December 29, 2024
The Holy Family
FOCUS: Let the peace of Christ control your hearts.
Our readings today point to the importance of reverencing one another with respect and charity. We are to honor our parents and let the peace of Christ control [our] hearts. We are to put on love and strive always to live with gratitude.
What's in Your Heart
One’s own experience of family is extremely important in one’s faith development. God calls us to a larger understanding of family than just our family of origin. Both these statements are true.
​
-
Can I think of a specific instance where my family nurtured and shaped my faith? Are there ways in which they inhibited my growth in faith?
​
-
When did I begin to get a notion that I was more than just a member of my own family, that I had a calling and a mission?
​
-
Whom do I exclude from my notion of family? Am I aware of ways in which my limited sense of the human family limits my growth in faith?
Homily Stories
“Careful, you’re scaring the normals,” Michael Berzatto’s cousin warns him when he throws a fork across the table at Christmas Eve dinner in the “Fishes” episode of the hit show The Bear. The family’s emotional excesses, addictions, and dysfunctions are on full display as they share in a traditional Italian-American feast of the seven fishes. The family dynamics are heartbreaking, funny, and in many ways very relatable, which makes it compelling TV.
​
Families are messy bundles of congealed emotions. When the heat of bodies gathered for a family meal is applied, resentments bubble to the surface and tempers flare. Saint Paul has the perfect recipe for just such occasions: “Put on heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.” Wow, what family couldn’t use a reminder to be forbearing with the conspiracy theorists in our midst; patient with the embellishments and meanderings of some of our storytellers; forgiving of all the barbs and digs that invariably get tossed, some in good fun, some not.
​
Then in a final step, Paul’s recipe requires that we fold in all the drama and lay love on top of it. Ah yes, love, the essential ingredient that makes a family holy.
​
First Reading
Second Reading
Gospel
Video Reflection
Quotes
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
—George Bernard Shaw
​
It didn’t matter how big our house was; it mattered that there was love in it.
—Peter Buffett
​