Summary of a Fr. Gerry Creedon homily from January 01, 2007
"They did not understand what he said to them." Lk 41:52
Families constantly have to adjust. I visited my sister Nora in Canada this past week. Her husband Con completed 40 years of teaching emotionally disturbed teenagers on a Tuesday last July, only to go for cancer surgery on a Thursday. Some things are hard to understand. His battle for recovery included radiation. While I visited, he came down with Shingles, a most painful virus. Sometimes life is an obstacle race. It is hard for some men to be patients. They are used to showing their love by doing and giving. To receive, takes an adjustment.
Yet, it is in the interaction of family that we are called to live out the Christian life. Some people find out what they feel by talking. Some discover their feelings by internalizing. Adaptation is necessary. Some are active participants in their chores; others are couch potatoes. To deal with the tensions of family, we need two qualities above all, fairness and dialogue. Gone are the days when all was resolved by recourse to authority. Banished are the temptations of easy results through physical punishment.
When members all participate with a degree of equality, and when conflict is resolved by talking, and listening, we can more easily reach the ideal of harmony. The picture of the Holy Family cannot be airbrushed of all misunderstanding.
Pope Benedict offers a similar prescription to the human family in his World Day of Peace Statement: "Recognition and respect for natural law represents the foundation for a dialogue between the followers of the different religions and between believers and non-believers. As a great point of convergence, this is also a fundamental presupposition for authentic peace.....At the origin of many tensions that threaten peace are surely the many unjust inequalities still tragically present in our world. Particularly insidious among these are, on the one hand, inequality in access to essential goods like food, water, shelter, health; on the other hand, there are persistent inequalities between men and women in the exercise of basic human rights. A fundamental element of building peace is the recognition of the essential equality of human persons springing from their common transcendental dignity."
The road to peace is only lengthened by the illusory short-cuts of war and violence. To achieve greater harmony in our families, and in the family of humankind, let us practice the skills of conversation and the qualities of justice.