The attractiveness of domestic liturgy

Enrico Finotti

During Advent and at Christmas there are very beautiful and moving reminders to engage children in prayer during catechesis and in their families. At Lent and Easter, what signs can be proposed for a spiritual life that also involves families?

Certain catechists

It is very appropriate that the liturgy of the Church has a constant implication in domestic prayer. In this way, parents prepare their children for the celebration of great solemnities and extend the spiritual atmosphere of holy feasts and times into family life.

That singular ‘priestly’ exercise, which is proper to Christian parents, finds its most ordinary manifestation in the organization of a life of prayer at home, as an effective instrument of sanctification of spouses and their children, a wish for divine blessing on marriage and on the family.

Tradition offers appropriate signs for each sacred time to stimulate family prayer. It is about wanting to take advantage of these symbols. Just as the ‘Advent wreath’ and then the crib attract attention and brings the family together in the season of Advent and Christmas, so too the ‘Easter cycle’ could have its reference symbols.

If in Lent the cross assumes centrality, exposed in a place of honor as the fulcrum of domestic prayer, during Easter the most suitable symbols could be the candle, decorated in the image of the Easter candle, with the vase of holy water next to it. This is how what is celebrated in the church takes place at home: per crucem ad lucem. The Cross guides our steps on the Lenten journey, the light of the candle attests to our faith in the risen Christ.

The symbols of the paschal candle reproduced on the house candle become a catechetical tool to teach children the sense of the presence of the Risen One, his identity as the eternal Word, incarnate, dead and buried, and now alive among us with his glorious wounds, that we must be able to see in faith, according to the words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who have not seen but yet believe” (Jn 20:29).

Even the domestic use of blessed water refers to the mystery of our resurrection, which took place in baptism. And here, as was done in the past, after the Easter vigil, both the ‘new’ fire could be brought into the house and the candle lit with it, as well as the ‘new’ water, drawn from the baptistery and kept in the house at least for Easter time. The short rite of veneration to the Candle, could also be used in family prayer at Easter time.