Happy Monday, and happy holidays, if you’re celebrating them. Today seemed like a good day to open a discussion on the role of faith in these times.
How have your beliefs changed or remained the same? How are you practicing your religion given physical distancing and stay-at-home orders? Have you been called to minister to others in new or exciting ways?
Let’s talk about it!
I find that my spiritual life has been supported by both personal and communal practices. Worship together can be a rich source of wisdom, encouragement, and love. Meditation and other personal practices can nurture, integrate our experiences, allow us to discern, and bring healing to deeply personal wounds. I find myself resisting the assumption that communal worship should be carried forward with recorded events, or liturgies with very few people present to each other. Instead, this has become a time when my personal prayer has become more important to me. This is aided by music, silence, a lit candle, journaling, prayer beads and more. It has a communal dimension as I name those in need of prayer, hear a song which I first heard in communal worship, or read scriptures shared by my faith community. But it also allows time for the deep personal work God is doing with me, and in me, and through me.
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Oh, yes, I love this! I like the idea of drawing in and focusing on your own worship and prayer time.
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As Catholics, we’d love to go to Mass, or to go to a Church for some quiet prayer time with Jesus, who we believe is both spiritually and physically present there. But we can’t. There’s a real absence that we’re feeling in these days. But we believe God permits bad things to happen so that a greater good may result…we often don’t know what that greater good is, specifically, but we’re on the lookout for it, and we try to help bring it about.
So, the rest of our faith life similar but different. We’ve still got our “domestic church”, that is, our family household, with all the daily practices that we’ve been trying to live out individually and communally: daily quiet prayer time, reading spiritual books/the Bible, set prayers for different times of the day, making sacrifices (e.g. at meals, eating a bit more of what I don’t like, and a bit less of what I do), trying to be charitable and service-minded with everyone at home in closer quarters, doing little Lenten things (when it was Lent) like counting to 40 before eating dinner, and so on. These are all things we’d theoretically be doing anyway, as day-to-day things that help maintain/build up the spiritual life and relationship with God. In stay-at-home times, these practices, especially the communal ones, get extra weight.
Since the kids are all home from school, we’ve made some practices more concrete—we started offering our day to God and doing a “spiritual communion” as a family at a set time each morning, and we also made a point to have at-home prayer services at home every Sunday and for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil…generally we’d all get dressed, sing a hymn, do the parts of Mass that we non-ordained-ministers could do, and close with a hymn. I even give little improvised sermons (very poorly prepared, haha). Usually, though not always, the kids behave pretty well during these prayer services. I was worried Easter would just come and go with little impact this year…thanks in part to these practices, Easter still felt like a big deal. (Our 3-year-old daughter said, “I looooooove Easter!”…but maybe that was the jellybeans talking!)
I still feel the temptation to just put everything on hold and coast, both regarding faith and for the rest of life. It definitely feels like there’s less accountability. A men’s spiritual book club that I’m a part of—now meeting via Zoom—helps with that somewhat, but it’s still a day-to-day struggle.
I do miss being able to be randomly kind/generous to people outside of the house as much, so I’d love to hear more ideas for how we stay-at-home people can minister to others at these times.
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I’ve been reminded during this pandemic, when everything feels so chaotic and upset, how important routine and ritual are — to kids and to grown-ups alike. It’s not just soothing to have some of the same shapes to your days and your practices; there’s something about it that’s mindful and reverent, in a way. I’m really glad you’re able to re-create some of these traditions and practices now, at home. I’ve heard that our home is the way we learn about the world — so the closer your faith is to home, the closer it will be to your family’s conception of itself.
It can definitely be tempting to “put everything on hold and coast,” as you say. With everything that’s going on, it seems like we could be forgiven for cutting ourselves some slack. I think it’s important to remember your family’s happiness at the end of the day, and so putting some unimportant things aside could help. But what’s more important than faith and belief, and the ways you derive identity from them? On the contrary, now seems like a more important time than ever to build that up.
I know some people are making masks and emergency kits for those in need (elderly neighbors, people at shelters, etc.) Helping can also be as simple as calling someone who’s feeling down — or singing happy birthday to a kid whose celebration had to change because of all this 😀 I think the most important part is keeping that “helping” antennae raised, so that when you see some action, no matter how small, you’re poised to take it.
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