Put On Love

Put On Love

December 30, 2012

Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph 2012 C

By Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ

God sets a father in honor over his children; a mother's authority he confirms over her sons.  Whoever honors his father atones for sins, and preserves himself from them.  When he prays, he is heard; he stores up riches who reveres his mother.  Sirach 3:2-4

Put on, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.  And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.  And let the peace of Christ control your hearts, the peace into which you were also called in one body.  Colossians 3:12-15

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.  When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, "Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”   Luke 2:46-48

Piety

Piety begins in the family of God.  Piety is the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit that makes one God out of three divine persons.  Piety is our oneness with God.  Created by the Father through the Son and alive through the life of the Spirit within us we reflect God's love by the oneness we share together that has its beginning in the family life that makes our lives possible.  The tragedy of an abandoned child is in the cutting off of what life should be.  Piety is not only our oneness with God that makes up our spiritual life.  Piety is also the wonder in the reflection of goodness of the parents in the child.   The Holy Family is the human expression of the mystery of Trinity.  We celebrate the fullness of the mystery of the incarnation when we celebrate the Word of God become flesh to dwell with us and finally expressed In us by our lived piety.

Study

We come to appreciate our parents as we grow older.  We leave behind us whatever thoughts we might have had about the parents we would have chosen.  God gives us the parents we have.  In the mystery of the love he has for us in that choice, we discover what it means to let God be God.  If we do not accept the parents we have with all their goodness and weakness, then we are playing at God and robbing God of the honor and glory we give him by honoring the parents we do have.  In growing up, we discover love as a gift that is given before we could ever deserve to be born and to be loved.  We are wedded to a partner of life that takes us away from our parents even as we become parents.  We discover that one deserves justice.  Love is given beyond the demands of justice.  One does not deserve love.  Love is the mystery of the gift of life that comes to us through love of parents.  We study parents without being aware of what we are doing and learn to be parents by what we have learned from our own parents.

Action

We work at becoming good people.  The good that one does in life lives on in the children that are part of our lives.  We work at honoring our parents all our lives because they share the glory of what we accomplish with our lives even when we do not see how that works out.   Car pools and all the ways parents are present in the lives of the children reveal  love in its nitty-gritty.  Seeing the president of the United States waiting for his daughter and writing words to honor children that were lost by senseless violence gives a real boost to meaning of any little thing.  The ordinary of life has its extraordinary meaning in how it gives growth to healthy family life.  We are born into our world to become in our very birth reflections of the Mystery of the Holy Family.  Family is the bottom line that makes sense out of the family of Nations.  We are called to be the family of the people of God where all difference will be swallowed up in the mystery of the oneness of the Holy Family that is our des tiny in Christ.