FAMILY FAITH MISSION

THE  FAMILY’S FAITH MISSION

            The Christian Family is understood as mission, continuous with the church, the body of the faithful who together are the effective sign of salvation turned towards the world. The family as “church in miniature” and as a vibrant cell in the whole body must interact with the other cells to bring about the healthy and missionary vitality of the whole. Weak cells produce an anaemic body. It is no wonder that Pope Benedict XV instituted the Feast of the Holy Family in 1920. Before that there was little need to put up the Holy Family as a model, since family life was by and large in a healthy condition. But then came the Industrial Age and the rise of the cities, fast lanes, mass media, entertainment outside the home. Serious problems began to appear on the family horizon. It is a given fact today that family life has become a most difficult project. Apart from economics, housing and education, one thinks immediately of divorce and broken homes, the scourge of alcohol and narcotics, the breakdown of discipline, the media’s indifference to marital fidelity, its trivialising of adultery and violence against women, and the rest of the unhappy lot.

            On the psycho-moral level the human values of the family must be restored, such values as trust, mutual respect and dialogue. But the really good news for marriage and the family will come from the teaching of Jesus Christ, mediated through the Church which continues the specific actions of Christ called the sacraments, and his teaching in homilies, catechetics, encyclicals and conciliar statements. The New Testament teachings about the family are not abstractions. They remain reassuringly down to earth: the mutual respect that members of a family owe to each other, issuing in empathy, compassion, considerateness, kindness, patience, gentleness, forbearance and forgiveness. What a home it would be were one to find there all the qualities just mentioned !  People would fight to come in and just hope that something of it would rub off on them and their families.

            Marriage as efficacious sign not only represents the salvific love action of Christ for his community, but actually effects it for the salvation of the world, actively re-enacting the paschal drama on the stage of life and thereby helping to re-establish the right relationship between God and man.  Marriage is a prognostic or eschatological sign, indeed, whereby husband and wife possess one another, but not exhaustively, since the person as such is destined for God who is even now taking possession of his creation. The characteristic surrender in marriage is an anticipation of the ultimate surrender to God. If love means working for the good of the other, conjugal love can have no greater intent than to hand the partner over to the ultimate consummation in God. This is coincident with the intent of pilgrimage, the essential dynamic of the Christian life.  Every family helps every other family on their way to the eternal family, viz., the most Holy Trinity, by prayer and the sharing of spiritual and material goods and cultural excellences.

            Togetherness and punctuality are key factors of home discipline and peace. Where are the children after 9.30 p.m. ?  Where are they at other times ?  Times for meals, for prayers and evening study ? Can the whole family sit together for the principal meals, and pray together for its own stability and happiness ? Or is the home a cheap hotel  where people come and go as they like without permission or information ?  Luke’s gospel tells us, “He went down with them and was subject to them.” How do sons and daughters take that line now-a-days ?  Have discipline and obedience become unmentionable words ?  Shall we insist that our children be educated into integral and competent human beings or turn out to be half-baked specimens of humanity, unable to face a competitive world ? Shall our children learn from us our prayers and refined vocabulary, or monosyllabic expletives and words of destructive criticism ?

            People, especially children, do not become good by being told to; they must be charmed  into goodness which, like love, is not taught but caught.  The environment in which we have been raised and in which we raise our children is essential to our formation and development.  A family is a very human environment, in fact, the first a child is introduced to.  The joy, the pain, the drama and the ordinary events of our lives are lived within its confines. God chose to mould and form his Son within the environment and culture of a family. He hasn’t broken the mould, since, and thrown it away, because in his mind the family continues to be the place of holiness, love and emotional sustenance.  And the Holy Family of Nazareth tells us that in God the family is not extinct.

            May God make the door every home a gateway to his eternal kingdom.