Isang makakalikasan at makatarungang Bagong Taon sa lahat! Mabuhay ang pamilyang Filipino!
When people treasure life than despise it, when people affirm and speak values to one another, when people know they are brothers and sisters, and they keep looking for reasons to have faith in God, then family life becomes a solid place for love, security and transforming agent in our world today.
The liturgy of this feast is a troublesome mixture of so many things all at once. It continues the story of Jesus from the infancy narratives as the Gospel of Matthew relates it. It also offers general words of wisdom about human existence as shaped by family life. At the same time it presents exhortations about Christian community life as distinctively redeemed and redemptive.
The lesson from the Book of Wisdom literature offers reflectionsupon patterns of human life. Each generation shapes the conditions in which life will be lived in the future. This happens in the family circle and also in larger society.
There is a note of responsibility here, in our decision and actions, not only for the making of our lives and personalities, but in large measures also for the making of the lives and personalities of others.
When we turn to the Second Reading we seem to move to the more
particular – to some extent beyond the advise in Wisdom Literature – in the emphasis on forbearance, compassion, patience, humility, bearing with one another and forgiving one another and on top of these, put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.
One must be heroic in the exercise of virtue like humility in situations which are often unjust. Our family, when strengthened by virtue of discernment and pursuing the will of God, can mirror the quality of the Holy Family as described in the Gospel.
The feast of the Holy Family is a celebration of our human bonds with Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore of our redeeming bond of grace with all the human family in the world, but particularly the poor, the distressed, the despised, the abandoned children in the streets.
When people treasure life than despise it, when people affirm and speak values to one another, when people know they are brothers and sisters, and they keep looking for reasons to have faith in God, then family life becomes a solid place for love, security and transforming agent in our world today.
PAX ET BONUM!
Santuario de San Antonio Parish 