Jesus is Stripped of His Garments ~ Family Life Strips Us, too..

by Joseph A. Breig, 1950’s

Little by little, family life strips a husband and wife of all kinds of things that weigh them down and slow them in their progress toward endless happiness. It strips them of pride; who can be anything but prostrate in humility and helplessness while a baby is being born into the world? In those anxious hours we learn rapidly how utterly dependent we are upon God. We realize profoundly what we have always known but have not really grasped-that He alone has power to give life. We understand His overlordship of everything, and perhaps for the first time we pray with all our hearts and all our strength.

Family life strips us gradually, too, of selfishness. Bit by bit, the willingness to serve replaces the desire to be served. There is a strange power in an infant’s powerlessness; only a monster can refuse to tend a little one who depends upon his parents for absolutely every need.

Family life turns the mind from irresponsibility to responsibility. And it opens the eyes of husband and wife to the enormous folly of sin. How enlightening is the process of trying to teach children the goodness which we ourselves once dismissed as old-fashioned!

Our youthful flippancy is stripped from us. Now we know why there are laws God’s laws, nature’s laws, human laws. Solicitous for the good of our children, we understand suddenly God’s solicitude for our good. We know now that His commandments are not arbitrary or capricious; they are directions for our protection from grievous harm. They are like our commandments to our children-do not cross the street without looking both ways; do not touch poison; do not play with sharp knives; do not get into an automobile with strangers.

“Do not get into an automobile with strangers!” How often we were warned by priests and parents, when we were adolescents, about avoiding bad company! But we thought they were old fogies; we were perfectly capable, we said, of taking care of ourselves. But now we caution our children as we were cautioned; now we know that laws and rules are made by those who love us, in a constant effort to keep us from evil and injury and suffering.

Our smart-aleckry is being stripped away from us. Our conceits are torn from us, and as they go one by one, we realize that they were tapes binding us hand and foot. How we clung to them! We thought they were part of what we called our liberty, but all the time they were holding us in slavery. And when we see them in our children, we recognize them for what they truly are.

Living in the family, we begin to see that the soul, like the body, is vulnerable to injury. We perceive how sin and self-centeredness and vanity wreck the soul’s beauty as an accident can destroy the loveliness of a face, or the grace and mobility of a body. Follies of all kinds are being stripped from us; we are being made ready for the kind of death, when death comes, that is but the last great birth-pain of joy everlasting.

Garments of foolishness, of opinionated obstinacy, are being stripped from us one by one. And at last we come to understand something of the sacramentalism of marriage, the sacramentalism of family life. This is the vocation for which we were ordained in the Sacrament of Matrimony, this life with each other and with our children. This is the way of life in which we are to attain holiness; this is our salvation.

Now we can look upon each other, husband and wife, as far more than mere companions and mutual comforts. Why, we are co-saviors with Christ of each other! In the Sacrament we were united spiritually as well as physically, to the end that we should help each other, and help Our children, to God. In heaven we shall-or we should-owe much of -our salvation to each other. We are together not to hamper each other on the way to everlasting life, but to walk toward it hand in hand, and to draw our little ones with us.

In a certain sense we are as priests. We are the first to wear God’s own most beloved name, ‘Father. We are not merely to bring forth children physically; we are to help bring them forth spiritually, too. Priests are called ‘Father because they are ordained for the work of giving life in the supernatural order. But the title came to them from natural fathers; and from the cooperation of natural fathers with the Fatherhood of God came the nobility of the word ‘Father on earth.

Now more and more of our blindness, our graspingness, our self-seeking, our self-love, is being stripped from us. More and more clearly do we see the sublimity of marriage and family life. Each bond that is tom from us sets us freer to walk forward in the grace that comes through the Sacrament of Matrimony. We are turning heavenward, and we want our family to turn heavenward with us. Now we rejoice if the children give us spiritual bouquets for our birthdays, instead of shaving kits or smoking jackets. Now our ambitions for our children become less and less worldly, and more and more other-worldly.

No longer do we desire that our children shall marry into wealth or position or power. What we want now is to see them, when their courting days come, meeting young men and young women who are good. Our minds have risen from short-lived earthly things to the incorruptible things of heaven. What we now desire is that our children shall marry others who will help them to salvation, or even better, that they shall enter the religious life.

Our hopes and our prayers are taking a new turn because we have been stripped of the things that were holding us down to earth. It is not that we are no longer conscious of the importance of reasonable success in earthly occupations. It is rather that now we realize that such success is not an end, but a means to an end.

We do indeed desire that our children, if they enter an occupation or a profession, and if they marry, make a success of their chosen field and of their way of life. But now we see that what is everlastingly important is that they use such successes for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. And if they elect the highest vocation-the life of total consecration to the things of God-then we are happy and proud and grateful.

Now the husband and the wife see each other with new eyes. In the beginning, perhaps they were attracted largely by physical beauty, by winning personality, by the capacity for happy companionship and shared entertainment. But now what they see in each other, chiefly, is goodness; and in that they find such joy as they did not previously dream of. Now they are indeed ready to live together happily ever after.

The Agony

“If I ask, my Father will send Me twelve legions of angels.”

Poverty was a favorite theme with Jesus. “Do not lay up treasures on earth,” He said, in His first sermon; “and the people heard him gladly,” because they were poor.

He grieved openly over the rich, young man, possessed by his possessions. He told the pointed tale of a fool who dreamed of bigger barns on his deathbed. He praised the widow, who put her last penny into the temple treasury.

And what He preached, Jesus practiced.

The night before He died, He renounced an army of glorious angels, His possession by right, and entered upon His passion, (as he had entered the world) in utter poverty.

In these meditations, dear Lord, help me to understand why You speak of poverty as a blessing.

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