+JMJ+ Feast of the Hoy Family +JMJ+

FEAST* of the HOLY FAMILY of

Jesus, Mary and Joseph

 

*The Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day.

If both are Sundays, the feast is celebrated on December 30.

 

 

 

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph had only one life, one purpose: To glorify the Heavenly Father.  That is what we also must want. 

To achieve it, we have to enter into union with Mary and Joseph, share their life - family life, the intimate interior life of which God alone is secret. 

What happiness to be called to this life.  Our love will consist in living with Mary and Joseph on the love of Jesus Eucharistic.”

 

St. Peter Julian Eymard

 

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church

533 The hidden life at Nazareth allows everyone to enter into fellowship with Jesus by the most ordinary events of daily life:

The home of Nazareth is the school where we begin to understand the life of Jesus - the school of the Gospel. First, then, a lesson of silence. May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of mind, revive in us. . . A lesson on family life. May Nazareth teach us what family life is, its communion of love, its austere and simple beauty, and its sacred and inviolable character... A lesson of work. Nazareth, home of the "Carpenter's Son", in you I would choose to understand and proclaim the severe and redeeming law of human work. . . To conclude, I want to greet all the workers of the world, holding up to them their great pattern their brother who is God. (Pope Paul VI at Nazareth, January 5, 1964)

534 The finding of Jesus in the temple is the only event that breaks the silence of the Gospels about the hidden years of Jesus (Lk 2: 41-52). Here Jesus lets us catch a glimpse of the mystery of his total consecration to a mission that flows from His divine Sonship: "Did you not know that I must be about my Father's work?" (Lk 2:49) Mary and Joseph did not understand these words, but they accepted them in faith. Mary "kept all these things in her heart" during the years Jesus remained hidden in the silence of an ordinary life.

 

Holy Family of Nazareth, help us to willingly enter the hidden life of Nazareth, the school of Nazareth, that allows us to enter into fellowship with Jesus by the most ordinary events of daily life.  Holy Family of Nazareth, pray for us. Amen.

CONSIDER THIS:  Perhaps a 2014 resolution might include resuming or beginning the practice of writing/typing JMJ (Jesus, Mary, Joseph) atop your papers (emails) of correspondence.  This beautiful practice and devotion  just might stir up some good conversation. It symbolically illustrates a worldview, a mindset that reminds that we follow an example, a way that is sanctified and greater than ourselves.