Our home is a fairly normal-sized house with a garage chock-full of everything but the car. And rather than Gregorian chant the sounds are those of energetic children (aged between 2-14) and rather than incense, the whiff is likely to be that of last night’s curry. So how have we tried to make our home a domestic monastery? If we look back over the last decade-and a-half we can identify three key steps:

1. A conscious decision to take seriously the First Commandment, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and fostering a personal relationship with the Lord in prayer.

2. A willingness to fundamentally change the way we live in order to put God first.

3. A firm resolve to take seriously our primary responsibility as parents, namely, to evangelise our own children.

In reality, of course, these three steps did not necessarily follow one after the other; but have been intertwined and interdependent, and we have been constantly tested to reaffirm each of them. Some years ago, however, we made a conscious decision as a couple that we wanted to try and grow in holiness, that we wanted to become Saints. The first step, then, in the planting of the domestic monastery is a decision: “Choose today whom you wish to serve... As for my family and me, we shall serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

Started to develop a life of prayer

Despite the fact that we are both cradle Catholics who have never strayed far from the Church, it was only when we were in our thirties that we started to develop and nurture a life of prayer. We had the great blessing of spending a few weeks with the Cor-et-Lumen Christi Community at their house in Chertsey. There we learnt how to pray. Just as importantly, we learnt how vital it is to make our personal relationship with the Lord a priority in our daily routine through a commitment to daily prayer-time.

In order to dedicate time to prayer, we realised we had to be willing to give up time elsewhere and to change the way we were living. To make time for more prayer, we realised we had to give up either sleep, work or play. As a result five years ago, with a deep breath and a stiff drink, we got rid of the telly, a decision we have never regretted.

Big Decisions

One of the biggest decisions we made was to move to a much cheaper house in a poorer area to enable us to live on less money and, therefore, be able to spend less time working to earn a living. The second, having spent a year praying and researching our options, was deciding to take our children out of school and home-educate them. Not everyone may be called to consider such radical choices, but for us it has been the right thing to do. All this enabled us to make more time for God and time for prayer. The rhythm of daily prayer we have established over the years goes something like this:

• Every morning we both try to have at least half-an-hour in silence with the Lord. We try to pray part of the Divine Office: Bob prays Morning Prayer, I pray the Office of Readings, and we meditate on the Mass readings for the day.
• We try where practicable to enable one or both of us to get to daily Mass, and we are usually able to bring the children to weekday Mass three times a week.
• We pray together as a whole family for about ten minutes in the morning and again for ten minutes in the evening. We eat together whenever possible and sing or say grace before meals.
• Once our younger children are settled in bed, we sit down and pray the Evening Office together, adding our own petitions and intercessions as we feel inspired. This is our daily time for praying together as a couple.

Sometimes things do not go to plan, but we begin again the next day.

We want to become Saints, and we want our children to become Saints too. As parents we want to do everything we can to help them achieve just that. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us: “Through the grace of the Sacrament of Marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelising their children” (CCC §2225). What a responsibility! What a privilege! Ultimately, of course, our children have free will, and we realise that they may at some point choose to turn away from Christ and His Church, but we want to give them the best start we can on the path to holiness. In his encyclical for the new millennium, Novo Millennio Ineunte, Pope John Paul II writes: “This training in holiness calls for a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer... our Christian communities must become genuine ‘schools’ of prayer... not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly ‘falls in love’.” (Novo Millennio Ineunte §32-33)

Training our children in holiness

We are thus trying to train our children in holiness by teaching them to pray. We want the community that is our home to be a genuine “school of prayer” where through the meeting with Christ, our hearts and the hearts of our children can truly fall in love.

Our family prayer time has developed over the years. We have seven children, the youngest of whom is just two, so we have had to be willing to adapt to enable everyone to join in; we have prayed with other families and have often learnt from them. We usually sing something simple, perhaps a Taizé chant or a praise song (though sadly we are not very musical). In the evenings we have a time of thinking quietly about our day – an examination of conscience. We pray a decade of the Rosary with everyone taking turns to lead. We give thanks for something that has happened during the day. Giving thanks is a good place to start in family prayers. We have an icon in the lounge where we light a candle and then we all kneel or sit in front of it. This all sounds jolly reverent and edifying, and sometimes it is, but sometimes it ain’t! Toddlers and young children cannot sit still for very long, so we try to include some praise songs with actions. We also have a bag full of various musical instruments for children for them to make some music, which they do, very noisily. It can be a bit of a racket. Moreover, the instruments can also become weapons for whacking each other over the head if squabbling breaks out over who gets which one. We usually pray together in our living room, and we have tried sitting on the sofas, sitting on the floor, kneeling on the floor, but what seems to work best is when we have something to focus on, for example, some candles, an icon or a crucifix.

We try to bring the rhythm of the Church’s liturgical year to life in our home. We celebrate all our Saint’s days. During Advent and Lent we alter our family prayer time accordingly; in Advent we use a wreath, or perhaps a Jesse tree; in Lent we pray the Stations of the Cross on Friday evenings, adapting the prayers so that younger children can join in. We encourage the children to attempt little acts of self-denial and service during Advent and Lent, and every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year.

On Sundays we go to Mass together and dress more smartly. During the day we try to do something together as a family; we need to be quite creative because of the different ages of the children! We try to refrain from unnecessary work on Sundays, so we would not normally do the cleaning or shopping or such like. We typically eat a good dinner and try to make the day relaxing and enjoyable. More generally, we include in our reading the lives of the Saints, the teaching of the Church, and other Christian books, newspapers and magazines. We encourage our children to read material that will draw them closer to God. Home-educating allows us to choose inspiring books and sound catechetical programmes that will hopefully enable them to know, understand and defend the Faith in all its beauty and truth.

We aim to go on at least one family retreat or conference every year. There are now more and more to choose from: in addition to Celebrate or New Dawn, there are family weeks at Taizé, and National Association of Catholic Families weekends at Walsingham. We have also attended many of the wonderful Family Days organised by the Cor-et-Lumen Christi Community. Less formally, we try to organise days out, weekends and holidays with other Christian families with similarly aged children.

Non-negotiables

So what happens if the children are resistant to any of this? What happens if they do not want to pray or go to Mass on Sundays? We want our children to fall in love with God and we try to pray every day for all our children and godchildren. In the meantime, however, we feel that some things are not negotiable vis-à-vis our children. Just as parents do not allow children to decide for themselves whether or not to attend lessons, we feel the same about the practice of their faith and going to Mass on Sundays. For us, praying with the family is not optional. As parents we consider that we have the God-given authority and responsibility to decide these things for our children. For us a sound formation in the faith is much more important than their achieving good results at school.

This might sound a bit excessive, but we are inspired by what Jesus said when he was asked what the most important commandment of all, was. He cited Deuteronomy, the full text of which reads: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9).

There is nothing particularly special about us and for years we never prayed at all. But the Holy Spirit knew our longings and He has helped us to do what we couldn’t do ourselves and helped us create our own domestic monastery for our children to grow up in and be formed by. We have seen that nothing is impossible for God and the Holy Spirit will help us in our weakness, when our hearts are open and we want something different for our children and our lives.