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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
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Today’s Solemnity of the Birth of John the Baptist is truly unique among the saints. Not only is it one of only three birthdays celebrated on the Church calendar – the others being the birth of Jesus on Christmas and the birth of Mary on September 8 – but it’s actually a higher order of celebration than even Mary’s birthday. September 8 is what’s called a feast day, whereas today we celebrate what’s called a solemnity. So, for instance, if September 8 happens to fall on a Sunday, we don’t celebrate Mary’s birthday that year. But if June 24 falls on a Sunday, we still celebrate St. John the Baptist.
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We all know Venerable Patrick Peyton’s most famous sayings: “The family that prays together, stays together,” and “A world at prayer is a world at peace.” One of the blessings of working here at Holy Cross Family Ministries and getting to know Fr. Peyton better is learning some of his lesser known but no less profound quotes. For instance, on the wall of our conference room is this beautiful Patrick Peyton insight: “The Our Father raises the family circle to the highest level.”
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Our own Biblical worldview is so familiar to us that I don’t think we always realize how truly extraordinary it is. Throughout most of human history and human societies, powerful men have pretty much been able to take advantage of anonymous people with little challenge or consequence. Yet in today’s reading from the Book of Kings, King Ahab – who, though not a good man, still at least initially seems guided by God’s principles for Israel – feels powerless to force Naboth to do his will. It’s only when Ahab’s foreign, pagan queen Jezebel -- who represents the ungodly views of the world -- gets involved that Ahab embraces the notion of his absolute entitlement as king. But, as we will hear tomorrow, Ahab and Jezebel suffer dire consequences for his act of violence. And Naboth himself is not relegated to being some anonymous victim, lost to history. Three thousand years later, we as God’s people still remember his name and mourn the injustice he suffered.
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Jesus’ death and Resurrection is the most important moment in human history, an event of literally cosmic significance. And so, when you stop to think about it, it is remarkable that Jesus chooses to set this infinitely unique and important moment in the context of His traditional Jewish faith and the ritual of Passover. On the night before the Son of God is to die for the sins of the entire human race throughout all of human history, this is what is most important to Him: that He celebrate the Passover meal with His disciples, and so connect this ritual commemoration of Israel’s freedom from bondage with His new Covenant of eternal freedom from sin and death.
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Saint Joseph is a great bridge figure between the Old and New Testaments, in the image of the Hebrew patriarchs and the adoptive father of the promised Messiah. When we think in the broadest sense about what the Jewish covenant with the Lord consists of, the two words that come to mind are “the Law and the Prophets.” The Law, or the Torah, guided the Jewish people to live their lives well; it was more than a set of just dry rules, for a more accurate translation of Torah would be “the teachings,” the teachings of Who God is and how we can follow His plan for our lives. And we might best think of the Prophets not so much as predictors of the future, but as the pinnacle figures of Jewish prayer, similar to the great prayer mystics in our Catholic tradition.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
In the era before the Industrial Revolution, it was quite common for a son to learn a trade or a profession directly from his father. In fact, some of the medieval guilds, automatically accepted the son of a member into their ranks. Of course, this kind of dynamic played out explicitly in the life of Jesus. Joseph was a carpenter, and Jesus was known as both “the son of the carpenter” and as a carpenter himself. It’s beautiful to imagine a teenage or young adult Jesus and Joseph going out on jobs together or working with each other on projects at their home in Nazareth.
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