Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning. Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family.
The Opening Prayer O God, who are pleased to give us the shining example of the Holy Family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life in the bonds of charity, and so in the joy of your house. Delight one day in eternal rewards through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Old Testament from the book of Sirach, 3rd chapter, 2nd to the 6th verse, and 12th to the 14th verse. God sets a father in honor over his children. A mother’s authority he confirms over her sons.
Whoever honors his father atones for sins and preserves himself from them. When he prays, he is heard. He stores up riches and reveres his mother. Whoever honors his father is gladdened by children, and when he prays is heard. Whoever reveres his father will live a long life. He who obeys his father brings comfort to his mother.
My son, take care of your father when he is old. Grieve him not as long as he lives, even if his mind fail. Be considerate of him. Revile him not all the days of his life. Kindness to a father will not be forgotten. Firmly planted against the debt of your sins, a house raised in justice to you.
The Word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm Blessed are those who fear the Lord and walk in his ways. A reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, 3rd chapter 12 through the 21st verse brothers and sisters, put on as Christ’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, Heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. If one has a grievance against another, as the Lord has forgiven you, you must also do. And over all these put on love that is the bond of perfection, and let the peace of Christ control your hearts, the peace into which you were also called in one body.
And be thankful. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. In all wisdom you teach and admonish one another, singing psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Wives, be subordinate to your husbands as is proper in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, avoid any bitterness toward them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord. And fathers, do not provoke your children that they may not become discouraged. The Word of the Lord. Hallelujah Verse. Let the peace of Christ control your hearts. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly.
The Gospel for this feast of the Holy Family is taken from St. Luke, second chapter, 41st to the 52nd verse. Each year Jesus parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up according to festival custom after they had completed his days. As they were returning, the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Thinking he was in the caravan, they journeyed for a day, and looking for him among their relatives and acquaintances did not find him.
They returned to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.
And he said to them, why are you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house? But they did not understand what he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. And his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.
The Gospel SA in our liturgical year, we always follow the Feast of Christmas with the Feast of the Holy Family. And there’s some obvious connections. I mean, Jesus was born into the world as one like us, and he grew up in a family. And somehow what we’re encouraged to do, as you listen to the opening prayer, is we’re invited to somehow learn something from the experience that Jesus had as he grew in age and wisdom. Living in a family now I always smile when I think about learning from the example of the Holy Family, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. When you figure how good a Joseph was such a humble Man, Mary never committed a sin.
She was born without sin, and Jesus was God. So I don’t think that’s exactly a normal family. But the dynamic in a family is always the same, always the same. There are roles that people take on. And in a way, when you listen to the first reading, and it’s an interesting book. It’s the Book of Sirach, which is also called the book of Ecclesiastes.
The Book of Sirach is not in the Hebrew canon, and it’s not in many of the Christian Bibles that are not Catholic. And one of the things that is interesting about this book is it was written about 200 years before the coming of Christ, and it was written by a man by the name of Ben Sira. And one of the things that so touched him was the law that was given by God, the law of the Old Testament. And he saw in it so much wisdom. And what he longed to do was to write a book that sort of tried to draw out of the law wisdom that is there. It’s a fascinating book to read because it’s so clearly a practical application of how we should live.
And some of it’s humorous to me, some of it disturbing. I know one of the things they would in a list of things you should be ashamed of is never go to a feast of someone who is wealthier than you and say, wow, what a feast. Another one is, if your host is looking at something at the table and it looks like he wants it, don’t grab it first. Another one, interesting. Be ashamed of yourself if you ever put your elbows on the table. And in the disturbing things were one passage about being a parent, and it said that a good father beats his son, and a father who plays with his son is creating a great problem for him and for his son.
So all of this strikes me is that there’s a way in which the law, when you see it presented purely as a law, often seems to fly in the face of our emotional life, what we feel inside. And so I’d like to begin by looking at the image that we have in the first reading, and it’s clear that it’s saying to us, you know, we should honor the roles that people have. We should honor our parents. And by honoring them, what we’re doing is somehow showing respect for the role that they have and allowing that role to take its course and always being filled with great reverence and respect for it. In the same way that, you know, a child in this system of where the parent is called to be the One who nurtures and cares for the children. The children in response need to appreciate what is being offered and then in turn, honor and respect them when they are in need.
That all makes perfect sense. But how it works out, how it unfolds, is so complex. And we know that there are healthy parents and parents that are not able to be the kind of healthy mentors to their children that ultimately I would like to think they really want to be. And we have children who are not always receptive to the healthiest of parenting. And it’s all very complex. And that’s why I love the second reading from St.
Paul, which is filled with the one single thing. It is absolutely essential if you’re going to live in a family, live in a system where people have authority over other people, where there’s responsibilities that need to be carried out by both sides. Those who give and those who receive. One of the things it says so clearly is if you’re going to live in this system and be somehow not damaged by it, if it’s not what it should be, then you have to be filled with all kinds of. Let me list them. Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, love, gratitude.
