June 16, 2024
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My dearest parishioners!
It seems, at first blush, that we must always choose God over everyone else, including our family. When circumstances force us into making a choice, we must always give God our preference, even if it means I might have to disown or reject my flesh and blood.
Let’s look at the Scriptures. In today’s First Reading Adam is busted. He was rather foolish for putting more faith in Eve than in God and he fell spectacularly. Had Adam put God ahead of his wife, it would have turned out alright for him, for Eve, for his children, and, eventually for all of us, his descendants! Had Adam chosen to listen to God rather than to his wife Eve, had he trusted God more, he would have been saved from the deception of the devil. I hope I am making sense, because my point is rather convoluted (you will see!). But please bear with me and let’s just focus on one thing: family or God?
What was going through the mind of Christ’s family? Through the grapevine, they had learned of all the things happening in his ministry: healings, people mobbing him from all over Palestine, non-stop work around the clock exhausted Him for they didn’t even leave him time to eat. The family became increasingly concerned that their flesh and blood might have gone insane, and so they came tried to save Him! Poor folks! They had no clue who Jesus really was!
A little bit later, this time it was revealed that it was precisely His mother and some of his cousins who had been eager to speak with Him. Then came a response that was nothing short of heartless and insulting - more like a rejection, “Who is my mother? And who are my brothers?” Christ’s reaction here takes me back to the time when our Blessed Lord was 12 years old and was missing from the family’s caravan on the way home. Both St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother were worried sick about Him. When they finally found Him, instead of rejoicing, He gave them the cold shoulder, “I must be about my Father’s business!” That must have hurt! So, could it be that Jesus was telling us that, in order to do love God, we must ditch our families?
The short answer is: NO! A thousand times No! God’s will is not that we should choose between Him and our family, but that I and the people in my life we should all choose God first. It is not contest for popularity, but it is a commandment that we all of us should always do the will of God. Because when I choose God first, I also choose God for my family. And if by the grace of God, my own family also has a preference for God, then ultimately we also choose each other! Ultimately, I and my family are united together in God and with God for our own good! When I choose God first, I choose God first not only for myself but also for all of the ones whom I love. It means I want them to have God first also in their lives. And ultimately, when we all put God first, we find ourselves and we find each other in Him! The choice between God and family is really a false dichotomy. When I choose God first, I choose whatever is best for myself and for all the one who belong to me!
Fr. Vincent Nagle is a remarkable priest, with whom I was privileged to make acquaintance through our shared admiration for Msgr. Luigi Giussani and the Communion Liberation movement he founded. For a number of years, he was a Catholic chaplain at one the best and oldest hospital in the country, Massachusetts General. And this is one of the remarkable he shared with us.
I visited an elderly woman who was impaired for most of her life – she had stroke years earlier. She was not quite a vegetable, but she had not communicated with anyone for ten years. But you assume that people like her are aware. I was praying with her during the Last Rites, and I got to the end and said, “May Almighty God bless you, in the name of the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’ – and she took her own hand and made the Sign of the Cross. Her family members there started to scream! They had been with her for ten years, and nothing had happened! What did they expect? When you come with Christ’s Sacraments, you can reach where others cannot!
I could never forget this story, for it illustrates a remarkable but not surprising truth, “Blood is thicker than blood!” The Most Precious Blood of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is of course thicker than the blood of one’s relatives. In front of that most Blessed and most Precious and most adorable Blood of the Savior the priest had carried with him, this dying paralytic, bed-ridden, unconscious, and unresponsive patient could not but move her hand to make the Sign of the Cross in her attempt to acknowledge and to bless her God, Who had come to see her for the last time on this earth. In that amazing gesture and in front of her family, many of whom no longer darkening the door of a church, this unconscious vegetative patient was in fact quite awakened and alert to the Presence of her God. But she was more than just being awakened: she consciously chose to do something nobody had expected her to do: signing herself with the Sign of the Cross. The conscious decision by someone seemingly submerged in the oblivion of a coma, totally lost to the world indicates one thing to me: she deliberately chose God for her family. In that simple act of faith, the dying old lady was expressing her last prayer, her last wish, her last hope: that God be merciful to herself and her family, that God bring back her family from faithlessness, that God soften their hardened hearts and souls, that God pardon their ignorance and their obtuse spirits! The last words of a dying person are always the most sincere, most heart-felt, most truthful. In that Sign of the Cross, we saw the deepest desire of her heart: that God be honored for the sake of man. With this terminal act of her long life, a life filled with sufferings, that old dying woman continued to do something she had done her entire life when she became a wife and a mother: she chose God for her family! For deep down, she was always conscious of the fact that unless she had given her family God, she had given too little!
Padre Luigi (AKA Fr. Luan)
