Six Sacred Rules for Families

Highlights

  • RULES FOR FAMILY SPIRITUALITY 1. God brings our family together on pilgrimage. 2. Our love for one another leads to joy. 3. Our family doesn’t care about “success.” 4. God stretches our family toward his Kingdom. 5. God will help us. 6. We must learn which desires lead us to freedom. (Location 132)
  • Chapter One Change Your Perspective (Location 149)
  • Far from a kind of certainty about everything, faith is, at its most basic level, a way of living with hopeful conviction that life is meaningful. (Location 156)
  • Parenting, we have found, necessitates that kind of conviction. (Location 157)
  • Starting and living family life is almost never according to plan. The image that comes to mind is driving in the dark: you can only see as far as your headlights allow, but still that’s enough to drive across the country. (Location 163)
  • we began to think of faith less as something to learn and more as something to rely on in the face of life decisions. (Location 178)
  • ASSESSING FAMILY PRIORITIES Spend time in prayer considering what you value as a parent. • What will you remember on your deathbed? • What will you hope you have passed on to your children? • How do you hope they will remember you? • Consider keeping a journal to remain mindful of what is most important and what is fleeting. (Location 190)
  • To say it a little differently, nothing of family life is meaningless: God can orchestrate joys and griefs, successes and failures, expressions of love or experiences of pain toward something beautiful. (Location 212)
  • That change is about using Kingdom eyes in a very specific way: to see that everything we do in the course of every day is in cooperation with a God who loves us and who is constantly inviting us to be love in the world, first toward our families and then toward everyone else. That kind of perspective emerges through the regular practice of prayer. (Location 223)
  • Prayer is the language of friendship with God.2 And like any good friendship, it will have its moments of joy and heartache, of stress and tenderness, of gratefulness and anger. (Location 225)
  • Rather, imagine your prayer as simply your daily conversation with God, your chance to catch up with the most intimate friend in your life. Greet God when you wake up; talk with God as you shower; chatter with God as you help your children get dressed or get them ready for school; dream with God as you prepare meals; lean on God as you comfort your child who has gotten sick. And teach your children to pray by imitating the ways you pray. (Location 233)
  • things that occupy our thoughts when we are not driven from one immediate need to another—are what touch us most deeply and suggest to us that the contours of our experience are perhaps not as clearly defined as we often assume. (Location 325)
  • Chapter Three Awareness in Everyday Life (Location 334)
  • God is immediately present and anything is possible, but those moments must yield to the slow, repetitious pace of everyday life. And (Location 336)
  • If you are a parent—especially of small children—you know these realities are often hilarious. They certainly stretch your imagination and maybe even your tolerance. In our home over the past week, a more or less average one, much of our energy was dedicated to curious things like bathroom use, the irritation caused by whining, the ways our bodies need nutrients, the problem with shoes cluttering the floor, the benefits of laundry hampers, the conjugation of Spanish verbs, the recipe for guacamole, and the schedule for basketball games. And what is remarkable is that God is present in each one of these curious things, and we have to constantly remind ourselves of that truth. For us, discerning God’s presence is sometimes as easy as opening our eyes. Other times, though, particularly when things get stressful, God can seem as distant as a good rest. (Location 342)
  • Too often, busy people are looking for God so much that they don’t see God. Too often as parents, we are looking for some deep meaning, something that maybe reminds us of monks chanting, of beatific-faced religious sisters serving a dying person, or of a preacher expounding upon a deep theological truth—so much that we miss the incredibly obvious truth right under our noses. Family life is a life of faith, and as an act of faith, it is the place where we can learn love, and as the place where we can learn love, we can discern God. (Location 351)
  • Find a comfortable place where you can secure ten or fifteen quiet minutes. Have a journal handy. 2. Close your eyes and relax your body. Try deep breathing, stretching, or whatever else helps you eliminate distraction. 3. Invite the Holy Spirit to be with you in prayer, to help you learn to pray. 4. Offer God thanks for the day and anything else that immediately comes to mind. 5. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you light to see how you’ve experienced God’s grace over the past day. 6. Move through the day as if you were watching it on a video. Pay attention to the feelings that your past experiences evoke. 7. Ask God for forgiveness for any sins you find yourself regretting and ask for grace to grow in love in the coming day. 8. Close with an Our Father. 9. Write about your experience of prayer. (Location 370)
  • Repeat this prayer every day for a month, and you will develop an awareness of God’s work in your life. Think of ways you might adapt this prayer for your children. (See one example at the end of this chapter.) (Location 381)
  • searching for God in the everyday, (Location 386)
  • We started with a bedtime ritual of asking three questions: What was something that made you happy today? What was something that made you sad? What are you looking forward to tomorrow? (Location 395)
  • Similarly, at dinnertime we began the practice of “Two Things,” when each family member chooses to share two things that happened over the course of the day. (Location 397)
  • AN EXAMEN FOR CHILDREN 1. Quiet your children before bedtime. 2. Ask them what made them happy over the past day. 3. Ask them what made them sad over the past day. 4. Ask them what they look forward to tomorrow. 5. Remind them to thank God for what made them happy, ask for God’s help when they are sad, and pray for God’s presence in the coming day. (Location 401)
  • Chapter Four Family Life as a Vocation (Location 408)
  • The life of prayer is above all a realistic look at the world; our favorite description is that it’s “a long, loving look at the real.” (Location 436)
  • Putting into the deep—trusting Jesus’ words even though they feel exhausted—is the key to finding what they are after. (Location 454)
  • With Kingdom eyes, family members see through ordinary realities into the deep. They understand that small gestures and small objects can carry great importance for a family’s life. These things are often invested with memories that sustain family storytelling for decades. (Location 461)
  • To use a theological term, family life is naturally sacramental, meaning that these concrete things can be bearers of grace, of God’s love. (Location 464)
  • Family life is a font of grace, but it’s also a kind of crucible where the wounds of sin can be most deeply felt. (Location 468)
  • FOSTERING GRATITUDE FOR LIFE’S JOYS • Schedule five minutes today to pay attention to one item in your home—perhaps a toy or a picture your child has drawn—and imagine what it will mean to you in ten years. What will you miss about this stage of life? • Start a “box of memories” with your child. Ask your child to pick something meaningful from school or an activity he or she wants to remember, and put a picture or a (Location 469)
  • drawing of it in the box. Use it as an opportunity to say thank you to God. (Location 474)
  • we are trying to suggest that living family life reflectively is a ripe field for the cultivation of a living faith. (Location 479)
  • Perhaps the answer to why we pray is that it is how we practice imagining the way that God can love. Perhaps God is the origin and goal of what we most deeply desire for the ones we love. (Location 509)
  • Part Two Rules For Family Spirituality (Location 529)
  • Chapter Five The First Rule: God Brings Our Family Together on Pilgrimage (Location 532)
  • God brings us together for a purpose, and our life’s work is to learn it and live it. (Location 549)
  • The pilgrimage life is one of both journey and destination. First, it is a life of purpose: it involves the belief that we can orchestrate all our talents, desires, inclinations, even weaknesses into a beautiful harmony for the sake of God’s Kingdom. (Location 554)
  • The rules of a family’s spiritual life rest upon the willingness of the parents to live this pilgrimage life. It means, for example, (Location 596)
  • Taking a leadership role. Each parent is willing to talk honestly about his or her questions about God, Jesus, the Church, about his or her religious upbringing, his or her understanding of prayer. It means that each parent is willing to share the pilgrimage with the rest of the family and not assume that someone else (a spouse, the kids’ grandparents or teachers) will take care of the kids’ spiritual lives. (Location 597)
  • Practicing the spiritual life. If spirituality is to be more than an intellectual exercise, it has to involve concrete action. This may mean grace before meals, a family prayer sometime during the day, shared public worship (going to Church), or a commitment to social action like serving in a homeless shelter. Whatever the practice, it must be actively shared by parents and children. (Location 601)
  • Chapter Six The Second Rule: Our Love for One Another Leads to Joy (Location 614)
  • My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this (Location 626)
  • you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.5 (Location 629)
  • Chapter Seven The Third Rule: Our Family Doesn’t Care About “Success” (Location 657)
  • Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I’m not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones. (Location 689)
  • third rule proposes that we throw away whatever we imagine success to look like, because that vision is likely the product of what we’ve absorbed from popular (Location 691)
  • culture. Instead, with spiritual freedom we gain the ability to be surprised by happiness. We think less about what we don’t have, and we are able to marvel in what is unfolding right before us. (Location 693)
  • The third rule invites us to question what we think is good, to ask whether our vision of what’s good is ultimately in service to an expansive and generous love. If it is not, then it is also an invitation to let go of that vision, so a newer one might grow in its place. (Location 705)

