(76) Fr. Larry Richards: Building a Holy Family: Affirming Each Other

A homily by Fr. Larry Richards on the Feast of the Holy Family December 30, 2012.  Fr. Richards was the main speaker at the March 2013 Men’s Day of Renewal at St. Stephen’s Church in Caldwell (see Blog #48 for a summary of his talk).  The homepage of his website http://thereasonforourhope.org/ gives his current radio schedule and publications.  He teams up with Dr. Ray Guarendi on his weekly television program on EWTN cable/satellite and internet www.ewtn.com/tv “Living Right with Dr. Ray” 7 pm Eastern on Saturdays and 5 am on Fridays. To see numerous samples of Fr. Larry's talks, go to www.youtube.com and type in Fr. Larry Richards.    

Building a Holy Family: Affirming Each Other

By Fr. Larry Richards

Good morning.  We hear in the Second Reading: “and this is His commandment that we should believe in the name of His son Jesus Christ and should love as He commanded us.” That is what we need to focus on as we begin this Feast of the Holy Family. And I love the Holy Family, this Gospel, because it shows, you know, we all just came from Christmas, or still in the midst of it, of course, because there are twelve days, and we are in the midst of this Christmas season so we have all got to spend time with our families. And that is always such a joyous perfect time, is it not? Where everybody gets along and everybody hugs each other and tells them how much they love each other and all that kind of stuff.  When you go and Aunt Sally comes and she has had too much to drink but that’s okay whatever it happens to be. All our families are imperfect.  Right?  Even the Holy Family. Not that they sinned, the only one that would have sinned in the Holy Family would have been who? St. Joseph.  But they were far from perfect if you will.

Because listen to the Gospel today.  First of all, how does Mary, the Mother of God lose the Son of God?  Right?  Here, now you would think that if you were given a great gift, Joseph and Mary now take care of Jesus.  They lost Him in Jerusalem.  How do you do that?  Don’t you think someone would have said, “Hey, where is Jesus,” before they left Jerusalem?  But no.  They were a day away and all of a sudden someone says, “Where is Jesus?” “We don’t know.” “Oh, well wait. He is with other people.” “Oh He wasn’t there.”  And then they come back.  And there is Jesus doing His thing in the synagogue or in the temple and He is talking to them and they say, “Hey, why did you do this to us?” And He says, “Why are you asking?”  Now my mother would have hit me.  “I am asking because I am your mother.”  But I am sure she didn’t do that.  But again, was there anxiety there? Was there imperfectness there?  Yes.  Was there sin there?  Of course not.  But, when we sit there and play all the games… oh it must have been just so peaceful in that family, I don’t hear anything about peace today in this Holy Family reading.  None.  Filled with anxiety.

So that should give us some hope that none of us come from a perfect family.  Right?  But what are we supposed to do in this family to make it the way Christ commands us to love?  To have this belief in Him, how does this work?  Well I could focus on many things of course, but today I just want to focus on three things. That in our families we have to ask how each other is, how we are, how they are feeling,  how are they doing?  We have to sit there and affirm one another.  And we have to be generous with each other, not be selfish, for our families to grow.  And, that is what the Gospel says, “Jesus grew and was obedient.”  But let’s focus on how we can do that.  The first thing we have to do is we have to ask.  So often in families because we become so comfortable with each other, we put each other down.  We tell people what they haven’t done right.  We sit there and take advantage of them or we take them for granted.  Until someone gets sick and we start losing them and all these things go crazy and then all of a sudden we have to make this right.  Why wait for someone to get sick and die?  Let’s start today.

So one of the things you can do every day……You should be able to go and look at your spouse and say,  “How are you?”  And really find out how they are.  To be able to look at your children and say, “How are you today?”  And find out how they are doing.  I have told the story on my Family CD and different things, about ten years ago, when I first became pastor here.  I was still on the road as much as I am now, and I was still teaching and doing campus ministry at Cathedral Prep.  And I was going completely out of my mind.  Still am, but the reality is I am going crazy.  I go home to my mother and it’s Christmas.  I drop off all the Christmas gifts under the tree as I did this past Christmas Day and I went downstairs….a mess.  And my mother came down, closed the door, walked in, and said to me, “What’s the matter?  How are you doing?”  And she was the only one that actually sat there and did that to me in almost a year.  And it was what I needed the most.  That someone went beyond the external, me being mad or me being impatient, or being rushed and looked inside and tried to find out what is going on inside.  What’s the matter?

