Salvation Begins at Home: The Holy Family and the Analogia Entis (Part 2)

In my last article I gave a brief introduction to the notion of the Analogia Entis and how this idea gives special meaning to the Feast of the Holy Family; Mary and Joseph embody the "first ripples" of the Incarnation, and together with Jesus they form an even more explicit revelation of God's love than an abstract notion of Jesus apart from his family or his life. In this article, I hope to explain more deeply how the Holy Family itself sends ripples of meaning in all directions. By this I mean that the Holy Family not only tells us something about families and about the Church (the horizontal direction) but it even tells us something about the God who, through the Incarnation, is both its creator and one of its members (the vertical direction).