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Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
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The reading from the Book of Wisdom that we heard today will return to us on Good Friday. It speaks of a righteous person who becomes the target of resentment and hostility—not because he has done wrong, but because his goodness exposes the darkness around him. His very life is a challenge to those who reject God. They plot against him, tear at his reputation, and test him to see if God will defend him. Yet, as we hear elsewhere in Scripture, he does not retaliate. He turns the other cheek.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
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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Brief and contemporary inspiration focused on hope and family prayer will be delivered to your inbox! Articles include live video, written word, and links to resources that will lead you and your family deeper into faith.
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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Anyone who has ever tried to start exercising again after months or years of neglect knows this. The first day you say, “Tomorrow I will start.” Tomorrow comes, and suddenly your body invents fifty reasons why today is not the day. The strange thing is that the longer we stay stuck, the more normal the ‘stuckness’ begins to feel. There is a man lying near the pool in Jerusalem. Thirty-eight years. Just think about that. Some of you here have not been alive that long. Thirty-eight years. That's longer than most marriages. Longer than most careers. Imagine you've been sick for thirty-eight years. Not with a cold. Not with a bad back, not even a fractured hand. And every single day, you drag yourself to a pool and you wait. And wait. And wait some more. Thirty-eight years is long enough for a person’s entire identity to become wrapped around a single sentence: “This is just how my life is.”
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Imagine, for a moment, that you are the royal official in Cana. You aren’t just a character in a story; you are a man whose world is collapsing. Your son is dying. You have likely spent a fortune on the best doctors the Roman world could offer, yet here you are, desperate enough to chase a rumor about a carpenter-turned-healer. The royal official in John’s Gospel was, by any measure, a powerful man. He had rank. He had influence. His name opened doors. Yet none of it could save his son. So he walked. Uphill. In the Galilean heat. From Capernaum to Cana, roughly twenty to twenty-five miles. In our world, that’s a short drive with a good playlist. But in the ancient world, it meant eight or ten hours of dust, heat, and anxious silence.
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Catholic Motherhood | Holy Women's History Month | Holy lives of inspiration | St. Monica
For Holy Women's History Month, Alex Resch shares how her devotion to Saint Monica helps her have hope when family and friends are far from the Church. Saint Monica was the mother of Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine was a Doctor of the Church, and arguably, one of the greatest saints of all time. Much to the dismay and heartache of his holy mother, Augustine lived a less-than-holy life for much of his youth.
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