December 28, 2025 ~ Feast of the Holy Family ~ Year A
Spiritual Reflection
December 28, 2025 ~ Feast of the Holy Family ~ Year A (PDF)
Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives, and avoid any bitterness toward them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord.
Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they may not become discouraged.
Colossians 3:19-21
Although we know that our family in marriage should be our road to holiness, in practice we view our family purely through human eyes instead of looking at our family in the light of faith. In choosing the vocation of marriage, we are motivated simply by our desire to find reliance within the circle of our dear ones through the bonds of blood.
Usually spouses see their desire to become parents as a natural way to fulfill their love. The marital relationship undergoes change, however, after the first child is born. The husband will have to discover that the newborn has special rights to the feelings of his wife.
A woman desires to have a baby as a part of herself. She hopes that this baby will make her life more meaningful, filling up the emptiness and loneliness within her. Very often the wife expects that the newborn will fulfill her and give her what she is unable to receive from her husband. At the beginning, those desires usually are ‘fulfilled’. The child responds beautifully and completely to the mother’s feelings, becoming tightly united with her. However, this egoist expectation of fulfillment through her child does not constitute true love.
True love is realized when we are motivated to fulfill the true, most precious needs of another person, desiring to make this person truly and fully happy. It is not when we are motivated to make ourselves happy by helping the other person. Certainly, a mother desires to serve her child and make her child happy, but she usually expects mutuality from the child. She receives this mutuality when her child reciprocates her love with a smile, a certain look, and/or certain gestures. The reciprocation is the biggest reward. However, it becomes very easy for the mother in this situation to begin leaning on the child as if leaning on an idol. It becomes very easy to forget that the only reliance we can find is in God, and besides Him, we cannot find anybody who will love us fully and truly to the end.
To confirm this idea that parents want their children to be a source of reliance, the situation will arise when a child, for the first time, fails to reciprocate the parent’s love. When the parents respond to this situation with disappointment, they discover that their parental hopes are merely illusory, and those hopes begin to fall apart like a house of cards before their very eyes. The shattering of this illusion brings pain and suffering to the parents connected to the realization that the child is not behaving according to their expectations.
We often have very concrete expectations, which we place on our young son or daughter. These expectations largely depend on our physical, psychological or spiritual development. It can be said that we do not accept in others, especially in our children, the things that we do not tolerate in ourselves, while, in contrast, we do accept the things that we are able to tolerate and understand in ourselves…
When our children grow up and have children of their own, our reliance spreads further to encompass our grandchildren. New conflicts and sufferings arise because we forget that parents, not grandparents, are responsible for raising their children.
If we truly want our grandchildren to fall in love with God, for Him to become their only means of reliance, and His will to be their only food, then we will not count on our grandchildren fulfilling expectations in our lives. We will understand that we should focus on fighting for only one thing – that the grandchild will be fulfilled in a way that will lead him to what is most important – a relationship with our God, the Father.
S.C. Biela, God Alone Suffices, pp. 35-37; 40
References from the Catechism of the Catholic Church
2206 The relationships within the family bring an affinity of feelings, affections and interests, arising above all from the members' respect for one another. The family is a privileged community called to achieve a "sharing of thought and common deliberation by the spouses as well as their eager cooperation as parents in the children's upbringing."11
2208 The family should live in such a way that its members learn to care and take responsibility for the young, the old, the sick, the handicapped, and the poor. There are many families who are at times incapable of providing this help. It devolves then on other persons, other families, and, in a subsidiary way, society to provide for their needs: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world."12
Questions for Reflection
1. How do I look at my family relationships in the light of faith? How do I convey this attitude toward my loved ones?
2. How does God come to me when/if I discover a motivation of mutuality or reliance in those relationships?
3. How can the Holy Family’s example help me in my attitude toward my loved ones?
Prayer after Sharing
Thank you, God, for allowing me to see the truth about my weaknesses and how it calls upon the abyss of your merciful Love.
