Thoughts on Family Life and Ikea Furniture
The Feast of the Holy Family
Some Thoughts on the Life of the Family and Ikea Furniture
I had a wedding ceremony on Friday night, and a wedding Mass yesterday morning, so between the rehearsals and the receptions and then the 150th Anniversary Mass and Reception for my former parish that took place just last night, I never got a chance to sit down and put together a homily for the Feast of the Holy Family.
Late last night, I mentioned to the Archbishop about my need to get to my computer and start writing. He smiled and said to me: “Well, it is the Feast of the Holy Family, so I think you should talk about Anna the prophetess.”
That was not the plan I had in mind, but he is the boss, so here is one thought I have about Anna the prophetess: the fact that Anna sees Christ, beholds Christ, meets Christ, is amazing and wildly unlikely. We are told that her father’s name is Phanuel, and she is of the tribe of Asher. What makes the story wildly unlikely is that the tribe of Asher was part of the northern kingdom of Israel, which was lost to the Assyrians in 722 B.C. The tribe of Asher was destroyed, its members killed or taken into captivity. How is it possible for an identifiable descendant of Asher to find herself in a city dozens of miles away and centuries later living her faith and awaiting the appearance of a messiah?
We know that God wanted Anna there to see Christ. Maybe theologians will disagree on what is happening at the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, but to my mind God is working through Simeon and Anna so that Mary and Joseph come to a deeper understanding of who Christ is and what his mission will be. I think we sometimes fall into the habit of looking back on the story of the Nativity and presume that Joseph and Mary possess a perfect understanding of what is happening—that God has revealed already to Mary and Joseph everything they need to know about the years ahead and now the life of their family is just a matter of sticking with the script.
But that way of making sense of the life of the Holy Family reduces the reality of following God’s will to a matter of following a set of instructions—and I do not think that is the right way of making sense of what it means to follow the will of God.
I do not think that following the will of God (for anyone) is like discerning your way into the purchase of the right piece of Ikea furniture for your home: you know you need to make the right choice about what to do with your life, so you pray about it and you think about it and you open yourself up to the will of God but then once God makes his desires known to you the rest of life is a matter of heading to the right aisle, grabbing your pre-packaged life off the self, navigating your way through the check-out line that is the Church, and then getting home and opening up that box and spending the rest of your life assembling your vocation according to the carefully laid out instructions while you try to maintain a grip on your anger with God for making you deal with these worthless tools and the thousands of little parts that must go together in just the right way otherwise nothing works the way it should because now your life looks lopsided and there is a part missing and your hinges are creaking and maybe some days you would love to make a return but the prospect of disassembling what you’ve built seems outrageous and it would never fit back in the original box anyway and now you are past your 90 days to make a return and besides you have the instructions so all you really need to do is get better at following them so maybe you just need to go back a few steps and get things right. . .
I do not think that following the will of God is anything like following a set of instructions. To follow the will of God is to make a choice for God that requires binding yourself to what is unknown now but that will be revealed to you in time. To follow the will of God is to commit yourself to a relationship defined and directed by persistent acts of revelation: the will of God becomes known to you in time and over the course of years. The Holy Family, Mary and Joseph, in these first months and years of the life of Christ, are doing the beautifully human work of pursuing the will of God despite the fact that the full meaning of what is happening is not yet revealed to them.
So, to get back to the figure of Anna the prophetess. How is it possible that a woman belonging to a tribe lost to violence and conquest over 700 years before the birth of Christ is there to behold the Messiah when he is presented in the Temple? The answer consists of two parts: first, God wanted Anna there at the Temple, and second, Joseph and Mary wanted Christ there at the Temple. The mystery of the Presentation is what follows from the life of a family remaining perfectly open to the will of God even though so much remains unknown and so much is yet to be revealed.
The life of the Holy Family, really, is not so different from the life of any family that wants whatever God wants. The family makes a choice for God that requires binding themselves what is unknown now but that will be revealed in time. No family—not even the Holy Family—possesses a full and complete understanding of what God wants and what will happen in the years to come. That kind of life would reduce the life of the family to a matter of knowing and following instructions. And that is the kind of life that does not require active and persistent trust in God, a life of perpetual prayer and openness to revelation about what God wants, a life marked by the confidence that comes from authentic faith that what is unknown now will become known in time, that whatever remains hidden of the will of God will in time be made manifest.
What I want you to know is that the family is the place where we first learn to follow the will of God. Maybe we can say more: the life of the family creates a space for the sudden and dramatic appearance of God in the world. The life of the family is where God shows up. Have you ever really thought about what is happening with the mystery of Christmas? In a few moments, these words will be spoken at the altar:
For in the mystery of the Word made flesh, a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind, so that, as we recognize in him God made visible, we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible.
In Christ, the invisible God becomes visible, and the unknown God becomes known. And where the invisible God becomes visible and how the unknown God becomes known is through the life of a family. The life of a family creates a space for the sudden and dramatic appearance of God in the world. And that fact is true for any family that makes the choice for God and remains open to his will.
Many people talk these days about how modern culture and society make life hard for families. The life of the family is under attack, we are often told. I think those kinds of claims are true enough, but I also think those kinds of claims have usually been true for families in one way or another. Go through the scriptures and find me a family that had an easy life, a life untroubled by the workings of a corrupt culture or broken social structures, and maybe I will change my mind.
I think the greater threat to families in the modern world comes from inside the life of many families. Family life to us today seems ordinary, typical, just the thing you do when you get older to find some meaning and value for your life. Family life is not easy, and it gets boring, so there are football and vacations and social media and streaming services out there for us to make life seem more interesting. There is genuine love within families, meaningful love, but that love is often limited to what is human—personal accomplishments, achievements, projects. So, the stakes are highest for many families when it comes to kids getting good grades or into the right college or making the varsity team or sitting first chair for the upcoming recital and these pursuits become the obsession of families and a source of anxiety and anger and occasional sadness and it all happens because the life of the family today seems ordinary, typical—mundane.
And, in case you do not know, the word mundane most literally means ‘of the earth.’ Many families see the life of the family as a human project only. Maybe God is a part of the project, but the project itself is human and so it is vulnerable to the boredom and tedium and the frustration that comes from any life that is not radically open to the will of God.
So there, to my mind, is maybe the greatest threat to families in the world today: our forgetting of the truth that the life of the family creates a space for the dramatic and sudden appearance of God in the world. God appears in the world whenever a person makes a choice for God and remains open to his will and that kind of life takes root in us and is formed in us in and through the life of the family. You see in the life of Joseph and Mary the reality of a family life bound up with the will of God. There is desire and faith and an abundance of virtue but there is not perfect knowledge of what God wants or how the future will unfold.
There are no instructions for family life, no how-to guide that makes the will of God perfectly known to us and removes the need for persistent and active trust in God—and that is as true for the life of the Holy Family as it is for yours.
And why would we want there to be that kind of knowledge? What kind of excitement and goodness could possibly come from simply following a set of instructions?
The life of the family, when we get it right, is not a human project—it is a work of divine revelation.
Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on December 31st, 2023