For days I have been trying to find out how old today's feast is, the Feast of the Holy Family. I have been unsuccessful, but I am almost certain that it is a fairly late feast in the history of the church. It is certainly as old as Easter, Epiphany, or even Christmas. I think that this fact is significant and what I would like to do today is ruminate on this business of the family.

This feast is not likely to have been an early one because the early feasts were much more closely attached to biblical stories than were the later ones. And if you look at the New Testament, and if you were to take a concordance, or a biblical dictionary, and look under the title "family" I think you would discover some fairly astonishing things. First of all, there is virtually no reference to the family. For example, when I was growing up and attending Catholic grade school, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were like a second Trinity. You had your family, then you had them, and then you had God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All this is profoundly misleading and I think the onus of that misconception is what is driving my thoughts on today's feast. To get back to the biblical material, virtually every time the family is mentioned in the New Testament it is done so with a warning.

There is this astonishing passage in Mark, for example, which was so scandalous and shocking that when Matthew and Luke came to rework it they left it out. The passage depicts Jesus, who had been out for days, running around with his followers. He is sitting in a house talking, when his family comes to take him home because they think he is crazy, which in those days, of course, also meant that you were diabolically possessed. This was so scandalous that even its mention in later New Testament thought was absolutely unacceptable and so Matthew and Luke left it out. We can assume, therefore, that this event was historically accurate. So it seems that Jesus was very much an extern of his family, and, of course, in those days family meant a very extended group of people, not just his mother and father. Later, Jesus hauls off and basically disallows his biological family by saying: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Who are my sisters?". This is absolutely consistent throughout the New Testament. In other words, who are my family? In this passage from Mark, Jesus' biological roots are simply discounted because his family is constituted by a common fidelity to God. Thus, is blood thicker than water? It would seem not.

Then, of course, we have another complicating problem with getting to the point in which we can think in a useful and helpful way about the Holy Family today. There is, amongst fundamentalist Christians, this enormous focus on the family. Take, for example, this big group in Boulder, Colorado with their mega-zillionare headquarters, journals, and television ads, where the family is absolutely central. The Promise Keepers, another fundamentalist Christian movement, are another example of this. Over and over again you see this extraordinary focus and concentration on the family among fundamentalist groups. What kind of family are they talking about? They are talking about the so called nuclear family. I am not an historian or a sociologist but, from what I have read its seems the nuclear family is a fairly recent invention. Molly and me and baby makes three in My Blue Heaven, which was written in the 1920's, was, I suspect, a very interesting and novel idea during this period. However, the family, for most of the human race, is a much larger reality than what we conceive the family to be today: mother, father, and child(ren). For some individuals in various parts of the world relatives exist in large numbers. For example, from what I understand about African languages, the word "mother" and "father" is extraordinarily elastic. You can call anybody mother, father, uncle, sister, or brother. And I suspect that is true in other places as well.

As we are just finishing the celebration of Christmas there is yet another factor: the big family celebration. It seems to me, at least in my experience and through the casual observation of other peoples' families, that this is a very tough time and somewhat of a strain on families because peoples' expectations are so high. We are all supposed to love each other and be nice. This really does not work. It never had in my original biological family. So what do we do with the Feast of the Holy Family? I think we have to go back to that material in the New Testament that is echoed in this passage from 1 Samuel that Catherine read. For those of us who have children, we are to recognize first of all, that our children belong to God before they belong to us. I believe that an enormous part of the strain that occurs in families is based on the belief that we, as parents, have total responsibility for these human beings. We simply do not! If we really believe that we have absolute and total responsibility for other human beings then this will lead to serious problems. So, although this flies directly in the face of the myth of My Blue Heaven with Molly and me and baby, at the same time it is somewhat liberating. It is liberating because these others are God's people more fundamentally then they are mine. Therefore every move you make, word you say, outburst of anger, or moment of virtue you have is not going to determine ultimately the outcome of the lives of these people. This is not the case. And even all those other things that we feel are such great assaults on the family unit - and they are real - do not determine this. For example, television is one such assault on the family.

There was a ghastly statistic along these lines that the CBC announced: 46% of Canadian children prefer their computers to their friends. There are all kinds of things that are assaulting the family. I certainly do not have the recipe for family success, I do not even know what the ingredients are for what constitutes a family that is "successful" except by going back to this business of what we can learn from the New Testament. These biblical texts teach us that our kids are God's children and the best that we can do for our children is to be as faithful to God as we can be in our own lives. That is the determining factor, not all the Dr. Spock, Dr. Ruth, or Doctor whoever books. When we speak of families we are ultimately talking about engendering the base for successful human beings; we are talking about how we can help people grow up. Does this, therefore, alleviate the sense of responsibility that we have for the little human beings who are in our company for a short period of time? I do not think so. But it does help us to see the larger facts of life, namely, that these are not just our children, this is not just my wife, my husband, or my partner, because they are God's, first of all. And I think if you look at all that literature, I do not know whether anybody reads these things from the Focus on the Family kinds of people, you will see what I mean. This literature drives me crazy because it is just full of detailed recipes on how to have a successful family: Read this book, follow this therapeutic model, or this anthropological scheme, and everything will work. I do not think so.

So to go back to something I previously suggested, I think one of the most useful things to remember is first of all that these are God's people and God is more concerned about them than we are. God is more able to intervene in their lives, sooner or later, in a more profound and transformative way than we, as parents, are able to.