The Holy Family

In communicating with human beings, God rarely uses words to instruct, seldom sends a messenger angel to invite assent, is extremely parsimonious with visions and revelations about truths we must never muddy in our own minds. Instead, God speaks to us through events, lacing those events with invitations, and mirroring within our human situations visions of the beauty we should seek, of the ugliness we should avoid, and of our lifelong need to give supernatural value to what is, after all, a transient existence.

Each year, at Christmas, we celebrate the event of the birth of Jesus; and, although we focus on it less, God’s most specific commentary on one of our basic social institutions is also the object of our celebration. For God, Who could have chosen to come among us in many other ways, chose specifically to be born into a family. Jesus as a child is wholly unintelligible without His mother, Mary, and His foster father, Joseph. They, in turn, are merely vacuous images without their child. We cannot think of one of those three people without remembering the other two.

MM

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Malachi B. Martin

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In communicating with human beings, God rarely uses words to instruct, seldom sends a messenger angel to invite assent, is extremely parsimonious with visions and revelations about truths we must never muddy in our own minds. Instead, God speaks to us through events, lacing those events with invitations, and mirroring within our human situations visions of the beauty we should seek, of the ugliness we should avoid, and of our lifelong need to give supernatural value to what is, after all, a transient existence.

Each year, at Christmas, we celebrate the event of the birth of Jesus; and, although we focus on it less, God’s most specific commentary on one of our basic social institutions is also the object of our celebration. For God, Who could have chosen to come among us in many other ways, chose specifically to be born into a family. Jesus as a child is wholly unintelligible without His mother, Mary, and His foster father, Joseph. They, in turn, are merely vacuous images without their child. We cannot think of one of those three people without remembering the other two.