You are a Parent Forever In the Line of Malchizedek–The Common Priesthood in the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life

The following article is part of our ongoing series on the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.  To learn more, join our Facebook discussion group:  CatholicHŌM (Households on Mission)–Family Discipleship.

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On our radio program today, we got a call from a gentleman who accidentally offended his wife of 20 years by saying that if he had the relationship he has with God now when he was coming out of high school, he might have become a priest. He said that his wife, upon hearing this, felt like she was some kind of consolation prize.  Of course he didn’t mean it that way.  He said he just meant that he was a little envious of the opportunities a priest has to live so single-mindedly for God and that he sometimes struggles to experience God as deeply as he would like with all the distractions of daily work and family life.

Of course he isn’t alone.  I think most faithful lay people have felt this way from time to time.  I think most faithful Catholics–men and women–feel a similar call to “priesthood” at some point. What most people miss is that this genuine and authentic call to priesthood isn’t necessarily a call to the ministerial priesthood.  For most of us, the call to priesthood is a call to more deeply live the ministry of the “common priesthood,” but frankly, for a lot of Catholics, this feels like “second skimmings.”  That’s not because the common priesthood is any less important in the Kingdom of God, but because we haven’t effectively developed the theology of the common priesthood and what it means to celebrate it .

This is one of the reasons what we are calling the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life is so important.  The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life offers a more systematic way to appreciate how the common priesthood of the laity complements the ministerial priesthood and the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  It gives us a way to relate to the common priesthood in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re being patted on the head and told, “There, there, lay person.  Of course you matter too.”

Two Priesthoods, One Christ.

Theologian, David Fagerberg, points to this complementarity between the lay and ministerial priesthood when he writes,

The common priesthood of the laity is directed toward the cure of this now corrupted structure of the world, and the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood to equip them for their lay apostolate….. Therefore, “though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial… priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ”  (2004).

It’s inherent to the nature of priesthood to preside over liturgy. For instance, that’s why the church celebrates the institution of both the eucharist and the ministerial priesthood on Holy Thursday.  The two are inextricably tied.  It’s impossible to speak of priesthood without simultaneously referencing the liturgy over which the priest presides. The ministerial priesthood consecrates the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ through the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  In a sense, the common priesthood consecrates the world to Christ through the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.  In the words of one Eastern-Rite bishop who attended a talk on the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life model, “The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life represents the mystical vehicle that allows the grace of the Eucharist to be communicated to all the world through the living Body of Christ.”

What’s the Liturgy of the Common Priesthood?

I would argue that our understanding of the value and dignity of the “common priesthood of the laity” has suffered for so long because we’ve been attempting to talk about it without adequately defining the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life to which it is inextricably attached.  Building the Kingdom of God doesn’t necessarily require us to “do BIG THINGS for Jesus”  like building hospitals and converting entire nations to Christ. For most of us, building the Kingdom of God simply requires cooperating with grace to heal the way sin damages our relationships. The common priesthood facilitates this necessary and essential process of healing through the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.

Loosely speaking, it’s the role of the common priesthood to build and heal the Body of Christ while it is the role of the ministerial priesthood to feed the body of Christ.  And although Catholics haven’t historically tended to think of it in these terms, both roles are of equal importance and dignity. Seen through this lens, creating strong families through the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life isn’t just a nice thing to do.  It is the primary way the common priesthood of the laity participates in the salvific mission of the Church.

Two Liturgies Making Love Incarnate

Similar to the way that the ministerial and common priesthoods represent distinct yet complementary means of participating in the one priesthood of Christ, the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life should be thought of as a true liturgy that is distinct from, yet complementary to, the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Of course, the relationship between these two liturgies is enhanced by the fact that they are the only two liturgies where love, itself, becomes incarnate in flesh and blood—the former through the conception of children and the latter through the consecration of the Precious Body and Blood.

Your marriage and family life should never be seen as an obstacle to living your call to the priesthood. Your call to the common priesthood isn’t a lesser  The fact is, Catholicism is meant to be “a kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6). The common priesthood is a real priesthood that presides over a real liturgy. Celebrating the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life means celebrating–in a manner of speaking–that you are parent forever in the line of Malchizedek (c.f., Hebrews 7:17), a full participant in the one priesthood of Christ that serves as the source of the power, dignity, and spiritual authority of both the ministerial and common priesthood.


Dr Greg Popcak is the author of many books and the director of both CatholicCounselors.com and the Peyton institute for Domestic Church Life. You can hear him and his wife Lisa each day on their call-in radio program, More2Life airing Monday-Friday at 10amE on EWTN Radio and SiriusXM130.

 

Kids Aren’t Projects: The Myth of Parenting “Techniques” (And What To Do Instead)

The following article is part of our ongoing series on the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.  To learn more, join our Facebook discussion group:  CatholicHŌM (Households on Mission)–Family Discipleship.
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For the most part, the world views parenting as a series of tools and techniques you use on a child to get them to behave. By contrast, the Catholic

Image: Shutterstock

theology of family views of parenting as a discipleship relationship parents build with their children with the intention of helping them form a virtuous character and leading them to Christ.

