Feast of the Holy Family
It is has become rather fashionable to say that family life is in some difficulty. And external evidence would, superficially at any rate, seem to support this view. For example, in the year just gone by, one in three children born in this country was born outside marriage. Marriage break-down is a common occurrence in our society. The introduction of divorce in this country some years ago recognized this reality. But it didn't simply recognize this reality. Whether we intended it or not, it endorsed this reality to a certain extent. Marriage break-down is now socially accepted and legally endorsed.
We had further evidence this year of the pressures on the traditional nuclear family in our own country. Traditionally, society could rely on the family to operate as an effective agent of social control. And the bedrock of that social control was the Christian ethos, particularly the fourth Commandment: 'Honour thy father and thy mother'. Many ingredients in our social mix today have conspired to erode that commandment if not to render it largely redundant. There is of course a price to be paid for that erosion. Part of that price is made obvious in that recent phenomenon of child and teenage drunkenness. This is a serious matter with serious consequences down the road.
However, from another point of view, the family has been its own worst enemy. Crime and violence within the family home are detailed daily in our newspapers. And some of the stuff is horrific. From the evidence available there, some unfortunate people lead some desperately unhappy lives. And that unhappiness is all too often inflicted by family members. So let's not be too nostalgic or romantic about the family: like everything else in this world, it has great potential for good, but unfortunately it has great potential for evil also.
When we bemoan the decline in family values today, we must ask ourselves an honest question: Was this stuff always going on, and the only difference now is that it is coming out in the open? Individuals today have found the power and the courage to come out in the open with it and to shout stop. That is certainly a possibility and if it is true, we should welcome this development. The same applies to marriage break-down: is it a case today of people refusing to tolerate treatment that generations before them suffered in silence for the sake of respectability or whatever? And, on a positive note, there are more services and helps available to couples in trouble that there ever were before, and rightly so. So, before we set out on self-satisfying diatribes against the collapse of family values, we should take a more realistic view of the reality that is in the process of collapsing.
On the feast of the holy family every year, I am in the habit of using the family photo album to illustrate our attitudes to our own families and to the Holy Family. We all know the family photo and how carefully contrived it is. Everyone spick and span and each in his or her allotted place. Now as we view that photo we know well that it is a sanitised version of reality. As long as we know the conventions, we will not romanticise our own crowd. We know well what each character was like as a brother or sister. We know well he was only behaving himself for that split second that the photo was being snapped. So the photo has no hope of masking or obliterating the reality. We all know in our hearts that where there is no tension, there will be no growth. You have to break eggs to make omlettes. However, when we come to discuss the family generally, we tend to believe the photograph. We tend to idealise and romanticise.
The same dynamism seems to be in operation when we consider the Holy Family. Medieval artists set out to do for the Holy Family what today's photographers do for our families. Indeed from today's extract we see that the Holy Family confronted the harsh reality of life and death in the very early days of the infant's life. Those harsh realities are summarised in Simeon's prophesy to Mary: 'A sword will pierce your own soul too.' No family -not even the Holy Family- can insulate its members against the harsh realities of life. Through our love and care for them, we can prepare them to meet those realities, but if we try to insulate them, we will destroy them.