Wisdom that heals

Celebrating the Holy Family, we may be tempted to concentrate on the dramatic signs of dissolution in the family today. But the Word of God reminds us once again of what our contemporary culture persuades us to forget. "Among all the changes going on in the world, none is more important than those happening in our personal lives - in sexuality, relationships, marriage and the family" (A. Giddens).

The feast of the Holy Family was instituted by Pope Leo XIII specifically to counter the disintegration of the traditional family in the wake of the industrial revolution. Today there is a global revolution going on in how we think of ourselves and how we form ties and connections with others.

It is about these ties that the Book of Ecclesiastes speaks in today's first reading. The best remedy against present-day family and marriage diseases is 'wisdom'. The wisdom which helps us recover from going round in circles debating sexual equality, rights, and freedom of choice, but remaining always within the framework of the individualism and consumerism of so-called liberal values.

In our talk on marriage and the family, we need to speak more of the ties and connections that weave the fabric of our daily lives. We need to speak more of forgiveness, healing and redemption.

Family relationships, according to the Book of Ecclesiastes, constitute one of those areas where God can truly be worshipped. "Whoever respects his father is atoning for his sins, he who honours his mother is like someone amassing a fortune". We keep on discussing, perhaps even to extremes, about children's behaviour and providing all sorts of therapies. But we are all along missing very important points.

We all acknowledge that children are among the most vulnerable members of society. But then, instead of finding the courage to go back to basics, we continue to invent myths to justify the mind-set we ourselves created or which we consider difficult to resist. Myths like: that quality time makes up for lack of time; that child-care is the same as parental care; that what we cannot give, we can pay others to give; that all sorts of families - stable or fractured, male-female or single sex - are the same in their effects upon a child.

The survival of a marriage today depends on the couple's commitment. In the absence of cultural and institutional supports, we need inner resources above all. It's on this wisdom that the Church's vision about marriage and the family is built. The traditional idea of the family - father, mother, and children, faithful and committed to each other for life - comes from human nature and from God who designed it. It is a received tradition we need to recover. We cannot arbitrarily redefine the family and reinvent the rules.

The anxiety of Mary and Joseph in today's gospel, looking for Jesus in the crowd and having to go all the way back to Jerusalem, finding him three days later in the temple, is the same anxiety marking us today in search of true and solid foundations for family life.

As a believing community, we are experiencing a serious breakdown in communication with the world around us about a life or death matter. Before struggling only to defend the old models of the family with nostalgia, there is a truth which as believers we need to speak out loud. But we need patient discernment and much wisdom. Otherwise we're doomed to be losers on all fronts.