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I must confess, I don't know all the details of how June is celebrated in Ireland, but in the United States, it is an unusually busy month which commemorates beginnings, transitions, and endings. In June, many weddings and graduations take place, we celebrate Father's Day, and we begin the summer season. In the Church, June also celebrates beginnings, endings, and transitions. In this liturgical year, we began June with the Feast of Pentecost, (June 4th), we celebrated Trinity Sunday on June 11th, and the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) on June 18. Coming up is the feast of the Sacred Heart on June 23. From a faith perspective, June is a month packed with celebrations of the way God is expressed in our world! As I reflected on our June feasts, it occurred to me that they connect as much with family life as they do with Church life. If we begin with Pentecost, we see rich symbols that correspond to the experience of families. In one feast, Pentecost celebrates beginning, ending, and transition. It celebrates the beginning of the Church (Happy Birthday, everyone!), it ends the Easter season, and it helps us make the transition from the time of the apostles to the time of the Church, inviting all of us to be ministers of the gospel in the midst of our homes and the world. The readings for Pentecost ask us to consider how we work toward understanding each other, even when we speak different languages, literally and figuratively; for example, when parents and teenagers try to communicate with each other. They also remind us that we all have different gifts to contribute to the Body of Christ – and that all those gifts are necessary for us to be the Body of Christ – a community of faith, hope, and love. Family life parallels the feast of Pentecost. Like the earliest leaders of the church, families frequently must make themselves understood and listen with understanding to others. The Spirit, which blows new life into even the dead places of our lives, calls us to speak with new voices and listen with new hearts. Each day, families grow in awareness of the Spirit as we listen to each other with patience and speak to each other with love. The Spirit also is described as a fire, which warms, enlivens, and purifies. This month, as we celebrate Pentecost, is it possible for our families to be filled with life and with a fire that gives us passion and hope? On Trinity Sunday, we celebrate another expression of God. Throughout the centuries, we often have thought about the Trinity as an abstraction, and scholars have debated what it meant to say that God was a Trinity – or "three persons in one." One simple way of explaining the Trinity is "perfect community." The Father, Son, and Spirit are one with each other, yet distinct in their persons and purposes. They are a community of love, which implies that they're not simply involved with other, but reach out beyond themselves; in short, the Trinity is a loving God that longs to be with us. How are families called to be like the Trinity, the expression of perfect community? We know we'll never be perfect, but Trinity Sunday calls families to explore the ways they relate to each other. In the Trinity, the persons of God fully cooperate in love and goodness. Can we take a step toward the love and goodness so perfectly revealed by the Trinity? Is it possible for parents and children to move toward oneness and cooperation, to let go of the fragmentation and competition that so often characterizes our lives today? Surely, we'll never perfectly model God, but Trinity Sunday reminds us that God exists as a loving community, and that we, in the midst of our families, are called to do the same. Last month's column described the family in terms of the Eucharist – as people called to be blessed, broken, and shared. The feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ, reminds us that we are nourished by Christ's body and blood within the Body of Christ, the Church. Day after day, we nourish each other with food, time, and conversation, and bring our gifts, wounds, strengths and weaknesses to the table of the Lord, where we are fed by the Body of Christ within the community of the Church. The feast of Corpus Christi reminds us that Jesus gave us the Eucharist as his gift of self; it also encourages us to see how we can live as the Body of Christ in our families and in our communities. The feast of the Sacred Heart is not always highlighted as much as the other three, but it is a beautiful celebration which reminds us that Jesus' love for us is always visible, and endures in the world. It is about love, pure and simple. In his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that God is love. The Feast of the Sacred Heart tells us in no uncertain terms that just as this love required concrete action on the part of Jesus – He loved us enough to die for us – it requires concrete action on our part as well. Family life is the place where we experience love in action every day. While notions of romantic love may spark a relationship and are enjoyable, true, enduring love is expressed not just through romance but through the day to day actions of generosity, kindness, patience, and care. This vision is placed before us in the feast of the Sacred Heart. The readings for the day show us that God's love for us is present even when we don't recognize it, and that Jesus' total love for us was demonstrated by his willingness to hand over his life for us. Saint Francis de Sales, in his Treatise on the Love of God, once said that "the measure of love is to love without measure." The feast of the Sacred Heart reminds us that Jesus lived, died, and rose, loving without measure. It invites families to do the same each day. June is a month of beginnings, ends and transitions. In faith, families are invited to begin to see the many ways God is revealed through them, to end the chapters of their lives that cause pain and sorrow, and to move toward a life filled with the love of Christ and the passion of the Spirit. May we be filled with joy this month, and grow in our awareness of God's presence in our midst each day! Copyright 2006 Joann Heaney-Hunter, Ph.D. All rights reserved. |
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