December 29 – Feast of the Holy Family
Family: a School of Mercy and Community — Part I
Sarah and Patrick Williams are friends of ours from Texas. They have been married for 14 years and have nine children, whom they homeschool. They recently gave us a talk by zoom. At this time of year when we honor the Holy Family, here are their reflections about family life.
Patrick: Why is community so important? Because God made us for community. God himself is a community of three persons, and he invites us to enter into his life as community. And we know that love requires community. You can’t really have love outside of relationships.
Love is the gift of self. The Father gives himself to the Son. That is his identity: he is the one who completely and utterly gives himself. The Son receives himself from the Father. That’s his identity.
When he receives from the Father, he turns around and gives himself completely to the Father as an act of thanksgiving. The two of them are engaged in this mutual, complete laying down of self to one another. And then, the bond is so strong between the two that this act of love between them is the Holy Spirit, who is also the outflowing of the Trinity.
Three is the smallest number that love requires in order to be true love. If you have just two people, and they lock others out of their lives, their relationship is unhealthy because their love is only focused on themselves. But if you have a third person, you can say: “Look at Sarah; she’s so wonderful. I want somebody else to love her as I do.”
To form community, you need to be able to receive and to give. Our love always has to be bigger than ourselves for it to be true. God calls us to relationships that are overflowing and fruitful and that move outside themselves.
Community is important, because that’s how God lets us love the way he loves. We can love our neighbor before our neighbor gives anything to us, just as we love our little baby before our baby can even smile back at us.
What were things like in the Garden of Eden? In John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, he paints this beautiful picture of man in his innocence. But then we have the Fall. We have original sin, and now there’s this boundary we can’t cross, like a wall we can’t see across to see how man was before the Fall.
But there are certain experiences in our life that we call “boundary experiences,” as if that wall between us and the Garden of Eden has a few cracks in it through which we can sort of peer to get a glimmer of how things should be.
These boundary experiences may seem negative, but they are actually God telling us something about ourselves and what we’re made for.
Human frailty is one of those things. It shows us, through our brokenness, that we’re meant to be whole, resilient. Our broken relationships tell us we’re meant to live in perfect relationship with each other. Alone, we’re not enough, so it forces us to be receptive to one another.
If I’m broken, I have to allow Sarah to come in and help fix my brokenness, the things that are sort of wrecked in my own life. Whenever I recognize Sarah’s brokenness, I can step in and help her.
When our seventh child was born, our son Beckett, he couldn’t poop for the first nine days of his life. He had all these problems; he would drink his milk and then throw it all up.
It was a real struggle until they finally diagnosed that his intestines hadn’t turned all the way in the womb and would tend to flip over each other and cause these blockages. The night they did surgery on him, we were just decimated. We had no idea whether he would live or not.
In the hospital, all the medical staff crammed into the room went silent as I baptized him. Then they all went right back to doing their stuff. It was a moment of respect for us, and it was a community experience.
Then our entire community came together to help us. People we didn’t even know were bringing us meals, and friends were looking after our kids and cleaning our bathrooms. People in the town where the hospital was gave us a place to stay and when Sarah got sick and had to go home, they even loaned me a car for my use while I was there.
Grace after grace came to us through the beauty of the community around us. These low moments in our lives, these times of being broken, can actually be the moments Christ is using to build community. These people were being blessed themselves by helping us.
◈◈◈
Sarah: I think of some of the struggles of living in community as concupiscence, the tendency to sin that we all have, the tendency to pull away from God.
When we got married, we had to struggle to find our prayer life together as a couple. We all have a tendency to pull away, to not want to make time for God.
No matter how strong we may be, sometimes coming together in community, can actually be a bit of a blockage to our prayer life with God. All of a sudden, there is somebody else, and you are embarrassed to pray in front of them.
Or even, we’re watching this movie, but we need to go to bed, or we need to pray first, but I don’t want to be the one to say, “Let’s stop the movie and pray,” because then I’m nagging. So many things pop up that can keep you from God. It takes a lot to be purposeful, because concupiscence is always knocking at the door and trying to pull you away.
When our kids came, we realized we weren’t as selfless as we’d thought we were. Walking with my firstborn daughter every night when she was crying and screaming, I had to remind myself that she wasn’t trying to make me mad! One night it hit me: this feels awful, but my mom did this for me! And for all the rest of my siblings.
Your children reveal your vices to you or you may even form new ones, just because of the natural struggles involved in raising children. You think they’re little angels, but I never see concupiscence as clearly as I do on my little one-year-old’s face when I tell him, “Don’t do that.” He looks at me as if to say, “I am going to do it!”
Obviously, he’s not sinning, but that desire to go against what he’s been told, that push, is so blatant in the little ones. It’s there at the very beginning — our tendency to turn against God, our selfishness, our laziness, our vices.
God doesn’t just take away our inclination to sin when we are baptized. It can help us to come to him faster. It’s like he is saying: “I could take your vices away, but then you would take forever to get to me. I am going to leave them, because they will help you.”
They humble us, help us to remember our true littleness before our Creator, and increase our compassion towards other people. Because when we recognize those tendencies within ourselves, we are more able to understand and forgive them in others.
(To be continued…)
Icon of the Holy Family by ©Marysia Kowalchyk, Madonna House