Isn’t that interesting? All those dispositions, to me are the dispositions that make the difference between a reaction to the law, which we can be held up against the law, in a sense, or the law can be imposed upon us. And if there isn’t compassion, if there isn’t kindness, if there isn’t patience, if we’re not able to put up with the grievances we have against one another, if there’s no forgiveness, then it strikes me that the wisdom of the law cannot take us very far. It can’t help us to really develop as individuals who are called to live ultimately our own destiny. The fascinating thing in the system that God has created for us is that we come into the world with a task, with a destiny, with something we’re called to become. There is no law that can make us into what we are intended to be by God.
We have to learn how to find our destiny. We have to learn how to listen attentively with our hearts to the things that are deep inside of us and wondering, how do we find the place where we know we are doing what we’re called to do? And how do parents know enough about their children to guide them into that place? It’s a great, great mystery. So if this is our call to become who we are, then it seems that we’re going to be coming flat up against a Lot of tension and pressure when it comes to somehow living under the law. Let’s even say just living under the law of our parents.
Law might be too strong a word. Let’s call it what they would like, what they wish, what they hope for. I guess parents come in all flavors, and there’s those who could care less maybe about what happens to their children once they’re raised. They’re on their own and parents go off and live their life. There are others who call their children every single day, want to know exactly what they’re doing. But somewhere we’re all in between those two extremes.
And so how do we deal with this whole issue of having respect and honor for those who have real authority over us? At the same time, how do we follow what we’re called to do? Well, I find it fascinating that the liturgy of the Word for this feast of the Holy Family is not the same stories we listened to last week when we celebrated, you know, the end of Advent and the beginning Christmas and all these beautiful stories about the birth of Jesus and everyone coming and loving the baby and honoring the baby and, you know, the joy that you find in a new, in a family with a new baby. It’s always, you know, exciting and filled with potential. No, but the story that we’re asked to look at as a description of the Holy Family and to sort of look into that experience that Jesus had with his family to find an example of how we should live in our family, it’s a story that’s pretty horrendous when you look at it. I mean, here’s Jesus at 12.
Now, 12 is a lot older than our 12. So I mean, people are getting married, girls are getting married at 13 and 14. And so a 12 year old might be more like a 17 year old anyway. Certainly a teenager, you know. Now imagine this. Let’s put it in a contemporary setting.
You take your adolescent child to a place to. Let’s say you go to Washington for some reason and. And let’s say there’s a tour group with somebody’s taking care of the children. And so you expect that the tour guide is going to be watching your son, your daughter, and you go out to the airport and you’re getting ready to go on the plane and you look around and your child is not there. And you go, whoa, wait, wait a minute. Where is my child?
And the guy who’s sort of in charge? So I thought he was with the other director and. No, I thought it was this director. And so all of a sudden you get this panic in the part of the parents. Now think about this. They go looking in a city for their son for three days.
They have two sleepless nights wondering what happened to him, Was he abducted? Did he get. What could have possibly. What could keep him away from us? What could allow him to separate himself from us? And the thing that’s so fascinating about this story is, is they finally find him.
And the reaction of Jesus is not unlike any adolescent. In a sense, it was sort of like, what’s the deal? I was doing what I knew I had to do. This is where I have to be. This is my destiny. This is my father’s house.
I have to be here. Didn’t you know that’s where I would be? Maybe he was even saying, didn’t you know to look here first? But in either case, you have this strange tension between a child and his parents. And so if we’re invited in the opening prayer, this liturgy, to somehow pray for some kind of example that we find in this set of readings in this feast, then it strikes me that the lesson from the Holy Family is the lesson that I think is probably in relationship to parents and children. You know, the core issue in family.
How do parents let go of their children and allow them to fulfill their destiny? How does a child find his destiny when it isn’t necessarily what his parents want? Interesting. Think of all the shades of differences when it comes to the tension between children and parents, between any authority, between the church and you, between the law and you, and your work and your destiny. It seems to me that the mystery of the Incarnation continues to draw us into this place where we’re invited to imagine that there’s a spirit given to us, placed in our hearts. In the book of Ecclesiastes, there’s a wonderful line that said, you’ve been given a heart so that you can think.
Given a heart so that you can think. When you think with your heart, it seems like you’re not working out of the law, but out of this intuition, this thing deep inside of us. And ultimately, parents are there to involve the their children in a process that awakens their heart to their destiny and supports that destiny. What a challenge for parents. Yet it’s also such a challenge for young people to realize that the parents role perhaps is not going to be able to do that as smoothly and as easily as they wish. And they have to learn patience and forgiveness and understanding.
And on both sides those things are required. So maybe the thing we learned from this great feast of the Holy Family is mostly that we are called in a relationship where we have mentors and those who are being mentored. We have all that interaction between members of a community that where we haven’t chosen these people, they’ve been given to us in all that process of working through that whole thing. What is so necessary is that we have these qualities of the heart, qualities of patience and understanding and forgiveness. That’s the challenge to live in that disposition as we work with those who are teachers and work to learn what ultimately our ultimate Father is calling us to. Closing Prayer Father there’s often great tensions in our families.
We long for freedom from the tension that robs us of an appreciation of who we are and what we’re seeking from one another in a family system. So bless us with the patience, the love, the compassion, the understanding that is necessary for us to be able to grow and become all that you’ve called us to be. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program, is archived and available on our website Pastoral Reflections and and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts.
Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website Pastoral Reflections Institute. We thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios.
Copyright 2020.
