After a busy week of finishing baking and gifts, family gatherings and Christmas, I watched the BBC version on The Nativity on Saturday evening. This version took a lot of poetic license with the scriptures and I can’t say that I was pleased with their depiction of Joseph and his rejection of Mary but still, I was moved by all the various dynamics of family life, the travel of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem and the journey of the Magi. I am currently praying with a 10-day Ignatian Christmastide Retreat and scenes like those depicted in the series certainly help with my imaginative prayer of the Holy Family and their experiences. It’s easy to romanticize all that unfolded for Joseph and Mary, like a storybook we’ve read a hundred times, everything easy and coordinated. This year I have found it helpful to see Jesus as a child, in need of the care of others, born to a couple who were faced with difficult decisions and less than perfect circumstances. Jesus comes in his littleness and models for us “how we are live in a relationship with him. We are invited to come to him in our poverty, weakness and littleness.” (Encountering Emmanuel, Heather Khym)

I hear a plane overhead as I write this, easily heard in the thick cloud cover of the day, and say a silent prayer for all those traveling today from family gatherings and heading back home to their own family lives and work. It was a joy to spend time with my extended family and to see the many pictures friends posted of their own Christmas celebrations. Having chosen a single contemplative life though, the holidays are different. There are certain events and experiences, invited and included or not, that aren’t the same without your own family and children. There is a distance and separation that can’t be filled, try as you might. Having lost both of my parents, it is a little like being orphaned, alone in the world. Most days I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. But holidays always bring a certain bit of melancholy for times past and sadness, missing loved ones.

On Christmas Eve, when Pope Francis opened the Holy Doors in Rome, we began a Jubilee Year of Hope. Pope Francis reminded us that hope is there for us (Spes non confundit – Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee Year of Hope). Yes, we will still worry and have times that hope feels hard to hold on to, but within each of us there lives hope. Hope that inspires each of us to look up and believe that there is more and can be more, more than this broken world and the challenges it presents. It is a hope that we carry with us, every day, despite the things that are happening in our lives and the world. It is a hope that isn’t about “happy endings” but a hope that calls us to be pilgrims of light even in the darkness, pilgrims willing to share the reason for our hope, especially to those who are feeling they have little hope to cling to. A hope that is shared with others reaches out to them as people of worthy of dignity and honor, a family sharing the Love of Christ.

Today’s Feast of the Holy Family celebrates the families that we belong to biological and spiritual. This spiritual family models for us love, respect, dignity and contemplation. My desire for this Jubilee Year is to have hope and share hope. When it is difficult I know I can look to the “supreme witness” (Spes non confundit) of hope, Mary, as Mother of God and our mother for guidance. Under her various titles, Undoer of Knots, Mother of Good Counsel, Morning Star, and so on, Mary’s mantle is large enough to encircle and protect us, to point us to the reason for her hope.

Whether your tribe is big or small, local or distant, close-knit and affectionate or detached, there is a Holy Family to which you will always be a member of. On this Feast and on the Solemnity of Mary, New Year’s Day, I invite you to reflect and spend time with this Family. You are loved here. As Sr. Miriam James says as each week with her podcast, Abiding Together, “welcome home”.

Wishing you abundant peace and hope, Deena

Photo: Our Holy Family window at Holy Family Church