This book has been such a joy to me during Lent and Eastertide. It is almost time for me to take myself down to Saint Anthony's to pick up the next volume in the series.
Today's meditation is on "The First Christians" and the following paragraphs touched my heart:
The Christian homes of the early faithful were no different on the outside from any others. Parents passed on the Faith to their children and these in their turn did likewise. In this way the family became the main pillar for the grounding of Christian faith and morality. Christian homes being steeped in love were havens of peace, often in the midst of misunderstandings, calumnies and persecutions from without. In the home children learned the morning offering, how to be thankful and bless the table, how to turn to God in good times and bad.
What parents taught their children came with the naturalness of life itself, and so the family thus fulfilled its mission as educator. The following is the advice given by St. John Chrysostom to Christian couples: Show your wife you appreciate her company a lot and that you prefer to be at home rather than outside, because she is there. Show her a preference among all your friends and even above the children she has given you; love them because of her . . . Pray all together . . . Learn the fear of God; everything else will flow from this like water from a fountain and your house will be filled with bounty.
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I like to think that my house is "steeped in love" and is a "haven of peace" but so often I fall short in bringing that sense into our home. And yes, I think that is MY main duty--it's what my vocation is in my marriage and motherhood.
One of my regrets is that we came so late to the church. Zteen was already 11, and the years we missed of doing the 1001 small Catholic devotional things have been hard to make up. What seems natural with smaller children becomes more problematical with a teenager! We've done our best.
But a part of my heart looks forward to those years with (someday, please God)grandchildren. Littles to celebrate the feast days with cookies or special cakes. With crafts and costumes. With all the things that I would have liked to have done but missed out on. I want to be an awesome Catholic grandmother!
I treasure the wisdom of ol' Golden Tongue (St. John Chrysostom). St. Vladmir's Seminary Press (Orthodox Christian, not Catholic) published St. John's writing on marriage in a slim, but substantial, volume known as On Marriage and Family Life. Thanks be to God for His work through St. John Chrysostom.