The Holy Family and Holy Families
Though not a Catholic, Samuel Johnson once made an eminently Catholic remark when he wrote, “The end of all human activity is to be happy at home.” Yes, happy at home; with the family. The juxtaposition seems a little naïve. Subordinating the most noble pursuits of man, his achievements of the highest grandeur, in service to the humble unit of the family seems slightly askew. Isn’t it the reverse? Atomized Modern Man thinks so. He suffers an ontological fissure that leaves him marooned in a sea of inert flotsam called human individuals. Family? Home? Such quaint notions can no longer bear the grandiose pretensions of Man Come of Age. His new credo enshrines appetite over fidelity, fulfillment over sacrifice, affirmation over obligation and devotion to self over devotion to God. Family has become an atavistic throwback, unless, of course, it is reconfigured to serve the new purposes of the New Secular Man.
The family and home is where the human race begins. This is the womb where whole and wholesome men and women are created. Man is taught here that there is infinitely more to man than man. More to man than flesh and bones, appetites and longings. All attempts to reduce man to his bodily parts or base passions leaves man without himself. Modern times present man with tantalizing novelties like laboratory grown human beings and rent-a-womb for the affluent needy. If these are not resisted, man finds himself in a Brave New World so perverse that even Huxley would wince. Mary Shelly was prescient when she wrote chillingly about untethered science, that is, untethered from right reason and religion. Recall when the novelist has Dr. Frankenstein stare up at his new creation, the monster stares back down at the hubristic doctor saying, “You are indeed my creator, but now I am your master.” Science tyrannizes us when its intoxicating knowledge becomes our god. Chesterton correctly grasped the gravity of the matter with his usual simplicity, “We are learning to do a great many clever things…The next great task will be to learn not to do them.” Along with any Catholic, Chesterton had a great respect for science, but science in its rightful place, “Science is a splendid thing; if you tell it where to go.”
Of course, only the Church is able to tell science where it must go. But love for the Church is poured into men’s hearts through the family. Ordinary families tutor children into the most extraordinary things. And the larger the family the more effective is its children fitted for the protections against pride. It is only within the embrace of the family that man learns the limits of all finite things, and that limitless goodness found only in God. Again, Chesterton, “The human house is a paradox for it is larger inside than out.” Though the world proffers its counterfeits, the person formed well by his family spurns them. Aristotle remarks in the Ethics that only the young men from noble, (i.e. good) families will be able to take his rightful place in the ruling of society.
All this is true about the family not simply because it has been around for as long as man remembers. That would make the family merely conventional; one way this century, another way the next. The family is not conventional; it is ontological. Its structure reflects and perfects the very nature of man, and divulges what man ought to be. Families have their roots deep in the heart of God Himself. Just as He designed water to be wet, and the wings of birds to fly, so has He ordered man’s fulfillment in the bosom of families.
The family is not only man’s origin, it is his end. All the highly elevated vocabulary of the Church’s theology can be reduced to the vernacular of the family: Mother Church; priest as Father; the Bishop’s ring as wedding band marrying him to his diocese; Mother superior; religious brothers; nuns as sister; devotion to the Mother of God; the Father eternally begetting the Son. Family is inescapable – from the Trinity all the way down to us. Thus the Catholic passion for the family, and their equivalent rage at those who would redesign it. Such would be to turn the world inside out, and leave man asunder.
In His omnipotence God could have saved the world in an infinitude of ways staggering the imagination. Which way to did He choose? His only begotten Son incarnate as a man; born of an ordinary woman called His Mother; a foster father he called poppa. An accident? God does not rule or teach by accident. In the family we peek into the mind of God; dazzling in its revelation. The strokes of the Divine Artist show us the father, the one who leads and protects. The mother, the one who nurtures and teaches. The children, the ones who obey and learn.
Vanity and pride has made our world deaf to God and His plans for our happiness. To that deaf world, Catholics alone are left to tell the truth about the family. When Flanner O’Connor was asked why she presented such grotesque characters and sadistic violence in her stories, she replied: “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor spoke to that deaf world with the artistry of her stories; the rest of us are left with our fidelity and bold voices. Voices that sharply tell the world what the family truly is. Voices confident in the power of its truth. Elites will be enraged. Often those once thought our friends will harangue us or slither into the safe background of compromise.
Only the brave few can resist the blandishments of being loved, or worse, the approval of the bien- pensant Hiding beneath the skirts of smarmy pieties is not the heroism this age demands. Neither is the vain hope that if we say nothing, or very little, some path for dialogue will remain open. Strategies like that serve victories to the enemy on a silver platter. Worse of all is the naivte which simply declares the war over, and a time for positive action has dawned. Such a supine posture invites our enemies to see us as fools. And as they happily escalate their hostilities, we are left routed and dazed. Catholics must summon the courage to tell the world what the family is –even when some may call us obsessed. Only by keeping the family what it is will families be holy.
Only holy families will save the human race. Hyperbole? Look again at how God chose to save us: by sending His Son into a family. Who dares think he can improve on that.
January 2014