Chapter Eight The Fourth Rule: God Stretches Our Family Toward His Kingdom

  • Belief is what we think; faith is how we live. (Location 727)
  • happiness arrives not as something we pursue for its own sake; rather, it arrives softly while we are busy at the work of loving one another. (Location 753)

Chapter Nine The Fifth Rule: God Will Help Us

  • “Can you trust that I am with you when life is hard and that I will help steer you toward a more lasting happiness if you let go of what you think will make you happy?” (Location 801)

Chapter Ten The Sixth Rule: We Must Learn Which Desires Lead Us To Freedom

  • A goal of the spiritual life is to learn how to recognize the signs that a desire is either good and worthy of pursuing or distracting and worth overcoming. (Location 846)

Part Three Praying and Living the Rules

Chapter Eleven Sacred Stories

Chapter Twelve The Witness of Others

Chapter Thirteen Reading Scripture

  • What makes scripture theologically different from other words is the belief that the real desires that gave rise to the words originate in God himself, in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the authors. Prayer with scripture involves a kind of receptivity: a listening to words that have developed meaning over time and that can also speak to us immediately. (Location 998)

Chapter Fourteen Searching for Jesus

  • Parenting can offer us—sometimes daily—a whole range of emotions, but so very often the emotions have to take a backseat to a more basic question of what we choose to do and how we choose to show our children we love them, sometimes in spite of what we are actually feeling. (Location 1142)
  • Children, especially young ones, live in a world governed by their feelings. What they feel is what they do. When they get hurt, they want to hurt back so that things are fair. The story of the Lost Son offers a chance to look at life a little differently, to imagine the importance of moving beyond how you feel to consider what good family relationships require. (Location 1144)
  • Parents can model lessons, such as saying, “I’m angry that you did this, but I love you and want to move on.” (Location 1154)
  • Of all the hours in a week, how many do we want dedicated to school, sports, music, playing with friends, playing on the computer, learning to draw, learning a new language, making crafts, praying and participating in worship, reading for pleasure, and so on? (Location 1321)
  • Remember that kids live in a world circumscribed by their limited experience, and what they desire at any given moment is likely to appear to be everything to them. Part of our task is to remind them there is a much larger Good than they can currently understand and to call them to work toward that Good even when it’s not clear to them. (Location 1399)
  • Our role as parents is often analogous to that of the person who proposed a school science fair: we draw our children into learning experiences that they themselves might not have chosen but that grant them opportunities to develop self-knowledge and a vision of the Good. (Location 1415)
  • The rules are not fundamentally about trying to get everyone to do the same things and keeping people from fighting with one another. Rather, they are about helping people young and old to live life to the full as God intended. (Location 1528)