The Holy Family as an Antidote to the Modern Age
As we continue to celebrate Christmastide, Holy Mother Church grants us a number of feasts and solemnities through which to orient our prayer and meditation...
As we continue to celebrate Christmastide, Holy Mother Church grants us a number of feasts and solemnities through which to orient our prayer and meditation. The feast of the Holy Family this week is no exception, and gives cause for reflection, reverence and great joy.
For any father, St Joseph is a monumental figure of immense inspiration. His wondrous balance of silence, strength, nobility and attention to the word and will of God are just cause for this patriarch to be known as the ‘terror of demons.’ In a culture that has torn down masculinity, fatherhood and chivalry in the service of false and fickle idols, we must turn to St Joseph as an eternal guide and model of what our fatherhood should be. In the gospel of Matthew, we find first, Joseph’s honour and judiciousness, “being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose” his betrothed, who was of child, beyond the means and limits of his own faculties. Would that any young man of the our age be similarly temperate, beyond the vengeful lure of modern salaciousness and public exposure.
Furthermore, he is addressed by an angel of the Lord as “Joseph, son of David,” unable to escape the honour and responsibility borne by a royal lineage, to which all husbands and fathers should feel similarly bound, as “co-heirs of the grace of life.” Joseph is told “fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost.” We must fear not indeed, lest the tumult and banality of a fractured world that has abandoned and betrayed the blessings of conjugal, traditional marriage delude us of its permanence and divine purpose. When we ponder how “Joseph rising up from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him, and took unto him his wife,” we should all sense the rousing demand, honour and responsibility inherent in the need to nurture and protect the families we have been blessed with. A fatuous, eternally distracted generation would do well to rise from the sleep of an eternal adolescence, to embrace the heroic virtue of marriage and family, rather than flee from it in the pursuit of comfort and convenience.
Joseph, who was again told to “Arise, and take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt,” acted with a certitude, resolve and integrity needed to thwart the evil of the despot who would “seek the child to destroy him.” It is a simple act that asserts the moral primacy of the domestic church over the whims of empires and oligarchs that claim their disingenuous intent to “come to adore” our children, whilst of course seeking to poison them with an unrelenting ideological corruption of all we hold to be true, good and beautiful in God’s institution of the family, as we’ve known and cherished it for millennia. Joseph still stands, silent, present, undaunted, as the model for us all.
And of Our Lady - what praise and reverence could we render that would be sufficient? The Theotokos, the model of all contemplative traditions, who in the gospel of Luke “kept all these words, pondering them in her heart.” She too, just like Joseph, foreshadowing Our Lord’s repeated assertion: Be Not Afraid, was similarly assured. She was told, “Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God,” only in time to be warned by Simeon that “thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.” The comforts, consolations and tribulations of every parent can be witnessed in Mary’s bittersweet revelation that we must surrender to suffering, as much as revel in the joyous wonders that God renders in our children. The instruction though, to both Mary and Joseph to ‘fear not,’ is a gift to us, one and all, as the blessed burdens of our own families may at times tempt us to despair. The Woman however, “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars,” points us to a reverence in conflict with the materialism and conceit of the broader culture.
We must remember always, amidst the challenges of family, that “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.” The poverty, servitude and humility of family life grants us a spiritual banquet, should we allow God’s grace to prepare it. Our undue frustration, anger, egotism and immaturity can render us incapable of relishing the consolations found in fatherhood and motherhood, unless we submit to the sense of awe, wonder and due reverence for life that is writ large in the Holy Family. We recall how Mary and Joseph “wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger,” with God having “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men.” Without neglecting the devastating humility and servitude of the cross, we can see in the incarnation itself everything we need to truly understand service, selflessness and love in the bonds of familial life.
That God should be made man. That Joseph and Mary should tend to their child, with a humble, silent strength and certitude. That God should remind us again and again to ‘be not afraid,’ despite the struggles, the suffering and the servitude of our roles as husbands, wives, father and mothers. All these riches, and so many more, present themselves in our reverence of the Holy Family. May we pray to truly appreciate, understand and embody all that Jesus, Mary and Joseph have for us, to better serve a world that desperately seeks to abandon all that we strive to embrace - for our own families, as well as the broader culture beyond the walls of the church domestic.
by Gaetano Carcarello