Cherish the family for a better society

The immediate Sunday celebration after the nativity of the Lord Jesus, the Mother Church’s liturgy celebrates the gift of the family. The Feast of the Holy Family. In this day the Church presents to humanity the perfect model of a holy family of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, an ideal traditional family to emulate.


The gist of the day’s gospel gives the episode in which the twelve-year old Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem devoid of his parents’ knowledge. He was engaged in discourses with the elders and teachers of the faith and at the same time enjoying the company of his Father at His house. Wonderful! No? But he was far from his foster home, Nazareth.


Three days later, Luke the Evangelist reports, after unfruitful search in the neighborhoods, his parents landed a deep sigh of relief finding their son in the right place amongst the right persons but in the wrong time!


Like any other human parent, Joseph and Mary were astonished and annoyed by this action of their son. Finding him not amongst his peers, where the search must have began, must have astonished them even more, while at the same time annoyed by not asking their permission to stay behind in the temple. Again, they must have suppressed their feelings, a reason probably of Joseph’s dead silence, and acted out diplomatically in respect of the audience and the milieu.


Instinctively, such a tedious and annoying search of a young boy who knows the direction of his home would land him a thunderous slap on his cheeks, mangotos on the head to awaken the brain and followed by litany of insults from the furious mum. Then he is to be dragged home to face the wrath of an angry father who should have used that sweat to plane five pieces of timber.


This instead wasn’t the scenario at the Temple of Jerusalem. The last two verses of that gospel, Luke 2:41-52, reveals the uniqueness of this family. “He went down with them…and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.” These verses posit the prime function of a family.


But what is a family? Wait. The institution of the family has received threats from all fronts in the recent days. Same sex marriage is one of them. It frustrates natural expansion of the family and the human community. But in the case of the natural marriage of the opposite sexes, the gravest threat that emerges that imperils this sacramental bond is divorce. The latter tears apart the family and the familial result, offspring, are left asunder.


All human beings belong to a family, and must have at some point experience the true taste of a family despite the challenges that is embedded in the human society. Yes! The family is the prime unit and the beginning of the human society. Aristotle, a renowned Greek philosopher, describes family as a fundamental community between men and women in his ‘politica’ whereas, St. Augustine in his De bono conjugali speaks of marriage as “the first natural bond of human society.”


Like the holy family, Jesus was provided with the opportunity to express himself and advance in both wisdom and faith, so too, in the normal family where we all belong, forming the space for moral and religious upbringing. In the family, one expects warmth and security at least of life. It is the school where faith in God and basic fundamental human knowledge is planted at its initial stages, a perfect catechetical class.


Unfortunately, this task of the family as a moral and spiritual teacher of its members escapes it. One party might seem bossy and oppressive while the other naïve and submissive. In the due process the whole organ lacks genuine transformation which gets reflected in the larger society.


It should be the task of the wife to help the husband, the husband to help the wife, the parents to help their offspring and the offspring to help the parents. This is putting the energies and interests together towards genuine happiness and for the glory of God.


As we begin the year, this should be the spirit by which we transform our society. To make it flourish beyond all odds, by all sorts of virtues that seems unattainable. Let’s begin in the family and proceed to the jumia ndogo ndogo, then centers and finally, in the whole church in which we all belong as members of one family, the children of God, Father of us all. Have a prosperous familial year!