The Holy Family verses the Unholy Hive of Ciphers!
Why did God begin the Resistance and his coming Invasion in a family and in Nazareth of all places? You could sum up salvation history throughout scripture in one line, with one question: where is the Holy Family?
Go back to the very beginning and there you would expect to find the Holy Family, right? After all, God is creating mankind after His own image and likeness, male and female, husband and wife, urging them to be fruitful and multiply that the two become one and then become three and four and five and six…and fill the earth. There would be a Holy Family; created sinless, created with Divine grace, called to be children of God. There you would expect to find the Holy Family, the replica of the Blessed Trinity within creation, but what do you find? A husband and a wife who rebel against their Lord, their heavenly Father and sow the seeds of disgrace for their whole family, which we are, as we are sons and daughters of Adam and Eve.
You don't find a Holy Family a few days or weeks after the creation of the first human couple. Rather, it becomes a very unholy family with Cain killing Abel! So, what is God going to do about it? Perhaps we're going to find the Holy Family with Noah. After all, God declares that Noah is a righteous man. A righteous man who stood out from his contemporaries who were a people that were so unrighteous, wicked and violent that God had to render to them justice by sending them the Flood [Gen 6:5-8]. Only Noah, his wife and their three sons and wives were saved from this Flood. Surely, at last, we have a Holy Family, right? Wrong. After disembarking, offering sacrifice in thanksgiving and planting the vine, Noah takes the fruit of the vine and gets drunk. His son, Ham, pulls off a rebellious and perverse act of disobedience and for it Ham and his son Canaan are cursed and the family is split and divided all over again [Gen 9:20-28]. It's like a broken record: oh no, here we go again. So, it didn't work with Adam, even though he had been created sinless. It didn't work with Noah, although he was a righteous and blameless man. And so it goes for thousands of years.
Thousands of years past and not one single Holy Family appears, until we come across a humble, quiet couple to whom a baby was born in Bethlehem and who lately had come to live in Nazareth. Behold the Holy Family! The Holy Family is the proof that God's greatest work, on our behalf and for our salvation, is the Holy Family and that means the family is vital to that work. Indeed all the covenants from Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David are all about God making a family. So salvation is fundamentally about us being saved through inheriting eternal life, not just earning it, and who is it that inherits? Only Family members inherit!
Thus God establishes the Holy Family from which flows the fulfilment of all the covenants and the grace that will make us all members of God’s family. It all begins in poverty, in silence, and is beneath the notice and radar of the powerful; and this serves to establish an important lesson for our own spiritual lives. Our life must be lived in imitation of Christ's life and most of that life was lived obediently, humbly, patiently and anonymously in the Holy Family of Nazareth. The question before us today, the question that the Holy Spirit wants to put in our hearts is this: "Do you really want to have a holy family, or do you just want to have a good family, like the family you grew up in? You know, the one with faults and sins and lots of problems…and not a few lapsed members!"
If we contemplate the Holy Family what do we see? Well, we see in Bethlehem Our Lady, St Joseph and a Baby. Soon after we see St Joseph, like a refugee, fleeing the persecution of King Herod and taking Our Lady and the Baby Jesus to Egypt for protection. Next we see Joseph returning from Egypt after the death of Herod but going to Nazareth and setting up both home and shop in that town. Here, Jesus till he was 7 years of age, would have come under the care and tutelage of Our Lady, then from 7 years to 12+ Jesus would have spent his time in the presence of Joseph learning the trade of a Technon which is more than a carpenter as it would have included stone and tin etc. He would not have gone to school as Joseph did not go to work, indeed work, schooling and home were all in the one place. He comes of age at 12 and, as we see in the Finding of Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem, he shows that he can look after himself in the city of Jerusalem which had a million pilgrims visiting it for the Passover! From this time onwards we know that Jesus continued under the tutelage and care of both Mary and Joseph and both would have continued teaching him both the Torah and the Trade of a Technon. Whenever Joseph departed this world, no doubt Our Lord in his hidden years continued to work as a Technon and as such would probably have travelled about to build houses, vineyards, watchtowers, tables and chairs. From Our Lord’s work life comes the details displayed in his parables of the Kingdom as Our Lord was clearly a great people-watcher and indeed a great life-watcher. His travels may well have including going by boat to get materials for his trade and it may even have meant getting tin from Cornwall! Anyway it is a pleasant line to consider: And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?
