Happy New Year~This is a reprinting of the post I did one year ago. Today is Saturday, the day before the feast if the Holy Family...Holy Family pray for us.
I have always prayed the Assumption of Mary from the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary with the idea that when Mary was assumed, the HOLY FAMILY was reunited. "Holy family reunited in heaven please pray for my church family and my family."
I imagine the joy of Our Lord Jesus, and St. Joseph as Mary joins hands with them in a circle of prayerful love with the Holy Spirit and Abba God.
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| Oh, how I would love to be able to paint the picture of the Holy Family Reunited in Heaven from "my mind"~but I can not, (this image is the main reason I am republishing this "post"). This is the closest image I could find....just imagine Jesus as an adult.....Mary would have been in her mid fifties when she was assumed, and lots of joy and happy smiles of love. Glory and Praise be to God! May the Holy family hold you in their loving heart as a child of God, beautiful, created by God for love of and for Him, internally spotless through Christ Our Lord. You are so loved! Thank-you for all your support, and prayers. Thank-you for taking time out of your day to read this blog...Blessings upon you now and always (and most especially 2019). +JMJ+ Pray for us |
From Catholic Online, it is long but good.
"CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - During the Octave (eight days) of Christmas we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. The significance of the Feast unfolds when we come to understand the deeper truths it reveals. It teaches us about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph- and about each one of us and our own families. Through our Baptism, we are invited to live our lives in Christ by living them in the Church - which is the Risen Body of Christ. The Church is the place where we learn, as the Apostle Paul reminded the Colossian Christians, to "put on love, that is, the bond of perfection". (Col. 3:14) The Gospel of the Liturgy is taken from the presentation of Jesus in the temple account in St. Luke and the beautiful canticle of Zechariah. (Luke 2:22-40) However, upon leaving the temple to return to Nazareth, we read these words: "When they had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him." In a beautiful address on December 28, 2011, at his Wednesday audience, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI spoke of the life of the Holy Family in Nazareth. Here is a short excerpt:
"The house of Nazareth is a school of prayer where we learn to listen, to meditate, to penetrate the deepest meaning of the manifestation of the Son of God, drawing our example from Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Holy Family is an icon of the domestic Church, which is called to pray together. The family is the first school of prayer where, from their infancy, children learn to perceive God thanks to the teaching and example of their parents. An authentically Christian education cannot neglect the experience of prayer. If we do not learn to pray in the family, it will be difficult to fill this gap later. I would, then, like to invite people to rediscover the beauty of praying together as a family, following the school of the Holy Family of Nazareth". The Christian family is the first cell of the whole Church. It is the place where we begin the journey toward holiness and become more fully human. The Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, became one of us. He was born into a human family. That was neither accidental nor incidental. There, in what the late Pope Paul VI called the "School of Nazareth", we can learn the way of love. The late Pope's reflection called "The Example of Nazareth" is in the Office of Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours (the breviary) for the Feast of the Holy family. Every moment of his time among us Jesus was saving the world, re-creating it from within. To use a word from the early Church Father and Bishop St. Ireneaus, he was "recapitulating" the entire human experience.
There, in the holy habitation of Nazareth, He forever transformed family life. Now, He teaches us how to live in His presence, if we will enroll in the "School of Nazareth". From antiquity the Christian family has rightly been called a "domestic church." In our life within the Christian family Jesus Christ is truly present. However, we need the eyes to see Him at work, the ears to hear His instruction and the hearts to make a place for Him to dwell. In our family we can learn the way of selfless love by enrolling in the School of Nazareth.Jesus spent 30 of his 33 earthly years in Nazareth. Some spiritual writers have called these the "hidden years", because there is so little written about them in the Gospel narratives. However, they reveal the holiness of ordinary life and show us how it becomes extraordinary for those baptized into Christ. Every moment of his time among us Jesus was saving, redeeming, and re-creating the world. From his conception, throughout His saving life, death and Resurrection, the One whom scripture calls the "New Adam" was making all things new. The Fathers of the last great Council of the Church put it this way:"The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. .He Who is "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15), is Himself the perfect man. "To the sons of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. "Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin" (Gaudium et Spes # 22) In the holy habitation of Nazareth Jesus transformed family life. Already blessed as God's plan for the whole human race and the first society, the Christian family has been elevated in Christ to a Sacrament, a vehicle of grace and sign of God's presence. The Church proclaims Christian marriage, and the family founded upon it, is a vocation, a response to the call of the Lord.
In the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we learn the way of love in the School of Nazareth. The phrase "domestic church" was one of particular fondness to the great Bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom. It was a framework for the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on Christian marriage and family. Saint John Paul II developed this teaching in his "Christian family in the Modern World" and his "Letter to the Family". In these writings he invites every Christian family to, using his pregnant phrase, "become what you are", a domestic church. The Holy Family of Jesus, Joseph and Mary is not only our model, it is the beginning of the new family of the Church. Our Gospel story today tells us of a family trip which is packed with lessons for those enrolled in the School of Nazareth. In and through the ordinary stuff of daily life we find Jesus and in the encounter discover ourselves.
