Given all that let me say that our Church’s liturgical year also pays attention to the importance of family. Once each year, it celebrates the feast of the Holy Family, Joseph, Mary and Jesus. From all the hints of family life in the gospels, the Church chooses St. Luke’s anecdote today regarding the twelve-year-old “runaway Jesus” and his three-day visit to His Father’s house, the temple in Jerusalem. Without doubt this incident actually happened the way Luke describes it. Why else would he even write about it?

The human quality of that event, however, loses some its human character insofar as Jesus is portrayed as the new Lawgiver who, amazingly at the early age of twelve, understands the Torah in all its complexity. It is already a hint at age 12 of Jesus’ divine nature. All well and good.

There are, however, are some other lovely human elements that tell us that this event had the quality of a family squabble. Jesus’ mother, Mary gets a bit snippety and asks her son how he could possibly do such a dim-witted thing. “What possessed you?” she said? Didn’t it occur to you that your father and I might have been worried about your safety?” Isn’t this exactly what any mother father would have said to a senseless son? “You are coming home with us, we still love you ok?”

I use this anecdote to point out that there are many incidents in the gospels that portray family life exactly as it is. Think, for instance, of the incident when Jesus began encountering some serious threats from enemy factions. What happens? His mother, brothers and sisters come out and plead with him to come home. They did not want him to get hurt by the belligerent crowds.

On another occasion, his family came out simply to speak to him and check on his health. What is Jesus’ reply? “I already have a family that you do not know about.” Not a very respectful reply to a sincere question from his own mother.

I simply wanted to highlight those two incidents to point out that there are some very beautiful human incidents in the gospels that are at the very foundation of Jesus divinity.

Could not one say, therefore, that in the world’s human community there are factors that have the quality of true holiness?

All this leads me to say that in every human family there is a certain quality of grace something that reminds us that this is God’s way of telling us that being family is the way of redemption. Despite all the crazy things we do: our quarrelsomeness, our anger, our pettiness, but also our love our howls of laughter, our fierce defense of our brother or sister in times of stress, all this is a sacramental analogy for holiness. Yes, despite its defects we will still weep with our family and for them when all goes badly. In short, we do not choose our family; they are God’s gift to us as we are to one another.

Given all that, I say once again that even if we do not have a traditional family at this moment in our lives, we will go out and seek one. True, it may not look very much like the one in which we grew up but we are naturally so hungry for companionship that we will create one if it comes to that.

So, let us thank our God whose family is the Trinity that we have been graced with people who may not be perfect but they are all we have and that will be enough until we join God’s family in heaven’s kingdom.

The scriptures: 1 Samuel 1: 20-22; 1 John 3: 1-2, 22-24; Luke 2: 41-52