Homily for December 30, 2007 Feast of the Holy Family

As I said in the beginning, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family each year on this first Sunday after Christmas. So I spent the last few days reading over sermons from different sources about the Holy Family, statements of Popes about the Feast of the Holy Family and different religious writings about the family. I didn't like any of them.
So I woke up this morning, and my prayer was, "Oh, God, please don't let me say something stupid, or something inane, or something incredibly pious that will show how little I know about the topic." That said, I want to risk a few reflections on the readings today.
First, the Gospel. What family would we compare the Holy Family to? I have to confess ignorance here. I don't watch television, so I don't know how the family is portrayed on television today. Can anybody help me out? What are family models on TV?
They're comedies, or broken up families, or families with lots of turmoil. Okay, that's different than when I was growing up and the “Leave It to Beaver” family, or the “Father Knows Best” family were the models. They were all intact families, full of wisdom and happiness.
We know very little from the Gospel about the psychological life of the Holy Family or about their inner life. We don't know what struggles they faced. But, as I thought of families in the world that I might compare the Holy Family to, I thought of the millions of refugee families and immigrant families. I thought the Holy Family would be much better compared to those refugee or to immigrant families, because that's what they were, and that's how they're portrayed in the Gospel. They were a family on the run from political oppression. They were a family on the margins. They were a family whose origins were marked with the scandal of an apparent unwed pregnancy.
I thought if we want to understand them, perhaps we need to enter into that experience of being a refugee or an immigrant. To some extent, isn't that true of all of our families? We are buffeted about by social and economic forces that can make us feel like refugees and immigrants in the world in which we live. What do the readings offer us by way of wisdom?
It eems to me that in the first two readings, there is a long list of virtues. I'm going to recall the ones that I remember and invite you to chime in.
I heard this list: humility, meekness, compassion, kindness, bearing with one another’s weakness and shortcomings, forgiveness, obedience, honor, respect and Love. Over all these, put on love. Any others?
It seemed to me, in reflecting on the biblical view of family, there are certain virtues, certain attitudes that make for a happy life, and bind us together. There's the hint that we need to discover those virtues in our life. There's the hint that the happy family is the one who can live by those virtues. There's a hint that somehow God is at work in all of this, and that we need to be obedient to God's purposes in our life. Would you buy into that? And that somehow there's a call to celebrate that and to be very intentional about our pursuit of that way of life.
I know I've spoken in generalities. When we get to specifics, people will argue about them, and that's good and that's healthy. When we get the specifics and who models those and who doesn't model those, there can be a wide variety of opinions.
But I think what unites us all is the recognition that there are certain virtues in life that we can only discover. We don't create them for ourselves. They're there to be discovered and to be embodied in the way we live.
And I know I've used this before on the Feast of the Holy Family, and I want to use it again. I want to invite you into some reflection on your own. Think of the people with whom you live, and ask yourself these questions: Who are these people with whom I live? Why has God made them? Why did God make me? Does God love them? Does God love me? Why has God brought us together?