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IX.
Redeeming the Times
The irreligious
character of modern civilization is, certainly, shown most clearly in
the kind of daily, weekly, yearly schedules which it tends to impose on
us. Consider the daily program of a typical American family: father
rushes off to work by train or bus or subway or car; the children hurry
to school; mother hurries to get all her housework and marketing
finished; as soon as anyone gets home again, or finishes what he is
doing, he begins to think about the next pressing demand of social or
economic life. How little is such a program of hurrying and worrying
designed to foster a sense of the presence of God, how little to
develop the religious potentialities of daily life, or growth in
Christian living!
Or consider the plan of the typical American family's week: the strain
of the five working days, the weekend filled with odd jobs, violent
amusements, and the relaxation of exhaustion. What relation has this to
the Christian idea of the week? Or, again the typical yearly round:
school begins for the children, all sorts of activities begin for the
parents, the Thanksgiving turkey, the Christmas rush, Valentine's Day,
winter, Easter bunnies and chocolate, spring, end of school, plans for
a vacation, etc. How can years that concentrate our attention on such
non-essentials do anything but hinder gradual normal growth in
Christian living for either parents or children?
Here, surely, is one of our greatest problems as Christian parents: how
can we give our children the idea of a fundamentally Christian pattern
for a day, a week, or a year, tied as most of us are and must be in so
many ways to the almost completely secular timing of the world around
us? We cannot simply take the pattern of a monastery's schedule, nor
can we impose a design of living taken from another time and place,
however Christian and desirable such designs, in themselves, might be.
For we need to give our children at least the outline of a pattern of
life which at once is Christian, and of our own time and place. The
only practical way to go about such a task is, surely, under the
guidance of the Church, to think out the purposes for which God gave us
days and weeks and years as units of time in our lives. The Church
clearly teaches us, by her own official schedule of daily and weekly
prayer and services, of yearly feasts and fasts, that the fundamental
time-units of our lives are meant to have a sacramental meaning and a
sacramerital purpose. If we understand this sacramental meaning and
purpose, then, we shall be able to plan how again under the guidance of
the Church, we can make the most Christian ordering possible under our
own circumstances of the days and weeks and years of our family living.
To begin with the day, then. The Church has always seen in each dawn
the image of our Lord's resurrection and of our rising to true life
with Him. Each day's Mass, in which the great Action of our redemption
is re-presented for us to share in, is the focus, the vital center of
the day, radiating its light and force through all the Hours of the
Church's prayer, with Vespers as its evening shadow, a sacrifice of
praise. And Compline shows us that each night's sleep is meant to be a
rehearsal for our death in Christ, teaching us how, with contrition and
hope, to commend ourselves and all our work and care, with our Lord
dying on the Cross into the loving hands of the Father.
Each day, in other words, is meant to be an image of the whole
Christian life, and is meant to help us toward that perfect
conformation to our Lord and to His redeeming action for which we all
were made, and for which we were given the fundamental powers at our
Baptism.
What does this mean for our daily family schedule? First of all,
surely, that we should try to see each new day as an image of the
resurrection, a rising to newness of life in Christ, to try to live
more perfectly to God, in the strength of Christ, than we did
yesterday. Children naturally begin each new day quite afresh; they
seldom have conscious hangovers from yesterday's mistakes and faults.
Let us, then, in spite of our own morning fatigue and irritation and
the complications of getting a family started on the day's routine, try
to show the children that each new day is a gift from God, that we want
to thank Him for it, that we want to offer everything in it to Him with
our Lord's offering at Mass, and ask His help to use the day all for
Him.
Some sort of family morning prayers are usually possible just before
breakfast, at least while the children are small enough to have the
same schedules and be able to eat breakfast together. Let us take this
opportunity to give them a pattern of morning prayer for their whole
lives, not simply a routine "Our Father" and "Hail Mary," but one which
will contain praise, joy, offering, prayers for help and protection.18
Let us also occasionally try to show the children, when occasion offers
during the day's work or play, that our morning offering (or,
obviously, our taking part in the Mass) means a willing consecration of
the whole day, that we meant to share in our Lord's work during the
day, and now should not be taking our offering back by complaints and
whining and rebellion.