Do we do that with our spouses?  Do we do that with our children?  Or do we just take them for granted?  Or do we think worse?  That we know them, we know what is the matter.  Really?  You are usually wrong.  So you have to ask somebody.  So, make it a habit that every day after they have come home from work or you have come home from work, you just take five minutes with each other.  Make it an effort.  “How are you?  What’s going on?”  On the inside, not the exterior.  Let’s not work with the masks.  Let’s find out what is going on interiorly.  To have this intimacy in our relationships.  To do the same thing with our children.  Ask each other “how are you doing; what’s going on?”

The second thing you have to do of course is you have to affirm each other.  And again, affirmation is not something we are normally used to, especially the Irish/Germans like myself.  But it is something that needs to happen.  We need to affirm each other.  Again when I was called in, once upon a time, by one of the bishops, years ago, he sat there and he yelled at me a lot, it was one of those things.  And I looked at him and I said, “Listen, you cannot yell at me until you affirm me.”  He goes, “I do affirm you.”  “No, you don’t.” 

Trust me on this.  That again sometimes at the dinner table or in families we always tell our children what they have done wrong.  We tell our spouses what they do wrong but when was the last time you told them what they did right?  And see that is very important and again years ago when I was in Indianapolis doing a men’s conference, there were a 1,000 men there and there was a kid in the back.  And this kid in the back had his arms folded.  He had a Mohawk.  He had a long black jacket on.  He had the big black boots on.  He would go, (sigh) every time I talked.  Can’t get everybody and I missed this kid.

As I am running out the door, I am running out and this kid comes over to me and I thought he was going to kill me.  And when he came running over to me, he says, “Here, Father.”  And he handed me a little sheet of paper, which I still carry in my bible for all my parish missions; again we talk about this on my Family CD.  In the midst of it I said, “Okay, thank you.”  And they are usually hateful letters when I get letters. It is usually like, Father you know you are arrogant.  Yeah we know.  But anyways, so I sat in the car and I looked at this piece of paper and it says, “Pax Undique”, which means peace everywhere.  Then I open it up and it says a quote, and he made this quote up.  It says, “Maybe a thousand young people die from too much praise but every day a kid dies inside from lack of it.”  Is there too much praise in our families or not enough?

Do we sit there and say something good for our spouse every day, something good for our children every day? At least one thing because we always say the bad; you know you do.  Everybody here tells them when someone gets you mad or they haven’t done something right.  Bam, “I am a good parent. I told them what they did wrong.”  But are you a Christian parent?  Do you tell your children how they are good every day?  Do you tell your spouse what’s right with them instead of what’s wrong with them?  And you know you do it.  Would it kill us to tell our spouses and our kids one good thing a day?  I don’t think so. But let’s try.

The last thing we have to do again as I am convinced a thousand times is we need to be unselfish people.  The surest sign to me of someone being in Christ Jesus is generosity.  I don’t care if you spend every day on your knees before the Blessed Sacrament, you say twenty rosaries.  If you are not generous and giving your life away to people, there is no hope for salvation, because it is all about me.  And Christianity, as I have said a thousand times, is the forgetfulness of self never ever, ever, ever the focus on self.  So when we are in the family, are we generous with each other?  Do you do an unselfish act every day?  Right?  Like you’re in the bathroom in your house.  And in the bathroom you’re doing  your thing and you go and you use the last part of the toilet paper roll. It’s all gone.  Do you put another one there for the next person?  Or do you leave it that way? Very practical reality and a very easy way to be unselfish.  But I bet most of you let it go.  And the next person goes in, “That miserable, who was the last one in the bathroom?” And then you don’t own up to it.

Do we do selfless things in our family?  Do we do something at least once a day unselfishly for someone in our family or am I the selfish person in my family and they are all here to serve me?  Let me give you a hint. If everyone is there to serve you, there is not much hope for you because you are a pagan. It is time for you to forget about yourself and learn to reach out to family.  Now listen; it has to begin in your family first. I don’t care if you give all kinds of time here in the church and everybody thinks you are very generous.  I could care less. When you get judged, it’ll be first on how you treated your family.

So, do you ask each other how you are doing every day? Do you affirm each other every day? Are you unselfish with your family every day?  That is where it begins.  Our families aren’t going to be perfect; neither was the Holy Family as much as we theologize and say that it is.  But, they can be ones that grow. Jesus who is God had to grow in wisdom and grace.  So must our families grow. So if they are not perfect now, no problem. But, they can grow.

So make it your thing today on this the Feast of the Holy Family, 2012, that you are going to grow as a family and I gave you three suggestions. There are a lot more, but pick at least one, would you?   And, decide to grow this new year of 2013.  You got it?  Get it?  Going to do it?  You don’t sound very excited about this one.  May each of you know His love today and forever, amen.