The final line of one of E.E. Cummings’ Little Poems carries this beautiful image of one person carrying another’s heart within their own heart. The level of intimacy is unique, and the gift of love is forever understood:
Here is the deepest secret nobody knows,
here is the root of the root and the bud of
the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree
called life which grows higher than
soul can hope, or mind can hide, and this
is the wonder that is keeping the stars apart:
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart).
In the time of Jesus, the heart was viewed as the place where all emotions and thoughts were to be processed and understood. The ancient Hebrew was unaware of how blood circulated throughout the body and all the implications of its physiological functions, but emotional reactions were easily assessed and understood in the heart. One could have a cheerful heart or experience stubbornness by hardening one’s heart. In both the gospels of Luke and Matthew, the heart was understood as the place where anything valuable would be kept. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”
In today’s gospel reading from St. Luke, Mary “treasured all these things in her heart.” The heart reference is consistent, especially in the gospel of Luke, and would become a working metaphor for how individuals would reflect upon the religious mysteries of life. In this gospel passage, Mary and Joseph have been frantically looking for Jesus who was lost, and eventually found him teaching in the temple. Miffed by his disappearance, both Joseph and Mary were astonished by His behavior. Mary said to him: “Child, why have you treated us like this? You see that your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” Jesus said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?”
Aside from the family squabble, the mysterious nature of Jesus’ divinity was slowly being revealed to both Joseph and Mary. The true understanding of Jesus as the Emmanuel (God with us) would be ongoing. It is comforting to know that, even without the intervention of a family therapist or theologian, “Jesus went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them.” Luke concludes the passage by implying that both Joseph and Mary would treasure all these mysteries in their hearts.
Today we are celebrating the Feast of The Holy Family, a feast that we celebrate on the Sunday after Christmas. There is nothing ancient about this feast since it was introduced to the liturgical calendar by Pope Benedict XV in 1921; however, the family events that comprise the early lives of Jesus, Mary and Joseph were drawn from the first century Canonical Scriptures.
Stories of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the presentation of Jesus in the temple for ritual circumcision, the flight into Egypt and the finding of Jesus in the temple generate a peek into the Holy Family’s day-to-day activities. The chronology of events is a bit hazy in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, but the non-canonical works of scripture, especially the Gospel of Thomas, offer a fanciful portrait of Jesus as a child. However, these apocryphal works, while imaginative and entertaining, do not pass muster in the world of biblical scholarship.
The chaotic history of the relationship between Mary and Joseph around her mysterious pregnancy is portrayed only in the gospels of Luke and Matthew and is often glossed over by theologians in favor of some idyllic couple that got married, had their baby, and lived in relative obscurity in Nazareth. Mary becomes the demur wife, no doubt dressed in blue, and Joseph becomes the dutiful carpenter who provides a living for the family. In many ways, the beauty of including the troubled pregnancy does give hope to the angel Gabriel’s words to Mary that “All things are possible with God.”
When Pope John Paul II added the Luminous Mysteries to the rosary in 1982, we began to see the adult Jesus emerging from the Holy Family. Baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist, in the River Jordan we glimpse the beginnings of Jesus’ adult ministry. There would be other family events when Mary and Jesus would get into an exchange of opinions regarding the lack of wine at the wedding in Cana, or when Mary wanted to see Jesus and was told by Jesus, “Who is my mother or father or brothers or sisters?” What is most interesting psychologically, and which consistently threads its way through the four gospels, is the intimate role that Mary plays in Jesus’ life from birth to death. Mary continues to treasure all the mysteries of Jesus’ life in her heart while she shares the joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious moments of her life with Jesus.
The absence of any mention of Joseph beyond the early days in Nazareth provides room for speculation and conjecture. I recently stared long at a beautiful stained-glass window depicting the death of Joseph, in which the artist has Mary and Jesus comforting him in his final hour. While there is no place in the gospels where this scene is verified, the reality of such an intimate Holy Family portrait would easily have family members caring for one another in moments of life as well as death. The depiction of Mary at the foot of the cross when Jesus is dying creates an everlasting image of Mary carrying the heart of her son Jesus in her sorrowful heart.
Despite the frightening statistics of families plagued with dysfunctional relationships, the ideal of “The Holy Family” is worth pursuing. In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he exhorts his listeners to “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
What a beautiful “family plan” for happiness and for an opportunity to carry the hearts of one another into a world of peace, justice, and harmony. Finding ways to translate the ideal into reality becomes the ongoing challenge of the church and society. We desperately need the ideal of a Holy Family as a model place where all of us, like Jesus in Nazareth, “can increase in wisdom and in years, and in favor with God and human beings.”
“and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
Peace and best wishes for a blessed New Year, Fr. Joe Gillespie, O.P.