Then, however we spend the morning hours, there is usually a pause
somewhere around noontime, at least for lunch. The Angelus is the
age-old sanctioned form of midday prayer for the laity, recalling the
whole mystery of our salvation, bringing us back to a moment's peace in
the presence of God. While the children are small enough to have lunch
at home, and on weekends and during holidays with the whole family, let
us, then establish the Angelus as a family habit; again, as far as
possible, not as routine prayer but as an opportunity to be reminded of
what the whole day is for. Finally, somewhere in the course of the late
afternoon and evening, some sort of family "evening song" or praise of
God is surely the Christian order. Most families meet at the supper
table. Let us take this opportunity for some short psalm (Psalm 116,
for instance) or hymn, or prayer of praise as part of grace before or
after the meal.
And, while the children are young enough to have a set bed time and to
say night prayers in common, let us give them a pattern of night
prayers which will include all the essentials: a sorrow for what has
been done wrong and prayer for forgiveness, commending one's soul and
all that one is and has into the hands of the Father with our Lord's
dying on the Cross, in the hope of rising with Him to new life and
strength tomorrow.
The basic plan of a Christian day, then, would seem to be: getting up
with hope and joy and thanks (in our wills at least); offering
ourselves (by taking part in the Mass or, when this is not possible, by
a morning offering) to share in our Lord's work and suffering and death
during the day; recalling ourselves to this fundamental purpose of our
day's work and play and asking God's help to carry it out, at least
once during the day; and, in the evening, praising God for His
goodness, and for enabling us by His grace to make our life and work of
some real use and purpose; and, before we go to sleep, handing
ourselves over once more to Him in contrition and hope, with Christ our
Lord.
Surely these essentials would not overcrowd a family's timetable, but
would rather serve to weld all the items in the day's schedule into a
more peaceful and purposeful unity. The first step, perhaps, would be
for the parents themselves consciously to try to mould their days on
such a pattern; then, if there are older children, to discuss the whole
purpose of a day with them and see how they think it should be
achieved. Then anything "new" would not be just another thing to do,
but seem part of a plan.
With small children, a new season is always a good excuse for starting
a new "practice," like a psalm at supper time, or a new form of morning
or night prayers. The beginning of Advent or Lent, for instance, gives
a fine chance to rearrange prayers and prayer-times to achieve their
purpose more perfectly. (For the sake of avoiding routine, if nothing
else, prayers of all kinds should surely be varied by season as much as
possible.)
And when we have established these basic essentials of a Christian day
in our family living, then would seem to be the time to consider how
much more in the way of communal or private prayer, divine office,
reading, etc., should be part of the day's plan, what would truly help
each of us and the family as a whole, to conform ourselves and to be
conformed by God's grace each day to the image and action of Christ.19
The Christian week begins with Sunday, the "day of the Lord," a "little
Easter," a day of triumph in our Lord's triumph over death by His
death, a day of entering by hope into the happiness and peace of
eternal life which He won for us.20 In Sunday's Mass, the whole
Christian people come together to hear about the mystery of our
redemption; to offer themselves to be united with it; to re-live it
with Christ offering Himself through the hands of the priest and to
receive His own life and strength to unite them with Him and with each
other; to make ready for another week of carrying out His redemptive
work in their daily lives.
The weekdays following Sunday reflect and radiate its special light and
grace in their praise and prayers, until Friday brings us to remember
particularly the day of our Lord's death by the prescribed rule of
abstinence, and Saturday begins to end one week and to prepare for a
new Sunday, a new beginning in Christ.
