Thinking of Family

The Feast of the Holy Family was yesterday and today we have the celebration of Mary Mother of God. This short reflection ponders on them both. The thoughts of a new mother for her child are full of hopes and expectations with a richness that soars beyond what reality tells us to expect, and it is only when the hard facts of life hit home, that reality becomes the landscape in which the challenges of life emerge as the learning experiences which define us.

Whatever Mary pondered in her heart for her son, reality would always rear its head to intrude and to interrupt with its sharp edges and harsh necessities. Whatever the reality of life in Nazareth was like, the basics still needed to be done, and what this involved above anything else was love. The things which Mary treasured were, as with any other young mother for her child, fashioned out of a deep instinctive love for her son. Jesus had to grow up, he had to learn, he had to be told off, he had to be praised and made to feel an essential part of the family. In essence, his life was shaped, and his thoughts were formed, by the love that was poured into him by his parents. Without doubt that involved learning about God, and the importance of understanding that what nourished and nurtured his upbringing was the ease with which God’s presence, through the love of his parents for him, was evident to him. This truth, of making the presence of God’s love the bedrock of his life, was fashioned and shaped in him by his parents, by the community in which he was brought up, and by his wider family.

To make the love of God the bedrock of our family life may not be a bad resolution for the New Year. Jesus was born of a woman; his parents taught him what to value and how to sense the essential goodness in people. They taught him that what mattered was to heal and to restore, to make whole and to forgive. Essentially, they taught him how to love. Into this experience, divine revelation was born, and because of this experience, divine revelation was made comprehensible. The more we are able to touch this experience, the more we are able to accept it. The more we are able to accept it, the more it will fashion us and shape us into fathoming the depths of our humanity so as to access the inexhaustible heights of the Divinity, because the Son of God was born of a woman, who treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.