Our Father… Bless Our Families

Our Father –

Who art in Heaven –

• Our Papa God reminds us there is another life, another existence where all will be well. He helps us put into perspective this life and our nagging worries. Our attention should focus on the next life, knowing God is there, too, and we will know joy with him forever.

Hallowed be thy name –

• This phrase balances the concept of Papa God with a reminder of the awe-inspiring nature of All Powerful God, as well. He is all holy. His name is holy and we should speak it with respect and humility. Like our own children, whom we want to trust us and yet respect us, we owe him honor.

Thy Kingdom Come –

• We look forward to a better world but we can’t just sit and wait. We must also work to bring improvement to this world. Within our families and within our world, this phrase reminds us to strive to constantly improve ourselves and our relationships.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven –

• Our children must learn to obey us as parents in order to be safe and to grow into successful, law abiding adults. It might feel better to us in the moment to let their disobedience slide, but we owe it to them to respond consistently, even though they will be angry with us for a while. It is our job to model for them that their actions have consequences so that when they are adults they will not expect to get away with infractions.
• We, too, must constantly strive to discern and obey God’s will, in order to become the fully actualized people he created us to be.

Give us this day our daily bread –

• So much of the world is not assured of daily bread, let alone quality nutrition. And yet, we have more than enough. This phrase reminds us how desperately the world needs us to share our abundance.
• In a broader sense we are asking God to provide what we need, trusting he will. Not what we want, necessarily, but what we need.
• It also states us how truly simple are our daily needs. What do our children need daily? To be loved, protected, educated, fed, and clothed. Perhaps we need reminding that our children don’t NEED all the activities, toys, or electronics that we want to provide them. They need more of our time.

And forgive us our trespasses –

• We will make mistakes. We all do.  Let’s teach our children by example how to apologize quickly and ask forgiveness. Here is a useful template from www.cuppacocoa.com for a sincere apology:

1.     I’m sorry for…   Be specific. Show the person you’re apologizing to that you really understand what they are upset about.

2.     This is wrong because… Until you understand why it was wrong or how it hurt someone’s feelings, it’s unlikely you will change. This is also important to show the person you hurt that you really understand how they feel.

3.     In the future, I will… Use positive language, and tell what you WILL do, not what you won’t do.

4.     Will you forgive me? This is important to try to restore your relationship. Now, there is no rule that the other person has to forgive you. Sometimes, they won’t. That’s their decision, and that’s not something you automatically get just because you apologized. But you should at least ask for it.

As we forgive those who trespass against us –

• It’s a two way street. If we want to be forgiven, we must forgive others, even those who aren’t sorry and never apologize. God knows it cripples us to hang on to anger but when we release our grudges it releases our spirits. A family who learns this need never worry about mistakes tearing the family apart. Or resentments eating away at us from the inside.

And lead us not into temptation –

• No, God doesn’t ever “lead us into temptation.” We do fine leading ourselves there, or stumbling into it. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Simplified, 2846-2847, “Sins come from consenting to temptation. We ask God not to lead us into temptation, meaning ‘do not allow us to enter’ or ‘do not let us yield to’ temptation. God cannot be tempted and he tempts no one. This petition asks him to block our way into temptation and to give us the Spirit of discernment.” We ask God to protect us from temptation and when we are subjected to it, to strengthen us so we turn away.
• When we are tempted, God will “provide the way of escape, so you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor 10:13).
• We pray our children will avoid temptation. We need to communicate very directly with them about temptation and how difficult it is to stay strong. This is where role play practice comes in. “What would you do if someone asked you to…” Don’t let the actual situation be the first time they have to figure out how to respond.

But deliver us from evil –

• Protect us, God, from this world’s wicked ones.
• Protect our children as they go out into the world. Keep evil away from our family!

For God’s is the kingdom and the power and the glory! All will be well. We simply need to trust in his love for us.

Blessings on your week!
Betty

Single Parent Families

Welcome back to our 4 minute focus on building strong families!

One chapter in Building Christian Families by Mitch and Kathy Finley deals particularly with single parent families. If you are, or have been, part of a single parent family you will recognize the truth in what they write. If you are blessed to be part of a two-parent family, please read this anyway in order to build empathy for the special challenges you have been spared and perhaps to consider helping struggling families.

The single parent family is a true family and a legitimate form of home-church. Let’s follow the example we see throughout the Bible as God shows a soft spot in his heart for “widows and orphans,” or any family who needs extra consideration.

We all have our limits, and it’s only realistic to accept them. However, single parent families have special challenges we should be sensitive to:

• Both parent and children have gone through painful disruptions, whether because of abandonment, divorce, or death. Sources of income must be developed, a move to a new house or apartment may be necessary, and children might need to attend different schools. The grieving process may continue for many months, or even years.
• Parent-child relationships must be redesigned. A non-custodial parent may struggle to pay child support, worry about religious upbringing, have more time to be depressed, or feel acute loneliness.
• While couple parent families sometimes deal with the temptation to leave the main responsibility for parenting to the other spouse, the custodial single parent responds to the demands of children all day long and does it alone.
• Where a widowed parent may be looked upon by the wider community as courageous, others often view the divorced parent with suspicion or judgment. In some worship communities, the single parent who is divorced often feels shunned, ignored, even subtly ostracized. Yet divorced single parents have a deep desire to belong, to be a part of their church community.
• Single parents worry that their children will never have witnessed a normal man/woman, husband/wife loving relationship.
• Single parents must often deal with two particular temptations: the temptation to self-pity and to resentment.
• Many single parent families experience degrees of fear and anxiety that the typical couple-parent family does not usually know with such intensity. Financial anxieties may head the list, but a vague, undefined fear of what the future may bring is not far behind. The single parent is unable to share these fears and anxieties with another intimately known adult. She or he lives with these feelings constantly, so the fear tends to compound itself.
• In the two parent family, it is crucial for spouses to spend time regularly on themselves and on their friendship as a couple. It is equally important for the single parent to carve out of the week a few hours for leisure and, now and then, for prayerful reflection.
• The single parent often finds it necessary to struggle against the tendency to become isolated. Single parents have a need for sympathetic friends and for warm relationships with two-parent families. Single parents often need little more than a sympathetic listener, and they can frequently find this by forming friendships with other single parents and hopefully, by membership in church groups.

