The season for family time

What do you want for Christmas? According to troubadours down through the ages, it is to be home with your family and enjoy some family time.

Michael Bublé expresses the sentiment so tenderly in the classic Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” Watch:

The song’s final line says it all:

“I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”

We long for family. We dream about them. There is something special about them, something mystical, something sacred. Pulse Life Advocates has created a 4-part webinar that explores the beauty and power of family in a series titled, “The Holy Family: The ‘soul’ solution for a wounded world.”

4 Episodes

The Holy Family Project explores what modern families can learn from the Holy Family itself. How did Joseph, Mary, and little Jesus do family? The series is broken into 4 episodes:

  1. Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), with special guest, Bishop William Joensen of the Diocese of Des Moines.
  2. Fruitful Mothers, with special guest Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute.
  3. Fearless Children, with special guest Dr. Ray Guarendi, host of the EWTN radio show, “The Doctor is In.”
  4. Faithful Fathers, with special guest Joe Stopulos, host of the Man Up radio show on Iowa Catholic Radio.

Each episode begins with a talk by Msgr. Frank Chiodo, who helped us create the framework for the series. Here’s a preview of the series:

Why would Pulse Life Advocates, a pro-life group, take on such a project? Because the incidence of abortion plummets in a holy family. Some 87% of abortions occur with unmarried women.

Abortion separates us from God. And yet, as Dr. Carrie Gress says:

“Our goal is to get home to heaven.”

Dr. Gress is co-author of “Theology of the Home” with Noelle Mering. Holy Families help us keep on the right path in our journey through life to our heavenly home. In fact, Gress and Mering tell us that family time actually gives us a foretaste of heaven:

“Homes can evangelize … Catholic living, with all its imperfections and struggles, its mercy and its joy, not to mention aesthetic and hospitable beauty and nourishing food, can be an intoxicating inducement to the reality that life is fuller, more secure, more exciting, and more fulfilling when lived in the context of the divine.”

The language of the home is universal

“To step inside this context is a foretaste of heaven, and sometime, mysteriously, the Christian home can be even more profound for a stranger than being inside a church. For in the liturgy he may not know the ‘language,’ but the language of the home is universal.”

Ultimately, family time and life is a universal longing, which is why so many songs are written about, it according to Gress and Mering:

Theology of Home“We are incarnation. We want to unite the tangible to the intangible. We want this life we’re living to be beautiful in a deeper way. There’s a reason people write songs and make movies about going home. It’s a universal longing, which also means it’s a universal access point. It’s a force for evangelization. When I first realized I was going to marry my husband, I started to feel he was my home. The language of the home is universal. A deeper meaning of home is about longing and relationship. We find our home in God, which is a foretaste of what heaven will be like.”

Family life is in disarray, though, as fewer couples bother to marry. A quarter of adults are child-free by choice. The desire to have children since the pandemic hit last year has declined by 17% according to the Institute of Family Studies.

The Holy Family Project makes the case for marriage and family. Three of the four episodes are completed. And the final one on fatherhood is being edited. Pulse hopes to launch the webinar series in late January. Subscribe to our blog to be notified when the official launch date is announced.

In the meantime, Happy Advent from Pulse Life Advocates. We hope you make it home for Christmas.

Support family life. Donate today.

Leave a Comment