For most of us, alas, such a program does not seem at all like the
actual weeks we live through. But, if we concentrate on the essentials,
we can do a great deal to make this pattern of a Christian week mould
the pattern of our weeks, so that they may become more nearly in fact
the Christian weeks we want them to be.
We need, first of all, to aim towards making Sunday a day of "newness,"
a day of Christian happiness, a day of recreative rest, all centered
around the Sunday Mass; and we need in some way to make the remainder
of the week take its start and tone from Sunday's light and grace,
until towards the end of the week, we begin to prepare for another new
beginning.
Toward this sense of "newness," all the week-end cleaning and
preparations (which most of us do in any case) need only to be
undertaken not just because they have to be done sometime, but for the
sake of the Lord's Day. And, perhaps, if we can manage to do such
things more in the spirit of joyful preparation for a feast, the
children will take their due share less unwillingly. Towards making
Sunday a day of happiness and re-creative rest, we can also try to make
it the day on which, more than any other, we do special things, or have
the sort of friends to visit, or be visited by, whom the whole family
enjoys.
To center Sunday, and so the whole week, on Sunday Mass is, certainly,
as things are now both in the set-up of family and parish life today,
the most difficult part of remaking a Christian week. Sunday Mass just
does not seem like the focus of our lives. But, of course, we know that
it is. But there is no use in not admitting to ourselves the obvious
fact that it is only in the very deepest recesses of our faith that we
can center our lives, and each week of our lives, in the "hurry and get
'em out" type of Sunday Mass that is, due to many historical
circumstances, still prevalent in so many parishes today--a type of
celebration in which the Mass itself is treated as sacred magic, at
which the people "have" to be present, but which they cannot and need
not understand.
It is difficult enough, heaven knows, even when one is free to use
one's Missal and to take silent part in such a Mass, to realize that
one has, in fact, taken part in the greatest Action of a Christian's
individual and social life. But when one has to go to such a Mass with
children, one can only pray that the Holy Spirit will somehow give them
a sense of its wonder and the fruit of its graces, in spite of the
hustle and bustle and general unsacredness of most of the sounds and
sights all round.
But there are hopeful indications in many places today of the action of
the Holy Spirit working in the Church to remedy this situation, to find
the best ways and means to make the whole celebration of the Mass once
more a meaningful sign to us of its supernatural reality and action,
and to educate us to appreciate this sign and to take our full and
rightful part in the celebration. The Encyclical on the Sacred Liturgy
teaches us what our part in the Mass should be; the same Encyclical and
the official instructions and the text of the restored Easter Vigil
indicate that the highest authorities in the Church want everything
possible done to make it easy for us to take that part as fully as we
can.
While, therefore, we are doing whatever we can to cooperate with our
pastors in promoting fuller and more intelligent participation in the
Mass in our parish, while we are also doing whatever we can, with our
pastor and neighbors, to make Sunday Mass less of a chore and more of
an opportunity to worship for other people with families--what can we
do at home? We might try, for example, to find time on Saturday not
only for confession as needed, but also for teaching the small children
something about the Mass. On Sunday itself we might find some time to
read, if possible, the whole chapter of the Gospel from which the
Sunday's gospel is taken, or the Old Testament reading for that Sunday,
or the psalms of the Mass. Above all--and this we could certainly all
do without adding anything to our schedules!--we can try to speak and
act as if we realized the enormous privilege it is to take part in
Sunday Mass, never as if it were a chore or merely a duty.
Throughout the week, also, we could remind ourselves and the children,
as occasion offers, of the consequences of taking part in Sunday's
Mass. As a little girl once said: "You offer the whole week to God and
you mustn't take it back." Where possible we could continue the Sunday
readings and prayers, as part of our own family study and prayer life.
Then Friday's abstinence will take its place not as another chore (or
as a badge of loyal Catholicism!) but as a sharing by obedience and
some slight deprivation in our Lord's obedience unto death. And
Saturday will begin to become less of a day of no school, dentists,
shopping and amusements, more a day of happy preparation for another
Sunday.
