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O'Malley's Best

The Holy Family

[Ho-ho-ho! I goofed! Sunday is a feast of Our Lady and Jesus' naming. But I-dumbly-thought it was the Holy Family. Even after I'd realized, I alibied that, to the people I homilize for, the Holy Family was more fitting. And do you trash the birthday cake because it's got the wrong name? If it violates liturgical purity, I apologize unrepentantly and suggest you click and consign it to the ether!]

For years our PTA meetings were 3-5, 7-9, like a wake, and-even after a full school day- bearable. But a couple of years ago, unchallengeable powers changed that to noon-to-four-thirty, six-to-nine, right up there with Chinese water torture and gargling broken glass. Even if my approval and delight at this new practice is somewhat qualified, I'd be the last to deny the need for such exchanges. The kids are 95% of what my life is about, and the more I know about them, the better I can help them grow. I just wish more parents could avail themselves of the chance. Perhaps they'd feel an easement in their fears about this wrinkled old madman who's screwing up their sons' shatter-proof certitudes, and I'd have a better sense of why the kids' resistances were so absolute. Uncountable times I've come away from a PTA meeting muttering to myself, " You poor kid! How could your defenses be otherwise?"

Home is the place we get our first notions of who we are and who we can be. Our basic personalities are formed by the time we're three, not by some reasoned choice, but from a gut-response to our parents and siblings. Some kids emerge into adolescence guarded, reserved, only reluctantly forthcoming; others burst into it at least externally confident, extroverted, ready to challenge even before they know what the hell you're claiming. When I get them, in senior year, they've been hurt enough that they can begin to doubt, begin to take advantage of their newly-emerged powers of reasoning, begin forming a personally-validated character-which is quite, quite different from the personality they instinctively habituated themselves into.

A quite curvy approach to the Holy Family-which, for all we know, consisted of just a carpenter, his young wife, and a child who unbeknownst to all but a very few (perhaps even to himself) was the Son of God.. From all we've been given to believe, this was the most perfect human child who ever lived, and these were the most perfect parents, models for all mothers and fathers-a man and woman no less human than anyone else, but facing a challenge considerably more daunting than we face in guiding children to healthy personalities and solid characters.

Just as we can tell a great deal about an artist from her work and about Our Creator from his work, and just as a teacher can get at least a sketchy idea of a child's parents from the child, we can get at least some notion of Mary and Joseph not only from the unelaborated descriptions of them in the gospels but from the Son they groomed for his life's mission. And in so doing, we might find a clearer focus of our own tasks as parents and teachers.

From the gospels, we know Our Lady was humble before God's inscrutable will, puzzled but patient with her son's mystifying choices staying behind in the Temple and leaving a perfectly predictable carpenter's life to be a vagabond preacher. Joseph had at least as profound trust in God and in his young wife, accepting her preposterous claim of virgin pregnancy and God's hardly-rational urging to flee to Egypt. But of course the best insights into Mary and Joseph- which I confess I've never considered before-is studying the Son they raised into adulthood.

St. Paul says in Philippians that, at the Incarnation, the Son of God "emptied himself," gave up all perquisites of divinity like limitless knowledge (while still being God) so that he could also become fully human, learning step-by-step, suffering doubt and second-thoughts as we do. So Mary and Joseph faced a child who was a tabula rasa, just like any other parents, and we can see from their grown Son how successful they were.

Ponder Jesus' habits of dealing with people (his personality) and his manifest principles (his character), and you'll understand all three members of the Holy Family better. You'll probably focus on some other aspect, but for me the facet of Jesus that most reveals what good parents and teachers should foster is tolerance. For someone sinless-by-definition, Jesus was astounding in his empathy with weakness, non-judgmental, refusing to make people conform to expectations. "Why, he sits down with sinners and eats and drinks with them, like old friends! ...The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath....Then neither do I condemn you... Much has been forgiven her because she has loved much....Father, forgive them; they don't know what they're doing."

I've been trying for 45 years to teach empathy-which is the utterly essential predisposition for genuine forgiveness. But, other than service projects, I have no sure-fire methods. But I do know you don't teach it by shielding children-the way I always pictured the family of Nazareth: isolated in a sacred bubble of perfection from nastiness and dirt and unpleasantness and harsh words and unguarded tempers and downright hateful people.

What a hurtful lesson for any good parent: In order for kids to empathize with hurt and reach out to ease it, they have to feel hurt themselves.

Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit