So, we have this regression. All of which suggests that you can’t read the Bible with your brain turned off. We Catholics who have just re-discovered the Bible not so many year ago, need to have some sense of what it is we do when we read these texts. Yes, they are the inspired word of God. But, what does that mean and how does that equip us?

Now this problem creates an opening for what I would like to talk about. How do you judge that this text is superannuated? That wives are not supposed to be subject or submissive to their husbands. What criteria can we use, then, to say this text is a regression, a decline, from the news about human relationships that Jesus not only announced but embodied? And this can lead to a question about the Holy Family. What made the Holy Family holy? Well let’s try to look at that by looking at the regular family. I think it was the Russian playwright Chekhov who said all happy families are boring, it is only the troubled families who are interesting. And that is how he wrote The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, etc. Well I think that if he had looked a little more closely, he would have realized that there are no happy families. There are no families which are non-dysfunctional to one extent or another. We do not want to believe this; I do not want to believe this, but I think that this is the case. The reasons for that are not very far to look for. We say that the family is supposed to be constituted by love. But what is love? Love is to seek the welfare of the other. OK, who is the other? And what conduces to the welfare of the other? Now I came very late to parenthood. There is a certain advantage in that. I don’t know what worse mistakes I might have made in my attempt to raise my kids. The only thing that I am sure of is that mistakes were made. Why? Because I do not know how to love, point one. Point two, I am so much hobbled by my own needs that even if I did know how to love I would not be able to bring it off successfully, totally successfully. And I think that is simply the human condition. Period. Full stop.

So what problems does this raise for the family, what is the family to do? Let me make some proposals, all in the light of trying to get at what makes the Holy Family holy. I think that the very first thing that parents should do, is to recognize that although parents may know genetically what other children are they do not know who they are as human beings. All they can do is try to create an environment where this little kid feels that it is safe to live in this world. I think that that is the absolutely basic thing: to persuade their kids that life is livable. Now, how do you do that for a six week old, or a two year old, or a ten year old, or a fifteen year old? I don’t know. But I know that has to be the basic item on the agenda. Why? Because if the kid is convinced that the world is not safe for them then they are hobbled. She or he is crippled at the outset. They are not going to be able to live which is to say grow. So let’s assume that that is the first job and that, secondly, that job is never perfectly done. And that thereby creates a kid who is at least wary of the world, and of other people. OK, there is a sensible wariness and then there is a kind of pathological wariness. And I would like to propose that none of us fully escape some degree of the pathological wariness, the fundamental distrust of other people and of life. As a reflex of that sense we have to keep protecting ourselves. Look out for number one.

It is a fascinating thing to come at this from quite a different direction. Let us say that the job of parenting is to convince the child that they are loved. Now, this is slightly different from saying that the world is a secure place to live. The belief that they are loved gives kids the wherewithal, the energy, to make a way through and in the world. But here we meet a North American problem. How can you both convince a kid that they are loved and not at the same time somehow convince them that the world is there for their taking? We talk about the Me Generation. What has generated the Me Generation? It originates in the belief that the world is there for me, and therefore I have to get whatever is mine before anyone takes it away from me. We see this belief acted out over and over among the students here in their indifference to other peoples feelings, the violence that they routinely work on themselves by the words that they use, and by the language that they employ when talking about each other. I am astonished, I’m dumbfounded, I’m terrified sometimes. And the question is why do people do such hurtful things? A really good question.

All right, if then we can upend Chekhov and say that all families are dysfunctional to one degree or another, what makes the Holy Family holy? The fact that they gave this child the sense that the world was a safe place for him to live in, yes and they gave the kid the sense that he was loved. Yes but then, the mysterious and dumbfounding next step, which seems to be characteristic of Jesus (and this gets us back to the criterion for judging that this thing from the Colossians can be radically criticized). Jesus not only had the sense that he was loved, but he made the transition to an astonishingly different sense which holds that we are loved.

I would like to suggest that this moves across an unbridgeable gap. That is, I don’t think that we can move from "I am loved" to "we are loved". I think that is precisely the miracle of Grace that makes that transition. That I do not see myself as privileged and therefore I am able to treat anybody else without contempt or less concern. And this is certainly the hallmark of Jesus’ behaviour. "This man eats with sinners." "The prostitutes and tax collectors are going to make it into the Kingdom of Heaven before all you religious high types". Now what enabled Jesus to say such things? To spend so much time talking to women and handicapped people as well as talking to the wealthy and the religiously privileged. I propose to you that it was his awareness that God has no favorites, that we are loved. Not just that I am loved, but that we are loved and that "we" is a universal we.

Now look at the world today. Today there are 24 full-scale wars going on, where people are killing each other with munitions. What constitutes a war, whether within a family, or between nations, but the incapacity to understand the world as we? That it is we, who are loved. And what I want to say is that we cannot effect that awareness by ourselves. We cannot lift ourselves by our own boot straps. Indeed we have a very hard time bringing off those two other very foundational things: that kids are secure in the world, enabling the child to come to the conviction that they are loved. But the next step, the miracle, and that is what the Feast of the Holy Family is all about. I do not think that Mary and Joseph did this on their own steam. But this is the Grace of God, that somehow they raised a kid who could continue to grow into and live out of his consciousness that we are loved. So there is no separable I. There is only we, always we.

All this does not mean some kind of homogenization or the collapse of everybody’s self worth into some kind of great indiscriminate stew. Rather it is to say that I am I only insofar as I am connected with you. With God and simultaneously with everybody else.