Yet, recently our society is setting about undermining the whole idea of family. I suppose we should have seen this coming! Since the Industrial revolution and the rise of the machine, we have seen how the family was taken out of it’s rural setting and then placed in a slum. Protests followed and the family was eventually taken out of the slum and put into mass housing as found in terraced streets of towns and cities. Often these were built beside factories of mass production, then linked to Mass schooling and its stratification of youth according to age, and Mass hospitalisation, all of which gave us the Industrial society. Even the Catholic Church found itself mirroring this massification of society when she created a Mass Catholicism where sacraments were also industrialised like a conveyor belt. A Conveyor belt that was built on the Mass schooling system of Catholic schools. However, the Church finally failed to find an alternative to the conveyor belt system of Catholic schools. This ultimately meant the failure to evangelise or catechise generations from the 1970s onwards when catechesis eventually collapsed due to it being depicted as pre-Vatican II and old fashioned!
In 1927 a German expressionist science-fiction drama film, directed by Fritz Lang, called ‘Metropolis’ gave us a dystopian vision of a possible future of this industrialisation of human existence. However, this would not be the future. The Marvel and DC Comics were closer to the truth as they depicted the future as one where the world developed superhumans through bio-engineering, DNA altering injections or insect bites and mutations by radiation. It is a depiction of a future unfolding before our eyes and not just in comics and films but right now where human beings are told to go beyond nature and that means beyond his or her embodiement and ultimately to go beyond the world of mommas and poppas!
Indeed, today we no longer want to talk about male and female, man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter. Instead Western states are by law reducing every human being to a cipher or a clean slate or a binary number which the individual at first may be permitted to re-define as to its content, but later it will be something defined by Human Planning Inc. and State Planners! Later it will be part of a Hive of engineered beings where each will have a pre-determined status, value and social credit that determines its place and work in the Hive-Society. Aiding this revolution of human nature as usual are, what Stalin called, the ‘useful idiots’, who in claiming to want freedom from gender end up ushering in a determined, manufactured and owned product called a ‘homo-technologicus’ that is a humanoid made in the image of the mental constructs of its Conditioners and Human Techno-creators!
It is clear now that this Brave New World will be the fruit of bio, chemical and technological engineering of Big Pharma, Silicon valley Technology, Information Systems and Socialist State Planning and it is going to mean that the family will have to be made extinct! In its place will be a cipher of embodied consciousness who will be engineered, produced, incubated, hatched into a wealth of diversity of hybrids, like our cars, derived from the structure and appendages offered by robots, androids, animal-human hybrids and human engineered mutations. Only Geeks would want to live in this kind of world, the rest of us know the worth of systems-upgrades, just look at the recent history of every computer programme upgrade purchased for the NHS!
It is time for us Catholics to get serious in our reflections and in our actions! If in the Second World War, we put up posters all over the country saying ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives!’, today we need to recognise that we are in World War III, and it is a War against us, against human nature and human beings, and is waged by Big Pharma, Technocrats, Mass Media and Mindless but Captured Politicians. We need to start putting our posters up to awaken those who have gone to sleep, the sleep of Compliance, and our posters should read ‘Ignorance Costs Lives! Do your own Research!’
On this Feast of the Holy Family we are reminded of what Pope Benedict had to say about the importance of the Family as the ‘Domestic church’ in the work of New Evangelisation:
“The new evangelization depends largely on the domestic Church. In our time, as in times past, the eclipse of God, the spread of ideologies contrary to the family and the degradation of sexual ethics are intertwined. And just as the eclipse of God and the crisis of the family are linked, so the new evangelization is inseparable from the Christian family”, [said by Pope Benedict XVI as he greeted participants at the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Family].