In such simple ways, without adding anything to our schedule, we can
begin to re-fashion our weeks, however hectic they may be, more nearly
to the Christian design. And so we shall be giving our children a basic
Christian pattern of days and weeks, which they can carry out in their
future lives under any circumstances, and a basically Christian way of
thinking about days and weeks, which they themselves can develop, with
the grace of God, each according to his own vocation, towards the
building-up, if God wills, of a truly Christian culture.
In the same way, we can study the essential purpose and design of the
Church's year, and of each season and feast, and see how the already
existing elements in our lives can be used or adapted to achieve this
purpose, to carry out this design. Then we can see what we need to add,
and what would be wise and making for family happiness to add or adapt
to our family observances at each feast or season out of the rich
treasure house of age-old customs, and those developed by other
families today.21
The purpose of the feast of Christmas, for example, (considering the
Christmas-Epiphany season as one great feast) is, ultimately, to
rehearse and prepare us for the final coming of Christ in glory at the
end of the world. Through Advent, the Church rehearses the preparation
of the whole human race, and of the Chosen People in particular, for
the historic coming of Christ. For our Lord's birth at Bethlehem, in
the grand design of God, was only the beginning of His coming in His
kingdom, in the Church, which will be completed and shown in its full
glory when He comes again at the end of the world.
Now it is by our active love, in Christ, for each other that we will be
judged on that final day of His coming. We prepare most perfectly to
welcome Him then in His glory by welcoming Him now in His least
brethren. The Christmas Masses, in the real order of sacramental grace,
and also all the time-honored ways of picturing and representing our
Lord's historic birth in Bethlehem, are, ultimately, for the purpose of
awakening our gratitude and love for Christ's coming to us as our Head
and our Redeemer; so that we will serve Him better now, in each other,
and so, all together, be the readier to welcome Him when He returns in
glory.
All the business, then of Christmas giving and of keeping in touch with
our friends all over the world by cards and presents (activities which
so easily become merely tiresome and commercial) could be
re-thought-out in this light, and, without omitting any of our real
duties and obligations, be made a true and happy service of Christ in
each other.
What still survives of the real "Christmas spirit" (and surely there is
more than pessimists admit, even in department stores) is actually a
joy in carefree and happy giving beyond the call of duty; since God's
Son became Man, when we give to each other we now truly give to Him,
and in the gifts we receive from each other, we receive gifts from His
love. By re-aligning, then, in this light, our Christmas customs and
Christmas doing, including all the preparations, we can accomplish a
great deal truly to "put Christ back into Christmas," or, better, to
let Him remake our Advent and Christmas according to His own original
plan.
The ideal is to orient every element in our daily lives--prayer, study,
work, play--toward the celebration of each feast or season, to allow
the special light and grace and vitality of each feast and season to
permeate every aspect of our lives. (The word "celebrate" comes from a
Latin root meaning "to frequent," to gather in crowds. So we should
gather ourselves and our lives round the Church's feasts and fasts if
we are to celebrate them fully.)
Even from the merely human point of view, to make our humdrum lives
into a succession of celebrations of different kinds would, surely,
give them the color and variety and interest for which every human
being naturally hungers. And since the feasts and fasts of the Church
have been planned by the Holy Spirit for our education and growth in
Christ's life, the color and variety and interest which they give our
lives is not merely human, but also divine.
No parent can help thinking about all the crimes and follies committed
by very young people today, sometimes even murders. And when we study
the published investigations of such crimes, we see that they were
committed largely because the boys were bored, because they saw no real
purpose or interest in their present or future lives and had been
taught no legitimate ways of finding interest and variety in the course
of daily living and so had recourse to drinking, dope, and unsafe
driving in an unending search for easy "thrills." Such considerations
force us to pray for our own children, and all children. And they also
should urge us to try to guide our children toward the never-failing
Source of all the true interest and excitement of life, and toward
making use of all the marvelous means He has given us for making our
daily lives truly interesting and full of variety.
The yearly course of the liturgy offers us also to make the "terrible
round" of our daily duties more purposeful and more interesting. For
each year we are given a new chance to think about the great sacraments
whose outward signs are taken from the ordinary materials and actions
of daily life.
Lent and Easter time offer us the opportunity to think about Baptism,
to guide our own and our children's thoughts to the whole idea of water
in God's plan, of what it does for us in daily life, of how God has
used it in the course of history, of how our Lord used it, and of how
in His name the Church now uses it as the medium of our rebirth in
Christ.
Holy Thursday, Pentecost, give us the chance to think about
Confirmation, to consider why our Lord chose oil for the matter of this
sacrament of maturity and activity for Christ, why it is used in
Ordinations and for Extreme Unction So we can begin to appreciate from
above down, so to speak, the ultimate value and purpose of all our
family washing and cleaning and waxing and polishing and tidying and
decorating; we can begin to see all these actions, so full of drudgery
and fatigue, as means of raising our thoughts and desires to the
wonders of God's life as well as means of achieving the final fruit of
all these wonders, the life of the redeemed in heaven.
In the same way, each Holy Thursday, each feast of Corpus Christi, (as
well as every Sunday of the year) gives us the opportunity to think
about and appreciate the significance of the Bread and Wine of the holy
Eucharist, and to make our own use of food and drink more of a means of
appreciating that true Food of our Christian lives, of preparing us to
take part in the banquet and in the eternal feast of heaven of which it
is the pledge.
An element of the greatest importance in this "redeeming of the time"
in our homes, and in fact in every aspect of Christian life and
education, is the element of silence, quiet, the necessary substratum
of peace. This does not mean, of course, that we should aim at making a
house full of lively children as quiet as a convent. But it does mean
that we should try to eliminate unnecessary and purposeless noises from
our homes. Children have to shout, of course, but not all the time, or
everywhere; and they need a reasonable amount of quietness every day
for the sake of their nerves as well as their souls. Let us try to give
them the sense, then, that silence and quiet are quite normal, and that
sounds are to be made for a purpose. (Few things, for example, are less
calculated to foster growth of the Christian spirit than a radio or TV
set which is left turned on and simply allowed to make noise that
nobody really attends to, but which prevents anyone from paying full
attention to anything else.)
Real private or communal prayer, happy, intelligent conversation, and
all kinds of joyful noise to the Lord are the fruit of some real
silence and the chance to think. The most active children want and need
time to be alone, quiet in which to think their own thoughts, silence
in which to "just think." Privacy and quiet often seem some of the most
expensive of luxuries today; but let us try to give our children as
much of them as is possible. And then we will find it much easier to
cooperate with God's grace in instilling into both speech and silence,
necessary and happy noise and quiet, the spirit of Christian peace.
But, of course, all these means for sanctifying days and weeks and
years, all the framework of prayers and customs and the orientation of
work and play toward the life of the Church, need to be vivified and
made fruitful by the Holy Spirit, by the personal intercourse of each
member of the family with our Lord and His Father and the Holy Spirit,
with our Lady and the saints and his own guardian angel. Our part,
here, is, above all, prayer that God will show Himself to each of our
children and attract them to Himself as He wishes; and, of course, we
know that He is far more anxious to do so than we could be.
But we can do something to cooperate with His action by encouraging the
children to talk simply and naturally to God about their joys and
sorrows or troubles, not trying to tell them what to say but suggesting
subjects for conversation. Again, we can encourage their cultivating
the acquaintance of their guardian angels, "Why not ask your Angel what
would be the best thing to do about this..." And we can avoid, above
all, the error of only suggesting prayer when the children have been
naughty, or as a means of backing up our own whims, "Now you tell God
you are sorry you have been such a bad boy...," and the like. When a
child has been bad, and has realized the error of his ways, then is the
time to suggest, "Don't you want to tell God now that you are
sorry...," but also, on happy occasions, "Don't you want to thank God
for this lovely day..."22
If we are trying to sacramentalize our daily lives, to live the life of
the Church inwardly and as outwardly also as circumstances permit, then
the course of each day and week and year should offer its own
opportunities to teach the children as much as they are capable of
learning about God, about the truths of the faith. The guide in general
to what the children are capable of understanding and absorbing is,
here again, mainly the children's own interest and span of attention.
If the children are attending a Catholic school and having regular
instruction in religion, our job is to try to make sure that the
instruction becomes concrete and vital in the children's lives. If we
are solely responsible for their formal religious education, we must
see to it that our own preferences do not cause us to omit some
essential element of faith or morals, and also that the children
finally obtain the exactly worded and systematic knowledge of their
faith which they will need as part of their equipment.
But our main task, in any case, is so to present the truths of faith to
the children's developing minds and hearts that the children not only
assent to them, but begin truly to consent to them, to incorporate them
into their daily living.
Here again, obviously we should use above all the means used by God
Himself in His instruction of the human race in the mysteries of His
life and of our incorporation into it, that is, Holy Scripture and the
liturgy. God did not speak to His People in the Old Testament in
syllogisms but in figures and types, and in the very events of their
history. And all this is now, as St. Paul tells us, "for our
instruction."
Our Lord did not speak even to His apostles in a logically ordered
series of lectures, but in parables and stories and, above all, by His
own life and actions. So beneath and all around the systematic teaching
of the truths of faith, let us give our children their inheritance of
Holy Scripture, the mental climate of the Bible and the liturgy, which
is, precisely, the climate which fosters the Christian sacramental
spirit.
It is by means of loving familiarity with the Bible and with the
liturgy that we best learn how to look at all creation so that it will
raise our minds and hearts to God and to the mysteries of our
redemption, that we learn how to use created things for the love of
God. The Bible and the liturgy are the means of religious instruction
which satisfy all the complex requirements of our complex human nature;
they are truly incarnational, because they are the manifestation of the
Incarnate Word. They are inexhaustible sources of growth in the
knowledge and love of God, and nothing can replace them in the
Christian life.
If, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we are to any degree successful in
our task of thus "redeeming the time" in our homes, then each day and
week and year of our family life and our children's growth will
contribute something towards giving them the basic pattern of Christian
life on earth, the pattern of living, suffering and dying with Christ
in the strength of His already accomplished victory, working with Him
to bring every human being into the scope of that victory, looking
forward to sharing fully with all our brothers and fellow members of
the mystical Body in the fruits of that victory forever in heaven.
One result of such a training should be that the children do not look
forward as a right to lives of security, ease, earthly comfort and
happiness, but rather to lives of struggle, work, hardship, monotony--
and joy in Christ.
Another result should be that they are not afraid of the thought of
death. No human being, of course, can help that natural fear of death
from which our Lord Himself suffered in the Garden. But we Christians
should certainly not share in the modern unrealistic avoidance of the
whole idea of death, which results in hiding from dying people the fact
of their nearness to death, and in obscuring the obvious fact that we
are all going to die and should make plans for it.
We should take the opportunities offered, then, by the thought of our
Lord's own death, by All Souls' Day, prayers for the dead, burials and
funeral Masses to show the children that death is meant to be the
crowning, climactic act of life on earth, the act by which we finally
can complete the offering of ourselves to God with Christ, the dying to
sin and living to God which has been the main effort of our whole
lives.
We can show the children also, beginning when they are quite young,
that the only real horror of death comes from sin, so that they should
pray for the dying and the dead, and begin to look forward and prepare
themselves for the hour of their own death. And we can teach them above
all that death is the gateway to true life, the door to our true home
in heaven.
One of the safest and most beautiful ways of teaching the children
about death is to use the Church's own prayers for the dying as a text.
For the wisdom of the Church has constructed these prayers in a perfect
balance of true fear of God and holy hope.23
And if we take such means to give the children some understanding of
death from year to year, we will be preparing both them and ourselves
for death in our own family, or among those who are dear to us. We
shall, then, when death visits our own house, be better able to make it
clear to the children that we are not sorry that our beloved is on his
way to the fullness of true life with Christ in God: what we are
mourning is our own loss; what we are praying for is that his soul may
go straight to heaven and that we may have the courage to go on living
in this valley of tears without him.
And, again, as we try to found our daily lives on the true Christian
pattern, we will be giving our children the basis for a realistic and
Christian idea of history. They will have a defense for the future
against that false optimism of our times which sees progress as
inevitable ("If thus and so does not come about, Western civilization
will end. Therefore it must come about..." You can find such a line of
argument in almost any speech or pronouncement about the future of this
country, of the U.N. or what-have-you), and the false pessimism and
despair into which such opinion is so easily transformed at the sight
of actual historical trends and events.
Our children will, rather, grow up to see all history as the struggle
between good and evil, in which Christ will be finally victorious, as
the process by which the dough of mankind is being imperceptibly
leavened by the action of Christ in His Church. They will realize that
what is visible to us now is mainly the struggle, the battle, often the
temporary outward defeat of Christ's forces, but that victory is
assured, that, though we cannot see it, the Kingdom of God is actually
being built up and will finally come down from heaven "prepared as a
Bride adorned for her husband."
Whatever catastrophe the future may bring, then, our children will have
the assurance of Christian hope, renewed every morning, every Sunday,
every Easter time, renewed above all with every reception of holy
Communion, that Christ has already overcome the world, and that they
can overcome it in and with Him. And they will have learned not so much
to dread as to look forward to the Coming of Christ, whether in their
own death or at the end of the world, and to pray the true prayer of
Christian expectation: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"
Discussion Topics
1. How is Sunday viewed by the average American? What suggestions can
be offered for a return to "keeping holy" the Lord's Day? What
practical measures within the family should be used to emphasize the
dignity and importance of Sunday? How do we spend our time? How do we
dress? How do we prepare the meal and the house? Would a pagan notice a
marked difference between the Sunday order of the day in a Catholic
home as compared with non-Christian citizens?
2. What is the significance of the Christmas and Epiphany cycle of the
Church year? What can be done realistically to "restore Christ in
Christmas"? How much of the reform can take place within our own family
circle? Does the story of Santa Claus interfere with the child's grasp
of the true meaning of Christmas?
3. Review the author's suggestions for a Christian day. How could this
plan be adapted to meet individual needs of our own families? What are
the best and what are the most difficult times for having family
prayer?
4. Discuss possibilities for groups of Catholic couples cooperating on
a religious program to intensify the spiritual life of its members.
What are the opportunities for having a family day of recollection? of
making family retreats? of starting Catholic Action groups for married
couples? of family Communion Sundays? of increasing participation at
Holy Mass?
5. Make a comparison of the amount of time and energy spent by family
members in reading daily newspapers, listening to the news over the
radio, and reading popular magazines, with the amount of time given to
reading the Bible or spiritual books. If children can learn dozens of
"hit of the week" songs during the course of the year, would it be
possible for them to learn (and chant aloud) some of the Psalms?
Study Questions
1. What does the author suggest as a prayer pattern for each day and
what suggestions are made for family use of this pattern?
2. What is the significance of Sunday in the Church's week? of
Saturday? of Friday?
3. What is the meaning of the Lent and Easter cycle in the Church year-
-and how can the Christian mother tie the liturgical spirit of this
season in with her housecleaning?
4. Why should there be periods of silence in the home?
5. What is the Christian attitude toward death?
Continue:
The Christian Pattern
Our Neighbors
"...You Did It Unto Me"
Things
Places
Work
Training for Life's Work and
Play
Vocations
Redeeming the Times
Sex Education
Attaining Our Ideals
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