Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. Holiness is being set apart for God. We practice holiness in prayer, service and our participation as families in the liturgy. God dwells among and in his people. The sacraments of service are two ways that our baptismal promises affect us most profoundly, marriage and holy orders. These sacraments and their grace build on and perfect our nature.  A man and woman pairing off as a couple is one of the most basic drives in humanity. Intimacy and family are deeply linked. One of the great sources of suffering in life is the suffering linked to a failure in marriage and family. How important holiness is in families. Gentleness, forgiveness, moral action and prayer as a family. Holiness is always a choice.
 
The Holy Family
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. The readings today are linked to the happiness of families. The story of Abraham reminds us that God called Abraham to be the father of descendants as numerous as the stars in the heavens. We are in a profound sense children of Abraham along with Jews and Muslims. We also participate in that blessing of Abraham through our family, our ancestors and the children whose lives we form. It is a very shallow thing to think of being a father or a mother in only a biological sense. Guppies do that. Abraham is truly a father because, even with all his struggles, he continues to be a guide to being human, millennia after his death.
 
In the Gospel, Joseph and Mary, comply with the law by redeeming their first born as required by the law. They comply with the law by their offering of two turtle doves, the offering of the poor, for the purification of Mary. The irony of our Redeemer being redeemed and his Immaculate Mother being purified is offered for the benefit of our own humility. It also reminds us of God’s promise to humanity.  The story of the holy family is built on Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s participation in nature and their choices.
 
The World of Nature
I have been reading an interesting book called “The Inner Ape” by Dr. Frans de Waal of Emory University. He is an atheist, but he doesn’t have an axe to grind against religion. What makes his book interesting is his description of the world of nature. He is an expert on chimpanzee and bonobo behavior. There are striking contrasts between apes and human beings, but there are some remarkable similarities also.
 
Primate Caring and Compassion
Apes feel compassion for the suffering of other apes. They can be remarkably supportive and cooperative with each other. Their behavior shows care for the good of each other, as if love was written into their DNA. Chimps can also display caring and remarkable social abilities that transcend their group. He gave an example of a chimpanzee female that rescued a human child that fell into the zoo enclosure, stroking and comforting the child and presenting him to the keepers. But, there is another side to ape behavior.
 
Primate Power
Chimpanzees can be remarkably aggressive. The Alpha male of a chimpanzee group dominates breeding within the group but is indifferent in raising offspring. Rival males are constantly positioning themselves to take over the breeding lead in the group. Sometimes males will kill the offspring of other males. They will also hunt the males of other chimp groups, sometimes eating their corpses. Females, as a result, raise their vulnerable young on the peripheries of the group and males have almost no role in raising the young.
 
Primate Sex
Bonobos, a smaller relative of the chimpanzee, but are very different. There is much less male violence in a bonobo group than among chimpanzee males. The level of cooperation and sharing is remarkable. According to de Waal, this is accounted for because sexuality is exchanged freely among bonobos. Bonobos use sexual rubbing, indiscriminately, before eating and sharing food, to resolve tensions within the group and to pass the time of day. Young females, however, all leave the family group after seven years in order to breed in neighboring groups in order to avoid incestuous breeding.  Among bonobos, due to indiscriminate sexual practices, parentage is never clear and males have almost no role in bringing up children. Females raise their children alone, aggressively support their male offspring’s role in the group and band with other females to attack males that attract their anger.  
 
The Natural Law
The natural sciences open another window into the life of faith. What Prof. de Waal has discovered is what St. Thomas Aquinas and a long tradition of philosophers called the natural law. The natural law is the capacity for morality within nature. It is the imprint of the Creator God in nature. Prof. de Waal claims that he can explain human morality as an emerging phenomenon of cultural and biological evolution. St. Thomas would agree but would add that our human participation in this emergent process is dependent on our right use of reason.

For a Christian, that means relying on the gospel. Even Prof. de Waal comments on the behavior of humans, chimps and bonobos, especially their violence, reflects a thoughtful human take on nature. If you observe sexual behavior in our culture, you can see both the dominating sexual violence of the chimpanzee and the promiscuity of the bonobo. For we Christians, marriage and family are remarkably different because the gospel calls us to make choices that take us beyond our emotional impulses and physical drives. Natural law calls us to live a life of virtue in accord with our nature and right reason.
 
In our Catholic practice, human beings pair up and remain faithful to each other. Both father and mother are encouraged to be deeply involved in the well-being, education and care of their offspring and each other in part, because each have an investment in the family group. Christianity criticizes both the abandonment of the young by parents and the sexual abuse of men, women and children. Our families are called to be holy, set apart from merely natural urges to remake humanity in the image of our Redeemer and his own family. A holy family is rooted both in our nature and the life of grace. A holy marriage and family is part of nature, but is always a faithful choice.

If you would like to read "The Inner Ape" by Prof. Frans de Waal click on this link