Pope Benedict has stated that the family is the blue print for both human existence and a humane existence. When it goes wrong both children and society suffer from the confusions about identity, about manhood and womanhood, about sexuality and sex, about Fatherhood and Motherhood, about the value and dignity of babies, children and human life itself. But when it is in danger of being annihilated by forces derived from the Corporate World and its slaves, we need to stand up and hold on to the powerful icon of the Holy Family as this shows to us that God redeems and saves human beings, firstly, in redeeming and saving family life. The family is therefore not something we can replace, throw away or destroy for it is where God has arranged for us to be formed for eternity.
It is in the family where a human being made in God’s image is sown, grown and blooms but it starts even before the conception of a child as it is built upon the divinely and naturally established institution called Marriage. It is natural and precedes the State both logically and temporally and so Marriage is beyond the legal reach of the State. It is Divinely established and this in itself means that like the ante-deluvian civilisation of Noah’s time, God will sweep away those that attack Marriage and family life; Noah’s story is a warning from Biblical history to an overwheening, totally controlling and sacrilegious State that would want to replace, control or destroy marriage and family life! A Terrible Doom lies ahead for any State or Society that undermines the reality and meaning of family life and marriage.
Desmond Morris as a Zoologist and anthropologist had this to say about marriage which he saw as vital for the rise of human beings in the demanding process of evolution from hunter-gatherers, contra the evolution of apes and monkeys:
These demands inevitably favoured one particular kind of sexual system, namely the pair-bond, in which each male had his own female and so was not in constant competition with his male companions. For the females, the pair-bond meant the males would return to the campsite with the spoils of the hunt and share the feast with them. They, in turn, would share their gathered foods.
This highly successful social system led to the evolution of a powerful, biologically based pairing urge in the rapidly spreading tribes of primeval humans. Each adult became programmed to stay with a breeding partner long enough to jointly rear a ‘serial litter’ of young. Because these young were not all born together, but one at a time over a number of years, the pair-bond had to be more than just seasonal or annual. It had to be long-lasting.
That was how it worked for more than a million years as our species evolved and developed its special character, but then our small tribes began to swell into super-tribes as villages became towns and towns grew into great cities [‘My secret of 60 years of marital bliss - separate bedrooms and animal instincts!’ By Desmond Morris Published in DAILY MAIL 22 August 2012].
So, if evolution and culture is on the side of Marriage and Family Life, and the Holy Family is on the side of all human families and is opposed to the Hive and all unholy replacements of the family, it is not surprising that our Feast of the Holy Family and the call to all families to become domestic churches is even more significant and more urgent as we see the sun setting on Western civilisation. We need to develop out of the remnants of the Western culture that Wisdom tradition for Marriage, Family life and for our young that counters the false errors and narratives of our times.
What does this new evangelisation look like? It will be built on the following imperatives:
it will require families to possess and use a bible in their homes;
to possess and use a catechism in their homes that needs to be studied and not just read;
to establish family prayer time and family devotions to be led by the parents - Google Catholic Culture;
instantiate family talk time round the dinner table which reflects on the Sunday homily and the week that has just gone;
the building of an internal family order that controls the use of technology so technology serves, not rules, the rhythm of family life;
as long as the internet exists we need to use links with Catholic Websites that are not afraid to report the truth of both the present state of the Church and the present state of the World - see above in our website Links & Further Reading;
and finally family time allocated to support the parish family needs to be instituted - where we serve, teach and learn from other families what God wants of us as men and women, as husbands and wives, as fathers and mothers, as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters and ultimately as children of our heavenly Father.
NB Protect your families from the errors of our time and the culture of death that now looms large for Satan is a liar and a murderer from the beginning:
