Even though I’ve never viewed a single episode of “Family Feud,” I was somewhat aware of its popularity as a long-running, daytime TV game show…sort of like the soap operas “Days of Our Lives” or “As the World Turns.”
The game show features two families whose members respond to survey questions in the hope of winning cash and prizes. Since ABC first syndicated the game show in 1976, “Family Feud” has also become somewhat of an international sensation, playing in 50 international markets. It also has spun off home editions in the form of board games, interactive films, and video games.
Well, at least, that’s what Wikipedia claims.
What contributes to make “Family Feud” so popular and enduring is the competition among family members which increases the likelihood they will resemble the cartoon characters “The Bickerman’s.” Viewers eagerly anticipate the moment in the heat of the competition when an argument breaks out and family members “go postal” on national TV.
The more likely explanation of the show’s enduring popularity is that when family members are entirely dependent upon one another to win cash and prizes, they more closely resemble the more pervasive, home version of “Family Feud” about which Wikipedia is 100% mute: The daily reality of how most family members interact with one another in their homes.
This version is no game and oftentimes more closely resembles Jesus’ depiction of family life in today’s gospel when its members are “sleepy” Catholics. As Jesus described this reality:
From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
With all this division turning family members one against the other, some may conclude that at least in Jesus’ estimation their family fares pretty well. They take comfort in this judgment thinking to themselves: “Sure, we have some problems and, yes, arguments crop up more than I’d prefer. But at least those problems don’t keep us from having Christmas and Easter together.”
In the “family” of the U.S. Army, when a member—usually it’s one of the lower ranks—fails to fulfill, shirks, or does a lousy job in fulfilling one’s responsibilities, a more senior officer orders this member to do time “in the hole.” Having heard from several members of the Army about this experience, “the hole” is no pleasant place to spend one’s time.
It’s pretty much the same in any U.S. prison. When inmates violate the rules—even seemingly petty ones like not tucking in a shirt—violators are also sent to “the hole.” One prisoner described his experience this way:
I got in a fight, and they locked me down in the hole. I’ve been in this hole for more than two years now….You sit in the room 24 hours a day. The only time they let us out is to go to the shower. We don’t go outside. If you don’t have money to buy your own TV or radio, you’re just sitting in a cell looking at the wall all day. I have nothing. That’s what drives people crazy.
Today’s first reading related the story of the prophet Jeremiah who was sentenced not just to “the hole” but to die in it. We were told this particular hole was a dry cistern, the bottom comprised of mud, mire, and muck. The idea was that Jeremiah would starve to death in that mess. Then, when long last Jeremiah finally gasped his last breath, society would finally be done with having to put up with his offensive and divisive preaching.
With this image firmly in mind and using it as a standard of judgment, some of us might conclude once again that our daily family life sizes up pretty well. “Sure, there are some problems and heated arguments do crop up and family members say bad things,” we may think to ourselves. “Even though when someone fails to do something or says something offensive or offensive and is sentenced to ‘go to your room, shut the door, and don’t come out until I tell you to come out’,” at least the only mire and muck they have to contend with is their words and behavior. They’re luxuriating on a comfortable mattress with one of Michael Lindell’s My Pillows tucked under their head to think about what they did.”
Yes, “sleepy” Catholic families are so much better off today than when Jesus made his observation, aren’t they? Getting sentenced to “the hole” is merely a matter of being ostracized and ignored, luxuriating in comfort until “you come to your better senses.”
However, what happens when a family member or relative raises political or, more problematic yet, spiritual, moral, and religious issues associated with the Catholic faith that “offend” other family members? Is that family member or relative welcomed and treated as a prophet or prophetess speaking God’s word? Or, is that person more likely to be judged, as was Jeremiah, as one who “ought to be put to death”—sentenced to “the hole”—for demoralizing others and speaking these things that demonstrates zero interest in the family’s welfare but aim at ruining family harmony?
Against the standard of the Holy Family, every Catholic family—“sleepy” Catholic families and, yes, even “WOKE” Catholic families—falls short. And how could they not? Every family is constituted of imperfect human beings who are prone to error, failure, and outright evil. As it’s said, “feces happens” and when it’s to happen, it will happen most frequently in the family and ruin yet another attempt at what would have been family bliss.
Hope all its members might, joy doesn’t characterize daily family life as we know from first-hand experience. It can start first thing in the day when an argument erupts over the use of the bathroom. It can crop up at any point during the day of matters than oftentimes include doing chores, running errands, and the like. Then too, there’s what TV shows will be watch, when members are to go to bed, and taking out the garbage...to name just a few of the possibilities.
We also know from experience that money can’t buy joy in a family. The evidence suggests that God may have created the family for a fiendish reason: To be “the hole”—the perfect place where the imperfect creature that every human being is, is to be perfected.
Our Catholic faith teaches us that joy is a gift of the Holy Spirit, not a commodity available for purchase at a local store. For the most part, human beings experience joy only after enduring pain—the suffering that purifies and strengthens desire—as every mother knows only after her infant is born. While Nature teaches us this lesson, Scripture taught us last week that faith teaches a similar, yet somewhat different lesson: Joy in family life is “the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.”
Think of it this way: Faith is the fuel that powers the hope that family members will experience joy...somehow and some day when we get through the messes created by the imperfect members of each and every family.
Otherwise, we’d all give up.
When it comes to family life, who among us doesn’t desire and hope to experience joy in our families each and every day?
While we know intellectually we cannot purchase what we desire because it’s a gift of the Holy Spirit, we all recognize how this desire abides in our hearts. “If only…,” we think and muse to ourselves. Nowhere do we experience this desire more so than when family members fall short and bring us so much frustration and sadness—we exclude ourselves from this assessment, of course—rather than the joy for which our heart’s long if not thirst.
It’s all a matter of perspective, however.
If we were to poll families nationwide if not across the globe, based upon our experience and what we see in the news and on TV—“reality” shows and game shows included—would we really expect the data to indicate the reality of family life is that the majority of people experience it as one big, memorable party?
Were we to expect these results, we’d have to be crazy!
The data are more likely to indicate that the daily reality of family life—across history, in all likelihood—is more often than not filled with dejection, sadness, and tears…if only for the reason that every human being is imperfect, which has a way of contradicting the desire of our hearts. Among others, there’s illnesses that crop up, irritating problems in relationships with spouses, children, and siblings, irrationality, stubbornness, arrogance, and irascibility as well as the failure to contribute one’s part to maintaining the house, problems and difficulties at work, and shortfalls in income making it difficult if not impossible to pay bills or, worse yet, the mortgage.
The simple truth is that family life isn’t—and probably never has been—one big, memorable party.
Some might be surprised, but this allegedly “negative” assessment doesn’t exclude the Holy Family! Just read the Bible...the New Testament relates stories of the difficulties, challenges, and sadness the members of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph experienced.
Yet, despite these experiences, the Holy Family had a secret ingredient that “sleepy” Catholic families don’t possess and which they need, that is, if they’re to experience joy in daily family life: The ability to allow the trials and tribulations that are part-and-parcel of daily family life to purify those trials and tribulations…to wash them clean of their impurities by not allowing them to dash their hope so as to strengthen and double down on what their hearts desired and to make the ideal become more real with each passing day.
How are family members to become less “sleepy” Catholics and more “WOKE” Catholics so they might experience joy in the place God created where they are to be purified and perfected best?
That represents this week’s challenge from scripture: To allow faith to purify the trials and tribulations that daily family life generates so as to strengthen what our hearts desire.
To “do this in memory of me,” as Jesus taught, before dinner each evening this week conduct this simple memento mori: Turn off all electronic devices, especially the TV and cellphones. Then, after praying the blessing, don’t talk at all. Just eat dinner and remain at the table until the last person has completed his or her last morsel. Absolutely no talking at the dinner table...all week.
At first, the silence at the dinner table may prove to be deafening as spouses and siblings, parents and children, as well as adults and young people. What the silence will then reveal is that family members should not and cannot be indifferent to but must encounter one another in some way. It just doesn’t feel right not to encounter one another.
Carried out over the course of the week, this exercise will then bring to the consciousness of each family member what should constitute the content of those encounters...to the point that each is desperate to talk.
The objective of this week’s memento mori is to begin looking at, meeting with, and listening to one another...no longer just seeing, hearing, and passing by one another like ships in the dark of night.
Across the days of this week and through the silence—the equivalent of “resetting the clock” of daily family life—the lukewarm family life of “sleepy” Catholics that’s characterized by the frustration, unhappiness, trials, and tribulations which human imperfection generates gradually will experience the need to transform the present daily reality of family life into living experiences of authentic Catholic family life—perhaps even kind and loving words—that, in retrospect, will strengthen the desire to experience joy in family life present in the heart of each family member.
But, to achieve this outcome, each family member will first have to learn to “bear with one another out of love.” Rather than react as one another’s imperfections make their appearance (and they surely will!), recall the example of the court official Ebed-melech, who pleaded with King Zedekiah to release Jeremiah from “the hole.” Each night this week, as you fall asleep, pray in hope, just like Ebed-melech and a mother in labor:
Lord, I know this sorrow will turn to joy. I don’t know how, but I know it will happen!
Then, living each day this week with the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen—namely, the joy of daily family life—you will begin rooting your family life in the theological virtue of faith…the hope of joy that comes only by accepting the sorrow and sadness caused by human imperfection and allowing it to be purified in the midst of its pain…just like the hope of Ebed-melech and a mother in labor.
With a week of having endured the “sounds of silence,” come as a family to celebrate Mass next Sunday and say that prayer again. Then, following the blessing at Sunday dinner, let the encounters begin having reset the clock of daily family life.
Gradually, the false pretenses of faith evidencing themselves in “sleepy” Catholics will give way to the authentic appearances of faith evidencing themselves with “WOKE” Catholics. In these families, spouses and siblings, parents and children, as well as adults and young people aren’t perfect yet aren’t indifferent to one another. Instead, they actually learn to express their care for one another in the heart of the family—at the dinner table—despite their imperfections.
In addition, as the members of our families witness to the Catholic faith, what their hearts desire will be strengthened. Then, as this desire strengthens, “WOKE” Catholic families will surround all the “sleepy” Catholic families, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminded us in today’s epistle, with that “great cloud of witnesses.”
“How so?”, some may be wondering.
This achievement—to witness to the reality of what our hearts desire—requires an authentic conversion of heart: To move away from the false pretenses associated with the Catholic faith to its lived reality, from being lukewarm to being both hot and cold—that is, the bad and the good, living each day fervently in the abiding awareness that no member of any family has to be perfect because no one is perfect. Instead, the pathway to achieve joy in daily family life is to live in the awareness that “just like me”—I am struggling to become more perfect, given my imperfections—so also my spouse, children, siblings, and relatives.
This memento mori will go a long way to assist each of us, as “WOKE” Catholics, to begin encountering one another as members of the family God has created. Then, as we struggle to speak with one another in perfecting our love of God and neighbor rather than allowing their imperfections to divide our families, that’s where we experience in our families the abiding joy of God’s kingdom.
Given time and practice, this awareness of one’s own and others’ imperfection and not allowing that to divide our families by distracting attention away from one another is how “WOKE” Catholic families experience the fulfillment of the promise made on Christmas Eve: “They shall name him ‘Emmanuel,’ that is, ‘God is with us’.” It’s in this experience that each member knows “I live in the grace of God and although I am imperfect, It’s all going to be okay as the love of God and neighbor my family members express to me heals me” as it would have healed the people to whom Jeremiah spoke God’s loving word.
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