Sunday the Feast of the Holy Family Year A 2025

Let's be honest — family life is not always the Christmas card moment we post on social media! There are burnt dinners, teenage eye-rolls, squabbles over the remote, and that one relative who always brings up politics. Yet here's the astonishing truth: this glorious chaos is the very bedrock of our society and Church. And we wouldn't have it any other way!

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, in his pastoral letter for the Feast of the Holy Family, reminds us that families come "in so many different shapes and sizes" and that they are "the first school of life." How right he is! Where else do we learn to share (even when we don't want to), forgive (repeatedly!), and love unconditionally? The family is where we discover what it means to be human.

Look at the Holy Family itself — they were not spared drama! Matthew's Gospel shows us Joseph getting a midnight wake-up call: "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt." Can you imagine Mary's face? "Pack the donkey, Joseph, we're refugees now!" Talk about family stress! Yet through it all, they stayed together, protecting one another with fierce devotion.

St Paul knew what he was talking about in Colossians when he urged families to "bear with one another" and "forgive each other." That is real family life — messy, demanding and requiring patience we did not know we had! And Wisdom reminds us beautifully that honouring our parents is not just nice – it is foundational. "Whoever honours his father atones for sins."

Cardinal Nichols celebrates those who "work hard to sustain their family circle, to deepen its stability and love," especially during crisis and hardship. Yes! That's us, doing our best, sometimes failing spectacularly, but always coming back to love.

Our families, with all their quirks and challenges, are gifts of God's goodness. They are where hope is born, where we learn that love means showing up — day after day, through thick and thin. As the Cardinal notes, when we experience goodness, we become "agents of goodness for others."

So here's to family — stable, healthy, dignified, honest, occasionally bonkers, always beloved. Let’s all be extraordinarily proud to be an integral part of this great adventure!

By Fr. Thomas O'Brien a.a.