Saturday, December 28, 2013

Blessed Are All


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

Blessed are all who fear the LORD, and who walk in his ways.  What your hands provide you will enjoy; you will be blessed and prosper:  Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your home, your children like young olive plants around your table.  Just so will the man be blessed who fears the LORD.  Psalm 128 1-4

He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, He shall be called a Nazorean.  Matthew 2:23

Piety
Piety flows around those things, places and people that are dear in our life. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are family. They are the preeminent family because they are the meeting of the human and the divine.  Trinity as the source of the Holy Family is the home of every family. In a very loose sense of the word, Trinity is family.    The three persons of the Trinity are real persons. They are family as one God. The mystery of their unity is not family. Their unity is in the equality they have in the mystery of Goodness. God is beholden to no other. Family is the richness of history that has its meaning in the ultimate sense of Family in God as the creator of all of us. We would not know God as Trinity if God did not reveal self to us. We honor God as Trinity when we allow the mystery of God to continue. Family is not mystery. It is the mutual gift of mother and father that bring a child into the world. Mary bringing Jesus into our world brought us into the family of God.

Study
The breakup of many families in our time is worth studying. Power, riches and glory can break up family when any one of the trio becomes more important to a spouse than the other spouse. How we commit ourselves to God in the Religious life has the same problem  The commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our mind, heart, soul, strength, in short, with all of ourselves. Intimacy with a spouse covers much more than sexuality and job. How we give our lives for one another is accepting the truth that there might be better people and jobs to tempt us, but family and spouse are the ultimate cement of intimacy and  relationship.  God is willing to share all of himself with us in his Son.  Spouses learn to share all of themselves with each other.  So a marriage will last. The goal is to be on the journey to ultimate togetherness which will be found in Christ, hopefully during life but definitely in heaven. The Son in order to belong to all of us had to give his life for all of us. We study how to belong to God realizing that the father gives us his Son to be one of us. The Son loves us to the extent that he gives his life for all people and leaves us free to accept his gift by the way we live our lives in his name.

Action
Paul gives children the challenge to honor their fathers.  Mothers possess the same authority over their children. How we relate to our parents passes over to our children in how they will honor us. In everything we do, we must try to honor the way Christ loved his human parents and how he loved us.  We will be blessed in how we honor our parents. Family life is a God relationship that gives meaning to how we honor God.  Joseph and Mary, doing what is best for Christ in fleeing to Egypt, offer parents the challenge to bring up their children up in the safety of family love.

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