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The Cost of Family Love
December 29, 2002
Fr. George Smiga
Luke
2:22-40
During
one of the worst snowstorms of the season a small business
owner, who owned his own bakery, decided to close his store
early. "I'm not going to get any customers tonight,"
he thought, "in this kind of weather." But just
as he was ready to lock the door, a man came in, shivering
and covered with snow.
"I'd like two sweet rolls" he said.
Now the owner was shocked that anyone would brave such bad
weather for two sweet rolls. "Friend," he said,
"I don't recognize your face. Are you new around here?"
"Yes" the man said. "I moved into the old Wagner
place about two weeks ago."
"Well, welcome," said the bakery owner, handing
him his sweet rolls.
"Are you married?"
"Of course I'm married," said the man. "Do
you think my mother would send me out on a night like this?"
Ah family!
Who cares more for us? Who demands more from us? It is the
people in our families that love us the most and also hurt
us the most. This truth should not surprise us, because with
a little reflection it is clear that love and hurt are connected.
C. S.
Lewis in a famous essay on love says that if you want to protect
your heart from pain, you must give it to no one. You must
enter into no serious relationships, not even with an animal.
If you can isolate yourself from all relationships, your heart
will not feel pain. In time, however, it will become incapable
of feeling anything. If we choose to withdraw ourselves from
relationships, we also choose to isolate ourselves from love
and from life. What C. S. Lewis makes clear is that in the
movement by which we open ourselves to love is the same movement
by which we open ourselves to pain. You can't have one without
the other. Both thrive in family.
Mary discovered
this in today's gospel, which we just heard on this feast
of The Holy Family. She and Joseph bring the child Jesus to
the temple and Simeon rejoices that he sees the Lord's Messiah.
He then says to Mary, "A sword will pierce your own soul."
Simeon is telling Mary, "This child will hurt you."
Why? Because Mary was a mother, and the same movement that
opened her to a mother's love, opened her to a mother's pain.
Every
deep relationship, every family relationship, has these two
essential components: love and hurt. Although this is a sobering
thought, it is also ways a freeing thought. It frees us from
unrealistic expectations. If we think that we can love our
parents, or our spouse, or our children, or anyone in our
family and never be hurt, we are deluding ourselves. The only
way we can save ourselves from hurt is to never love.
Now I
am not saying that we should accept abuse or destructive behavior
in family life. We have every right and responsibility to
decide against, to protect ourselves from, those who would
continually manipulate us and harm us. God does not expect
us to remain in relationships that would destroy us. But given
that, if we somehow expect to love the people in our family
without any hurt, we are kidding ourselves. Love and pain
come together.
So then
how do we live family? How do we make our way through these
essential human relationships? Only with realistic generosity.
Because we are all flawed, because hurt will come, we need
to be realistically generous. We need to make allowances.
Happiness in families depends upon our ability to overlook:
to overlook some of the mistakes, to overlook some of the
insensitivities, to overlook some of the hurt. It is only
with this realistic generosity that we can move beyond the
hurt and enjoy the real blessings of family life.
The word
"family" comes from the Latin word famulus which
means slave or servant. This word tells us that in successful
families each member must assume an attitude of service toward
the other. Each much be generous enough to move beyond the
pain that can and will come.
On this
Feast of the Holy Family, the gospel says that those who live
in family must have realistic generosity. We must reject the
hurt that can destroy us, but we must be willing to accept
the hurt that is an inescapable part of family life. No family-not
even the Holy Family-can live without pain. Every happy family
understands that, if we can be generous enough to push beyond
the hurt, family remains the primary place to experience love
and to celebrate life.
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