On the other hand, single parents may have some advantages over couple parents.

• They build strength as survivors, even though both parent and children have known much anguish.
• Children of single parent families are sometimes more mature than many of their peers from two-parent families. They have, of necessity, been trusted with significant responsibilities at home.
• Single parents may be more free to lead their children in their chosen faith life. In two-parent families, value conflicts which relate to the spiritual life of the family sometimes develop between husband and wife.

Single parents are like all parents:

• No parent or set of parents can give children everything they should ideally have.
• Most parents today often feel guilty about not spending enough quality time with their kids.
• All families know insecurity.
• All parents are called to conversion of heart and life, to trust God above all, to turn away from fear and anxiety as motives for action, to love God and others as the source of life’s meaning and purpose. Parents are called to do this even in the midst of meaninglessness and the temptation to despair. This is true faith, in the real world.
• All parents need other parents to simply commiserate with, to talk to and share their burdens and joys. We should never underestimate the value of honest talking and listening among peers, for it is a terrifically valuable service that all church communities should offer to parents.

Finleys remind us that a basic principle for all parents’ spirituality is to “keep on keeping on.” May God help all of us, married and single to persevere in our effort to parent well.

The Family as Church

Blessed Pope John Paul II declared, “The family in fact is the basic unit of society and of the church. It is the ‘domestic church.’”

Mitch and Kathy Finley, in Building Christian Families, write:

“Within the family, the foundational experiences of the Christian life happen best, for both children and adults. For most people, it is within the fabric of family life that faith becomes real. In family life, we experience the deepest joys and our deepest anguish, which means that in family life we most often discover the Cross and Resurrection of Christ in our own experience. […]”

“Within the family and around the family table, children experience the meaning of the Eucharist long before they receive their First Communion. Within the fabric of life in the domestic church, child and adult experience the meaning of forgiveness and reconciliation, apart from any official sacramental celebration of the experience. In the family, both adults and children experience the Christian life at its most immediate, where the seeds of faith are planted and cultivated daily.”

The family is the fundamental building block of the Church. Family spirituality is defined by the Finleys as, “A family’s ongoing attempts to live every dimension of its life in communion with the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ.” We first learn our spirituality primarily from our family. As Christians, our purpose in life is to serve God and his people, to work for the good of others, that we may all grow closer to God as we build his kingdom here on earth and spread the Good News of his love through our actions.

Do your children know what it is to be Christian? And what it means to be Catholic (or your denomination)? Or, more broadly, what are your children (even grown children) learning about spirituality as they observe their parents’ everyday life?

If your children are little, think back to your own childhoods. What did you look forward to about how your family expressed its faith? What were your family spiritual traditions on Sunday mornings? On holidays? On vacations? I remember whirling around the living room with my grandpa on Sunday mornings after Mass, my feet placed carefully on top of his dress shoes. Does that memory make me more Christian? Actually, yes, I think so. I knew in those moments that Sundays were special days of joy. Days to spend with family. Not simply because they were days off, but because they were God’s day.

If your children are teenagers, do you speak openly with them about your faith? Do you ask them what they think about social justice, or priests they have known, or some of the ethical questions we struggle with today? Do you visit other parishes so they begin to understand the universality of our Church? Do you reach out to the less fortunate as a family?

Last weekend, my husband and I watched a documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers, about the 10,000 children who were sent away in the 1940s from German occupied lands to strangers in England, in their parents’ desperate hope of saving their lives. The separation traumatized both parents and children, but their children lived, when 1.5 million children who stayed behind did not survive. The story touched us deeply as we listened to these children, now grown into elderly men and women, talk about how their parents struggled, in the few days between learning their children were accepted to the freedom trains and sending them off, (in most cases, never to see them again) to impart to them all the wisdom and faith that they would have spoken and modeled over their lifetimes.

Whatever the age of your children, even if they are greying themselves, don’t leave for later what you want them to know about your very personal faith. If you are uncomfortable at the thought of talking about such a personal issue, (Why are the most important things to say the hardest?) consider writing it down today. Here’s a start:

I know there is a God because once…

I know He loves me because…

I believe He wants me to treat his children with love and respect. I learned this when….

I know God answers prayers. He answered mine once when… (Maybe he said no, and you only came to understand what a good thing that was later.)

I believe in heaven. I’m not looking forward to dying, but I’m looking forward to asking God a few questions when I get there. And I’m looking forward to seeing my loved ones: _____.

I know God forgives. I learned this when I was forgiven once by ____. If they could forgive me and I know God loves me even more than they, He must forgive us even better.

I chose the church I attend because______ (our family always has been, or I converted because, or whatever your story is)

Our faith should be so important to us that we take care to pass it on to our children as a family treasure. May we recognize our treasure this week!

Blessings,

Betty