Feast of the Holy Family--Lost and Found

Praise the Lord! “Mom, where are you?” “Over here?” I would go on to ask the question numerous times as I wondered out from our kitchen over the gravel driveway and out into the lawn. Each time I would ask the question the answer became more and more distant and muffled. I was in search for my mother, but I had wondered away from home never realizing that the voice was coming from the garage. I walked down Juniper Street along the bay and kept calling only to find that I no longer could hear the voice. I ended up on the corner of Juniper and Joliet about a quarter mile down the road with a family discovering a lost soul. They took me home and I was no longer lost.

How often do we find ourselves lost and separated from our loved ones? There are times when we find ourselves so very far away from the familiar voices that bring us together. Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family and Jesus has been lost. Now wouldn’t you like to have the problem that Mary and Joseph had? They had lost their child, but found him in Church? Think about it parents, if you where searching in desperation for your teenage son or daughter and found them in church? That would be a good problem to have wouldn’t it? I would be like, “Wow, am I glad I found you. Tell you what, you just stay lost because if you want to hang out at the Church, more power to ya!”

It is a universal experience to be lost and separated. In fact, it is part of our human condition to separate ourselves from others. Image how separated we may feel from our families at time. We are lost in broken relationships through physical, emotional, sexual, or verbal abuse. We are separated and lost in rifts between siblings and arguments about money. Again and again, the vary idea of the togetherness of family is thwarted by the scattering effect of sin.

It is so very interesting to note the “Diabalo” in Spanish means to scatter. The evil one’s desire is to separate us from God to scatter us far away from Him and to lose us in the disconnectedness of the world. And time and time again, we come to Mass finding ourselves in hurt and broken family relationships. But Sunday after Sunday, we return to Mass to be gathered up again and brought together.

Never in my life have I been together to church with my entire family. I expected that ordination may be the first time, but I was one short. The scattering of our lives through disinterested hearts can be the common and universal experience of all families, but we can never lose the hope that our Lord Jesus is always calling us back to come together. This regrouping will sometimes manifest itself in the hear and now, other times we live with the hurt of having disunity and discord in our families, but we must not ever give up hope.

There is a particularly great scene from the movie, “Stolen Summer,” about an Irish Catholic family that grows up in Chicago in the sixties. The mother is getting her eight children ready for Sunday Mass and there is complete chaos and confusion. As she is strapping her youngest baby in the car seat of their wood paneled station wagon, there is a child sticking bubble gum on the rearview mirror and a teenager complaining about having to go to Mass. A beautiful line comes from the mother to one of the complaining kids, “God has given you 168 hours a week, you can at least give Him one hour back! That leaves you with 167 hours left!” The scene changes to the camera scanning the family sitting together in the front pew shoulder to shoulder. Of course you have your common chaotic motion of eight kids, but you see a family together, gathered together and found in the church.

Jesus and Mary find Jesus in a Church. The Holy Family comes together and are found with one another in the Temple. We too can be brought together from our scattered lives and find Jesus here in our Church. We can find Jesus, along with Mary and Joseph in this place. We can be assured that He wants to gather us from our fragmented and scattered lives and let us know that He’s going about His Father’s business to let us know that we are loved.

What ever division or strife we may face in our families, we are called to remember just exactly what F.A.M.I.L.Y means, “forget about me, I love you!” If we are lost, if we have a loved on in our family we know that may be lost, know that Jesus can find us and we can find Him, here in this place. He reverses the scattering effects of sin and brings him around this table and living sacrifice of praise—the Eucharist. We must never despair and give up hope that our families will be brought together as was the Holy Family.