Michael's Random Thoughts and Photos on Spirituality

     This weekend we celebrate the Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist. What practical significance does this have for us? Well, it means that we have exactly 6 months to shop for Christmas. What is more important is the hiddenness of not only John's birth but also that of Jesus. Given the fact that the church has declared this day a feast day in honor of John the Baptist, given all of the art over the centuries that have depicted this event and all the events surrounding the birth of John and Jesus; each time the artists put their own spin on the events, their own ideas of what it might have looked like, and the desire to make something impressive, to say nothing of inspirational; all this distances us from who Joseph and Mary, Elizabeth and Zachariah really were. To put it mildly, they were nobodies. They almost didn't count except for their ability to pay taxes. They came not from Jerusalem but the tiny backwaters of no account Nazareth and Bethlehem. They were ...

St. Marks Gospel gives us little tidbits, details, about Jesus and his family the other gospels do not give us. One such tidbit is in today's Gospel, where his mother and other family members think he is mad and they want to take him away. Because my mind is a little twisted, and I'm always looking for the little oddity in any particular gospel, this incident caused me to wonder about the mental health of the Holy Family. Given this little incident in today's Gospel we might conclude that the Holy Family is, well, a little bit dysfunctional. We all have our image of what the Holy Family was like. We have been taught from early on that our families should reflect that of the Holy Family.  When I first heard this, maybe when I was six or seven years old, I thought well my family does reflect the Holy Family, what's the problem? Three members in the Holy Family, three members in my family. Numeric equality is about the only equality my family had with the holy family...