, and we should be in awe of it and support it with everything we’ve got.

This undoubtedly is a high vocation, intimidating at times. My family often does not live up to it; your family probably often fails too. Some families are broken; some families even are sites of tragedy and trauma, not holiness and joy. This is just the sad truth of the matter. But there remains hope. You can still struggle for a holy family, find a holy family, find the family of the Church. A broken family does not bar you from God’s mission for glory. You are not left out, but you may have to look. But, of course, Jesus had to do the same; he had to look for a family of faith too. He’s still looking.

And so, may he find you and may you allow yourself to be found. Because that’s what all this is about — Christ come for you.