This week I am beginning to teach a class at Riverside on family and Surviving the Holidays in light of the Gospel of Jesus.  I posted a question about this last week, and I want to be clear to my own family: You are all messy and you are all loving, wonderful and generous to us and we love you.

Over the past few years I have been learning how different all of my own family is, but also that they are all remarkably generous.  So, thank you for your differences (and in this I am thinking also of my family-by-marriage), and thank you for your almost limitless generosity.

I hope this class helps those of us with good families as well as those of us with more dysfunction (with me you can take your pick!).  We can always learn to love better.