{"id":14975,"date":"2024-12-29T00:00:16","date_gmt":"2024-12-29T00:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/?p=14975"},"modified":"2025-02-22T08:03:26","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T08:03:26","slug":"the-holy-family-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/?p=14975","title":{"rendered":"The Holy Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

A woman woke up excitedly on her birthday and enthusiastically told her husband, “I\u2019ve just dreamt that you gave me a pearl necklace for my birthday! What do you think it means?”<\/em> With certainty in his voice, the man said, “You’ll know tonight.”<\/em> That evening, the man came home with a small package and handed it to his wife. With anxious anticipation, the woman quickly opened the package to find a book entitled “The Meaning of Dreams.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be honest: I\u2019m the least qualified person to discuss family life here. I always find myself in a bit of an awkward position when I have to talk about family, like on this Sunday, devoted to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. There are two main reasons for that. First, I was brought up by a single mother. I think she did a splendid job, and there are no words to praise her highly enough, but it was hardly a model family. Second, I don\u2019t have a close family, i.e., a wife and children; consequently, I lack personal experience in this area. On the other hand, judging by the publicly known statistics, having had first-hand family life experience sadly doesn\u2019t guarantee success in building a lifelong loving relationship. Based on the many times I have heard from people exasperated at their own shortcomings or their spouses\u2019 or children\u2019s, I reckon it must be a considerable challenge. Every now and again, the more pious of such people have used a phrase like, \u201cMy family isn\u2019t holy at all\u201d, referring to the perfect one we celebrate this Sunday.<\/p>\n

The family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph wasn\u2019t perfect either, if you imagine them as having no tensions, troubles, or challenges and always harmoniously dealing with each other and the world around them. This projection is derived from the attached adjective \u201choly.\u201d It\u2019s commonly misunderstood as \u201cperfect\u201d in every sense, including morality, social skills, decision-making, and so on. We give the title of \u201cthe Holy Family\u201d to that of Jesus, Mary and Joseph only post-factum, with the benefit of hindsight, and from quite a distance too. When we read the stories of Jesus\u2019 childhood years in the gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, with the piety filter off, we can easily see a lot of challenges they faced individually and collectively. For example, Mary\u2019s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was the proverbial elephant in the room. Her fianc\u00e9, Joseph, seriously considered breaking up on those grounds. Understandably, he must have fought a long, hard and emotional battle in his mind about what to do. We can be sure that Joseph\u2019s considerations made it into his dreams, where they got combined with his deeply rooted moral and ethical standing. Thanks to modern psychological knowledge, we know that \u201cour brain knits it all together in memory to help us make better choices, and that neat trick happens overnight.\u201d<\/em><\/a> We still advise people to \u201csleep over important decisions.\u201d<\/em> Many years later, St Matthew\u2019s gospel poetically presented Joseph\u2019s thought process as an angel\u2019s intervention convincing him to take care of Mary and her child.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s gospel reading offers another example of the challenges faced by the family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Don\u2019t be fooled by the pious filter we subconsciously apply to the story of the missing teenage Jesus. Just imagine yourself not knowing for three days where your child is. Growing anxiety and fear accompanied Joseph and Mary during their search; she made it clear in her words to Jesus when they had finally found him: \u201cSon, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.\u201d<\/em> Switch off the piety filter for a moment, and you\u2019ll see the response on a par with a fairly typical teenager\u2019s carefree, jaunty attitude: \u201cWhy were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father\u2019s house?\u201d<\/em> I suppose most teenagers’ parents must be familiar with the following line: \u201cMary and Joseph did not understand the saying that he spoke to them.\u201d<\/em> I guess they must have had a long chat with Jesus, who then \u201cwent down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. […] He increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man,\u201d <\/em>clearly indicating that the teenage Jesus still had a lot of learning and developing ahead of him.<\/p>\n

The Holy Family got the title not for their perfection but because of how they approached their individual and collective challenges. Like everyone and every couple, young Mary and Joseph must have had their plans, visions and dreams for their family life. As happens most of the time, life took different turns and threw all sorts of challenges at them. They kept struggling together, not fighting against each other. Similarly, have your plans and dreams. Just don\u2019t get upset when, instead of a pearl necklace, life will hand you the book entitled “The Meaning of Dreams.” <\/em>Read it and act accordingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A woman woke up excitedly on her birthday and enthusiastically told her husband, “I\u2019ve just dreamt that you gave me a pearl necklace for my birthday! What do you think it means?” With certainty in his voice, the man said, “You’ll know tonight.” That evening, the man came home with a small package and handed it to his wife. With anxious anticipation, the woman quickly opened the package to find a book entitled “The Meaning of Dreams.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14115,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon","category-year-c"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/post-header-yellow.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14975"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15015,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14975\/revisions\/15015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}