Of course, techniques can play a limited role in every relationship. For example; there are different techniques married couples can use to handle conflict more effectively. There are techniques co-workers could use to negotiate differences. And, yes, there are techniques parents can use to help their children more clearly understand the lessons they are trying to teach.
Technique vs. Relationship
But techniques can’t stand in the place of actual relationship. Like a car runs on gas, techniques can be said to run on the strength of your relationship with your child. If a parent is out of rapport with their children, applying even more of the best parenting techniques in the world will actually make the situation worse. Not because the child is broken or willful, but because God created us to be loved as persons, not treated like projects.
I see this all the time in my counseling practice. Parents will describe some behavior problem and then say, “First, I tried this technique. Then I did that technique, and then I did this other thing but he just gets more and more defiant no matter what I do.” Ironically, the parents are often using all the right techniques, but when I ask how often they hug their kids, or cuddle up and read together, or get any kind of one-on-one time the answer is often, “not much” or “there just isn’t time” or worse, “that’s just not me.” In each of these instances, the problem isn’t that the parents don’t have the right techniques. It’s that they haven’t been able to invest in cultivating a heart-to-heart, discipleship relationship with their kids—a relationship that would make any techniques actually work.
People Not Projects
Children don’t want to be treated like projects any more than anyone else does. For the most part rebellious children become rebellious, not because their parents’ techniques are bad, but because the child is trying to say, “I need you to see me as a person and stop treating me as a project. And if I have to burn down the house to get you to see that, I will.”

St. John Paul’s Theology of the Body teaches that every human being—including children—is a person who deserves to be loved. God actually created us to rebel against people who treat us like an object or project.  The Catechism says, “Parents must regard their children as children of God and respect them as human persons” (#2222).

God built human beings in such a way that we naturally want to reject people who treat us as objects or projects because, generally speaking, those people are not safe to be around. Regardless of their intentions, people who treat us like projects or objects are violating our basic human dignity. We deserve better–especially from parents who are supposed to be the face of God to their children (CCC #239).

The Rite of Christian Relationship attempts to remind Catholic families that it isn’t enough to load up with all the best and latest techniques. The heart of a Christian family is the time and energy we put into making love incarnate in the home and affirming the personhood of each member of our households. The practices we recommend for the Rite of Christian Relationship are some simple ways to start: extravagant affection that enables our love to be incarnate, discipleship discipline that focuses on capturing the child’s heart and forming their character instead of simply punishing bad behavior, and prioritizing family time over other activities, which gives parents the time they need to cultivate meaningful relationships in the home.

“Imperfect People Need Not Apply” Does the Domestic Church Discriminate?

The following article is part of our ongoing series on the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.  To learn more, join our Facebook discussion group:  CatholicHŌM (Households on Mission)–Family Discipleship.

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There is a perception that the term “domestic church” is an exclusive club that only admits happily married couples with children.  Nothing could further from the truth.

In his presentation at the Symposium on Catholic Family Life and Spirituality, (and in the upcoming book, Renewing Catholic Family Life, OSV, 2020) theologian Tim O’Malley criticized the tendency to have an overly romanticized, Rockwellian vision of the “domestic church” as a large, perfectly happy, family who drives a huge van, takes vacations to pilgrimage sites and whose home is chock-full of liturgically-oriented art-and-craft projects. He says:

This romanticized account of family life tends to bypass the experience of actual families. It is an almost idolatrous vision of family life that passes over the difficulties that a family will experience in becoming a civilization of love. There are families suffering from the plague of domestic violence. Some couples are unable to have children, experiencing the agony of infertility rather than the communion that leads to a large brood of Catholic children singing along to the Salve Regina. In the United States, migrant families are separated, attempting to make a life apart from each other—sometimes by choice and sometimes because of political policy. Families in the United States suffer from poverty, unable to keep a roof over their heads let alone enjoy a meal together. Parents agonize as their children are arrested, struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, experience divorce, and even die prematurely.  If the term “domestic church” is to function prophetically within society, it must take into the fullness of the human condition—not only an idealized, upper middle class account of Christian life.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the Church hasn’t provided us with an official definition of what it means by the term, “domestic church.” Inevitably, that causes people to make up their own definitions that either exclude huge swaths of people or cause them to worry that maybe even they don’t belong.

Even so, looking at the way the Church has related to this phrase over the years, I would suggest that while “domestic church” is a specific term, it isn’t an exclusive one. Just like the Kingdom of God is both already present and not-yet-fulfilled, the domestic church lives in a state of constant tension between what it’s meant to be and the messy world it actually lives in.  And both can be legitimate expressions of domestic-church life.

