I'm almost a week late posting this. It is a piece that I initially wrote in Dec 2012, in response to a bigoted harangue of a sermon against 'irregular’ families' that I experienced at Mass on the Feast of the Holy Family. My family is larger - by birth, marriage, new friends of the heart - and smaller - through death, estrangement, setting healthy boundaries - than it was 8 years ago. And yet. It's still irregular. We still strive for holiness.

Happy Feast of the Holy Family! One of my favorite feasts of the year. Here's the sermon I would have liked to hear today:

Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, Holy Family, pray for us. God, bless the holy families. God, bless ALL our holy, irregular, families. Bless the families we came from and the families we live in. Bless the families we ran from and the families we created.

Bless the new moms and the new dads. Bless any parents-to-be who wait in expectation, who's Advent season is lasting a while longer yet. Bless all who desperately want a child, who yearn, and seek, and struggle to believe that God will not give God’s children stones when they ask for bread.

Bless the moms and the dads who have had to say goodbye to a child who has died. Because that should not happen, Lord, it CANNOT happen, yet it does, and it rends my heart and is wrong and I don't understand.

Bless the aunts and uncles who open their hearts and homes to the nieces and nephews. Bless the friend-families (O, sweet friend-family!!). Bless the families that adopt and foster and birth. Bless the parents who are partnered, and the parents who co-parent in different households, and the parents who know darn well that faith can move mountains because they parent alone and that vocation is the most potent blend of miracles and exhausting labor. Bless the families that are blended and extended and disjointed and annointed.

Lord, bless us parents when we fail our kids. Not if, when. Help us know that in our failures, that is where grace lives. That is where we or our kids turn to community, to friends, to Church, to God.

Lord, bless our families. For the family is where we learn how to love. And how not to. And how to forgive. It's where we learn that we can't be selfish, but we have to set boundaries. Where we learn that human beings are amazing. And incredibly flawed. Irregular. Holy.

Holy Family, pray for us.