Living Liturgy

Pam over at Everyday Snapshots is starting a Living Liturgy blog series for all of us to build habits of faith in our domestic churches. The first post on Living Liturgy Area of Focus is already posted. Another post has monthly planning details.

I've decided to jump in and join her on this journey. I feel like we do a good job of teaching the faith to our boys and putting God first in our family, BUT because it's priority number one there is always more than can be done and more to learn. It's a never ending wonderful commitment and we are excited to put forth some extra effort. I'm looking forward to learning from others and getting some new ideas. One thing I'm looking forward to in this journey is working together with my husband. It seems like most of the time I dictate the what, how, and when in this area and I'm looking forward to sharing this task together.

I believe Pam is right on with her areas of focus: Prayer, Keeping Sunday, Education, Liturgical Year.  So much so that these will be our area of focus too with one small change; Keeping Sunday will be given less focus (at this time).

Following is some notes on our ideas and goals from our initial brainstorming time. I included things we are currently doing, trying to get started and what we want to be doing. I tend to do most of our domestic church activities during the day and some will now be done in the evenings to include Scott. I'm sure to find more as everyone share their own over at Everyday Snapshots.

Prayer:
-monthly Adoration (the boys and I already have a thirty minute spot at our church)
-morning prayer time before school (happens 2 days during the week-need to get done daily!)
-meal time prayer (this some how gets missed)
-praying at bedtime and rising (keep reminding boys to do-recently printed some prayer cards for their use-Caleb needs a new prayer book)
-thinking about purchasing Children's Daily Prayer book 
-weekly family Rosary (out of habit at the moment-the boys and I were doing this during school time earlier this year)

Education:
-study of Catechism made top priority (getting done, but needs more focus-and this would be good for parents to do too)
-create a monthly book basket with liturgical titles to be done once (or twice) a week during religion time during school hours
-saint study (already being done)
-spend thirty minutes (or more) a day during school hours on religion education (already being done)

Liturgical Year
-Saint Study during school time (already done but needs work)
-Advent preparation (already being done)
-Christmas preparation (needs improvement during the two weeks we are on break from school during this time)
-Lent Preparation (already being done)
-Easter Preparations (needs improvement-need more details)
-daily Gospel reading (need to move to dinner time and be more consistent)
-celebrate Baptism days
-celebrate saint name days 

I have really spent the last week working on plans to celebrate the Liturgical year for the remaining of the year. I put together books on Saints for Novemeber and put them in a basket and put two days in the boys school planner to read from the basket. I'm starting to work on Advent preparations and I will do a separate blog post on those.