Interestingly, the Holy Father has chosen to launch the Jubilee for the Church world-wide, on the Solemnity of the Holy Family. New beginnings are signs of hope precisely because our Catholic jubilee has a Jewish past. Then, a jubilee occurred once in every 50 years. Its aim was to restore equality amongst all children of Israel. Families which have lost their property and individuals who have lost their freedom might have them restored. Celebrating a jubilee reminds society that a time would come when everyone, slaves included, will become equals. It is a hope based on God’s promise.
Thus, the jubilee was a powerful instrument of social renewal. It aimed to restore society to a balance or an equilibrium which reflected or mirrored God’s design for the human race. What exactly does it mean that society is restored? Sometimes we easily forget that society is only an abstraction or a conceptual structure because right at the heart of any social renewal, lies the family. Society is not made up of disparate or distinct individuals because everyone must come from somewhere.
The “somewhere”, which is the context, is the family. For example, when we speak of Church, which is a kind of society, it is not the sum total of all the individuals there are. Nobody here who is baptised, had walked up to baptismal font, scoop Holy Water, tilted the head and poured water over it saying to oneself, “I baptise myself in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. We are always baptised by someone. In other words, we are a web of inter-related individuals.
The densest or the most basic relationships are to be found within the family. Therefore, society is composed of a network of families. Go to a small town and you get the sense of the “society” there because it is made up of all the relationships amongst the families who are often intermarried. But when towns developed into cities, anonymity soon becomes a part of our social setting. With anonymity and larger societies, the extended family is under pressure to retreat into the nuclear family. It may be the basic building block of society but it is besieged by various anti-family ideologies. For example, in some places, the state or rather, the nanny state, will step in to dictate how a family should raise a child.
The family is crucial to our well-being. As mentioned earlier, we live in an atomised society in which we reduce everything down to the individual, measured by his or her wants and desires. I remember an incident between my elder brother and mother. He said to my mother, “Ma, I can marry again but you, I only have one”. The statement was not to relativise his marriage as if it were not important but it did bring home the point on the irreplaceability of one’s family member and how important family is to one’s well-being. I am not merely a sum total of my likes and dislikes. I am also a reflexion of my family to a certain extent, whether it be functional or dysfunctional.
We need the family because society cannot function fully without the family. According to Pope John Paul II, civilisation blossoms amongst the fields and flowers of the family. Whatever happened to the family will affect civilisation. The etymology of the word is “civis” or the citizen. Precisely being a citizen involves politics, a city (or civilisation) can thrive only because it is watered by the aqueducts of familial relationships. The health of any civilisation is dependent on the health, not of the individuals, but of the individuals who come from families. We easily forget this fact, that is, whether we like it or not, we are a web of clans and tribes. When we forget that society is family, meaning that relationships characterise us, then it becomes easy to forget those who are weak and vulnerable amongst us—the unborn, the elderly and those with no access to decent human services. Dysfunctionality in the family weakens a society’s well-being.
Every society is an aggregation of families. Therefore, when we speak of restoration, it is not merely a restoration of an individual. The Sacrament of Confession is a perfect example of what it means to be restored. “I stole”. Nobody steals from nobody. We always steal from somebody. There is no such a thing as a sin which does not hurt someone. Every sin hurts and destroys the fabric of society. Through the Sacrament of Confession, we are restored in our relationships, thus, revealing how important relationships are to our health, physical, psychological and spiritual.
As we enter into the experience of the Jubilee, maybe this year we want to give more thoughts to our family. Much of our hurts come from the family and its broken relationships. When there is no love and loyalty involved, betrayal is just that, betrayal and it is not personal. But when there is love and trust, betrayal leaves an enduring scar on some of us. We are often hurt by people we love most.
Clearly, civilisation cannot thrive when families fail and as rightly pointed out by John Paul II, the family is key to fixing the serious destruction of the environment because the family is the most important environment. In the context of Laudato si, protecting the family is key to protecting the environment.
Not only does the country or society need the family. The Church too. Without healthy and functional families, the priesthood will suffer and marriages too. The start of the Jubilee Year beckons us to celebrate forgiveness and reconciliation within the family as moments of mercy and healing. We get hurt by siblings and parents but the family is where we also learn to offer mercy and pardon and ask for forgiveness when we have hurt others. The Church holds up the Holy Family for us not because they were perfect. They are models because of their faith and their selfless love for one another. Pope Francis highlighted in Amoris Laetitia that “Jesus, who reconciled all things in himself, has restored marriage and the family to their original form. Marriage and the family have been redeemed by Christ and restored in the image of the Holy Trinity, the mystery from which all true love flows”. Our fervent hope for this Jubilee is that the same love of the Holy Family may flow in and through our families.
