Making A Commitment For Family Prayer
By
Nicholas Kovacs
My family has taken to heart the saying, The family that prays together, stays together. Jesus has always been at the center of our family, but through human weakness, we have failed on occasion in keeping up with prayer as a regular part of our day. On a Friday in December 2001, my mother and I attended Eucharistic adoration at our parish. Mom took a new prayer book with her to read in the silence while I silently talked to Jesus.
On our drive home after that holy hour with Christ, my mom excitedly told me that she had discovered a powerful novena in her book. It was a prayer from St. Bridget of Sweden who was a woman born into a wealthy family around the 12th Century. Bridget had a great devotion to the passion of Christ, and at the age of 7, she received a vision of the crucifixion. St. Bridget eventually recorded the visions in a book, which became popular in the middle ages. In her writings, we discover that she asked Christ how many wounds He suffered during the passion. Jesus replied with a meditative station of the cross style of prayer, which goes through fifteen significant reflections to answer her question. Jesus told her that if she said these fifteen reflections once a day for an entire year, she would honor each one of His 5, 475 wounds. Jesus then promised St. Bridget that whoever faithfully recites the fifteen prayers for an entire year would receive 21 promises.
After dinner that evening, my mother and I debriefed my sister and father about our exciting discovery. We explained that by committing to the St. Bridget Novena for an entire year, we would renew our prayer life. My dad’s first reaction was, “There’s no way we can possibly complete that kind of commitment!” He honestly believed that as a family, we would never be able to commit to such a demanding prayer. My mom and I, however, thought differently about the commitment, so we explained the rich promises of graces attached to the Novena. When my dad heard that one of the promises was the release from Purgatory of 15 souls from each side of our family’s lineage, he realized that this was truly a family prayer. What a beautiful gift it would be for us to give the family members who have gone before us, a ticket into Heaven!
My family and I began the daily reflection on Christ's passion the evening of January 18th, 2002. Once we completed the first day, we knew that there was no turning back. This could not be a false start; we were going to be committed to this novena throughout the next twelve months. With that thought in mind, each member of my family had a renewed devotion to prayer, and we all looked forward to entering into the meditative reflection of Christ's passion every night after dinner. Even the family dog waited patiently on someone’s lap until our prayer was complete!
As one might suspect in this fast-paced modern culture, our family could not always guarantee that we would be together during the Prayer Hour for the next 365 dinners, so we devised a few tricks to keep up with our commitment. We printed numerous copies of the prayer and put them in our vehicles and in different rooms in the house. That way, if our dinner schedule was disrupted, we would have the ability to recite our prayer at any other time during the day. Many times we would say an extra prayer on the way to church, knowing that it would be counted for a particular day that week when we would not be together. My sister even made our dad an audiotape for him to listen to in his truck, as he took many business trips out of town. We certainly had this prayer commitment down to a science.
On January 17, 2003 we began to reflect back on the year of prayer, which was about to end the next day. We could hardly believe that we not only managed to fulfill our commitment, but were also about to receive the 21 promises from Jesus. The anticipation of how glorious the event would be for our relatives in Purgatory was becoming a tearful experience. The next day, we were filled with excitement and anticipation for our prayer time after dinner. After dinner we said our final prayer and felt like we accomplished something great. We really felt closer to God because of our family prayer time and decided to continue what we had started, praying together as a family after dinner.
There are many other ways a family can spend time together in prayer than by reciting a novena. A family could read from scripture, read the catechism, read from the writings of the popes, pray the rosary, or even sing favorite songs from church! Family prayer time must unite a family to Christ, bringing them ever closer to becoming saints. In Paragraphs 39 -42 of LUMEN GENTIUM, the Second Vatican Council stresses a universal call to holiness to all members of the Church. To answer this call to holiness, we need to spend time in prayer in order to resist the temptations of the world, so that we can bring forth a culture of life. If every family throughout the world would spend at least one hour in prayer, imagine how holy this world would be!