There is a big difference between a house and home. A house is a place full of furniture, utilities, and “stuff.” A home is the place which a family creates, the place to which we can always return and be sure of a welcome. It is the place where we taste on earth the joy and peace of “the place” (the home) which God has waiting for us in heaven.
The Feast of the Holy Family does not leave out those whose experience of family is somehow unique or different from what some would insist is the perfect and only way to be family. Family, in the end, is about relationships, not about assigned roles of parenting, providing, or homemaking. Not all of us live in nuclear families. Some of us live alone. Some of us come from broken families, or we belong to some wider groups linked by blood or by other ties (like religious communities). Monasteries and convents, for example, are intentional families with brothers and sisters who love and care for one another. What all of us have in common, we hope, is a home, and that is where today’s Feast leads us. It leads us to look at and reflect upon our homes as places where we find God and are sanctified by what happens there.
***
For further reflection: Today’s Feast proposes that, somehow, we have to make certain that our homes are open toward heaven – not only by the way we live and treat one another in those homes, but also by the prayers that are offered there, the sacrifices made in love, the forgiveness extended from one to another, and the loving service freely shared.
The Church has always believed that the home is the first and fundamental “church,” the first community of love. The bigger Church is never stronger or more enduring than the family homes that make up a parish. Remember this as you leave Mass this weekend: you carry within you the Body and Blood of Christ – who not only wants to but does live in your home. Be sure to thank Him for that grace.
