Feast of the Holy Family Parenting.  You can't do it by yourself.

 

This is just a little preliminary remark about this passage from Luke.  Luke is really interesting among the four canonical gospels because every time he tells a story about a man, he tells a story about a woman. Or vice versa. So we get the annunciation of John the Baptist to Zechariah, the annunciation to Mary about Jesus. He goes through the whole of the gospels and he pairs these things. He's kind of an equal opportunity evangelist. That's nice to be aware of, I think.

 

The Feast of the Holy Family is late and it's really very strange.  As we have all these fundamentalist Christian groups: Focus on the Family, Real Women...etc. etc.  Dan Quayle talking endlessly about family values.  Yet, I think, they really overlook the central and startling fact about the family as we find it in the New Testament.  Every time Jesus talks about the family, just like when he talks about authority, he warns about it. Well, looking for your mother and brother, "Who is my mother and brother?" "Whoever hears the word of God and lives out of it. Unless you hate father and mother, sister and brother"....all this and more. It's fascinating. In other words, we have another instance of the most fundamental human reality, our relationship with our family, drastically relativized here by Jesus. 

 

As a parent, that is enormously intimidating because raising kids is an exhausting job and you just pour yourself into it, day in and day out, day in and day out.  You want some kind of payback from this.  You want some kind of reciprocation. By that I mean, we want gratitude, a kind of sense of indebtedness (we want all kinds of other things too).  But what Jesus is saying is that the whole point of parenting is to prepare a kid to detach from those earliest and most fundamental human bonds in order to be radically open to God.

Again, we have all been in a family, we are all part of a family.  It is interesting to have this feast right after Christmas when the suicide rate is so high and people's depression is so enormous. We have, somehow in the process of secularising Christmas, mystified the family.  I mean it seems to me that we put a weight on the family that is just literally unbearable. For the family, now, one day of the year is supposed to supply all kinds of stuff that it never does for the other 364 days.  Everyone is drained by the whole phenomenon. Now, if you withdraw God then that kind of family connectedness makes all kinds of sense. But also, it makes it intolerable.  Literally, intolerable.

 

So what can we take from the Feast of the Holy Family?  A number of things. I think one of the first things that is said is to disabuse us, especially those of us who are parents, of the kind of proprietary feeling that we have about our kids. "This is my kid.  My kid."  Again that's very hard because you work so bloody hard, precisely, in keeping the little nipper from killing himself or herself or somebody else in the process of growing up, to say that this child is ultimately God's. 

 

But there's this other wholly liberating aspect of that, of course.  We are relieved of a highly overdrawn and impossible burden: that we are utterly and absolutely responsible for our children.  No. They are still God's.  By saying that, I don't mean to say that we can have a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward them. But it makes a great deal of difference, it seems to me, if I'm aware, even in the most serious and earnest exertions on behalf of my kids, that they are still God's before they're mine.

The other issue, which, I think, is really salient here, is this matter of being able to hear the word of God and follow it.  That matter of being part of God's family.  That raises all kinds of questions.  What do I do or what has been done to me, so that God has become inaudible?  Lots of stuff, I think. Deprivation, I think, is a major instance. Freud, on a very superficial level was absolutely right when he said that God was basically the father that none of us ever had. But it is also very clear that that kind of religiosity is also very immature. The sense of self-engrossment results from that sense of deprivation. Now deprivation takes many, many other forms. It doesn't mean giving the kid too little, it also means giving the kid too much.  That, too, is a form of deprivation, whereby a child grows incapable of seeing himself or herself as connected to the rest of the world. I am fully aware in saying this, how difficult this is to bring off.  It is enormously difficult. It requires subtlety and prudence of an incalculable degree.

 

But, what the Feast of the Holy Family does is to always bring us to the same place. We are incapable of bringing off the most central and important human activity.  Parenting.  We can't do it by ourselves. For all kinds of reasons, we literally cannot do it by ourselves. My parents didn't do it for me and I'm not doing it for my kids and my kids are not doing it for their kids. And that's all right.  That's simply the truth.  It's not a horrific and terrifying truth.  Well, it may be that, but it is also a liberating truth. It liberates us in order to seek the God that does grace us with her presence, who does nourish us, who does somehow free us from our own neuroses and dense-ness that we can provide for kids a world in which they can rejoin us. But rejoin us in God.  Which means we rejoin everybody else too.