In the joy of the Christmas Octave, today’s Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is a day to celebrate family, reflect on our call to holiness, and recommit to strengthening the image of God in our lives. Today’s feast always reminds us of an encounter with a Polish priest that changed how we think about our family.

Years ago, we were on a road trip and stopped for Mass on a Sunday morning at a beautiful old church somewhere in New Jersey. The parish was run by a missionary priest from Poland, and since we met and fell in love in Krakow, we were eager to speak to him.

“Good morning, holy family!” he belted out as we approached him after Mass, pushing and pulling our five little ones along. For a good long moment, we couldn’t speak. We looked behind us and tried to process his greeting. Holy family? Was he beholding an apparition of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? But no, he was addressing us.

We had never thought of ourselves as a “holy family,” but his cheerful confidence in us was contagious. As we felt tears of joy springing up, he smiled even more as if to say, “Yes, that’s what I said—and I mean it!”

Remembering the grace of that moment, we want to share it with you today and say, Hello, holy family! to you and your loved ones.

Yes, the challenges each family faces are daunting, but with the love of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to encourage and guide us, we can surmount the dark forces of these times and rise to the dignity of our calling to be living images of the Holy Family and the Holy Trinity. And even though we struggle, we might just be closer to the Holy Family than we think.

What does it mean to be holy? To be holy is to be like God. And what is God like? He is a communion of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—so perfectly loving to one another that their love overflows to still more others, to create the world and us in God’s image.

A communion of persons? Yes, that is what a family is! As we read in the Catechism, “The Christian family is a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (2205). Our families are already much closer to holiness, to being like God, than we might think.

But then, of course, there is the hard part: are we so loving to one another that we create overflowing love to share with others, bringing them into God’s grace and so building up his kingdom?

If we take one look around our culture, we’ll find a strong tendency to go in the opposite direction of holiness, of putting one another first. Instead, we celebrate the “Big Me,” the selfie, self-reliance, independence, and the lone ranger. We chafe at being interdependent with others. Asking for help is a sign of weakness.

And the social science stats of today are clear about where that gets us: Americans have never been lonelier or more isolated, with so much consequent anxiety, depression, and worse. Bowling Alone—the title of a book on our drift into individualism—puts it perfectly. If the average family in America today is a collection of individuals who are each “bowling alone,” then we find something very different from an “icon of the Trinity.”

Against this backdrop, today’s Feast of the Holy Family can be a kind of Victory Day over the powerful forces that would tear apart the family. This Feast can be a day when we Christian families recommit to the one thing that can both bring us happiness and turn our culture around—to be like the persons of God and love one another as God has loved us!

Happy Feast of the Holy Family! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, pray for us!

P.S. Please join us in praying this prayer for the health of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, shared this week by Pope Francis:
 

The above reflection is adapted from our article on the Holy Family originally published at Aleteia here. And if you missed our Top 10 Graces of 2022 e-letter from earlier this week, check it out here! Each of the 10 graces point to the kind of impact your year-end gift to Trinity House Community can make!