Domestic Church: A Working Definition

My own working definition of “domestic church” is, “a household of persons united to God and each other through the sacramental life of the Church, and committed to living out the Christian/Trinitarian vision of love in their home and in the world.”

In this vision of the domestic church, grace supersedes both blood and outward appearances. Being a domestic church is less about how you’re related to each other and what your household looks like from the outside, and more about what you are working together to help each other become through a shared experience of the sacraments and a life of grace.

Icons of the Trinity

Of course, Christian families that are united through the sacrament of marriage do deserve special consideration and respect because of their role as “icons of the Trinity.”  We honor these families, not because Catholicism has a Leave It To Beaver fetish, but because every Christian is called to exemplify the love that lives at the heart of the Trinity in all we do.

For all its many faults and imperfections, a Christian family that is both united through the sacrament of marriage and genuinely intentional about living out the Christian vision of love in their homes really is the best witness to the Communion of Saints that we can manage to create this side of Heaven.  Even so, this kind of family doesn’t earn this “pride of place” (for want of a better way to put it)on its own merits or because of outward appearances. Rather,  I would suggest that a domestic church rooted in the unity and grace afforded by the Sacrament of Matrimony is honorable because of what it represents and what it is aspiring to become.  These families are on exactly the same journey that every other Christian–and Christian household–is on.  We look to these families–not as an idol or a finish line–but as a living sign that even in the face of our brokenness and sinfulness, it is still both possible and worthwhile to strive to exemplify Trinitarian love in our own lives and relationships.

Broadening Our Understanding

But even if all the above is true, Domestic Church life does not begin and end with intact, married households with children.  I would argue that any Christian household that is 1) united to God and each other through the sacramental life of the Church and 2) intentionally and actively trying to live out Christ’s love in their relationships with each other and the world is a domestic church. The more you can say this about your household–whatever its composition–the more “domestic churchy” your domestic church is.

It’s exactly this broader understanding of “domestic church” that gave rise to religious communities and monasteries. Historically, these Christian communities were considered to be a kind of domestic church.  Christianity overturned the notion of what constituted a family.  The traditional Roman view of family was tribal.  If you were related by blood, you were in the club.  If you weren’t, you were out.  Pure and simple. Cut and dried.

But in the Christian view of family, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ.  Religious communities and monasteries were never intended to be alternative forms of clergy, or even a kind of Religious SuperLaity. They were just a different variation on the Christian understanding of what a family actually is. That’s why religious communities have “brothers” and “sisters” and “fathers” and “mothers.”   The Christian family is not defined by blood but by grace and the desire of the members of a particular household to support each other in living the Trinitarian vision of love in their lives.

The Domestic Church: What’s It All About?

All that said, being a domestic church requires effort and intention.  The Liturgy of the Eucharist doesn’t just happen because you walk into a church building and stand around with a bunch of other people.  You have to actually be intentional about celebrating the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  In a similar way, a household doesn’t automatically celebrate the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life by living together under the same roof and sharing a data plan.  To be a domestic church–whatever your household looks like on the outside–the people under your roof have to  be about the business of supporting each other in living a sacramental life and exemplifying Trinitarian love. “Domestic Church” is more verb than noun.

No Family? You Still Belong

But how do people without their own families fit into this model?   Again, the Christian vision of family as domestic church is different from the secular “Roman” idea of family.  In the secular vision of family, if you don’t have one, you’re plumb out of luck.  But in the Christian vision of “family-as-domestic-church,” everyone who loves Christ is part of God’s family. The domestic church is a physical representation of that larger, broader community where we all belong to one another in Christ (c.f., Rom 12:5).

In the early Church, if you were single, or a widow, or an orphan, or you lost your biological family for any reason (or if your biological family was attempting to pull you away from the Family of God), it was expected that other Christian households would welcome you to be an active and integral part of their domestic church. I’d suggest that this is the logical, radical, conclusion of what I call “the Rite of Reaching Out.” If anyone believes themselves to be without a family, they need to be invited to become full, integrated members of our own, particular, domestic churches. No Christian should ever feel that they are not part of our family.  If they do, we have failed the Body of Christ.

The Way Forward

As the world continues to wrestle with what it means to be family, Christians need to overcome our lazy tendency to simply take secular, “Roman” and contemporary secular models of family and slap the label “domestic church” on them.  We need to rediscover and reassert the unique identity, mission, and dignity that constitutes the domestic church; an intentional community of persons united to God and each other through the sacramental life of the Church and dedicated to living out the Christian/Trinitarian vision of love in their relationships with each other and the world.

Dr. Greg Popcak is the executive director of both Catholic Counselors.com and the Peyton Institute for Domestic Church Life.  The author of over 20 books, you can hear him and his wife, Lisa,  on their radio program, More2Life, airing each weekday at 10amE/9C on the EWTN Radio Network and SiriusXM130.

“The Parish Exists To Support the Family Not The Other Way Around.” Popcak Interview with The Angelus on Domestic Church Life

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles just published an article I was interviewed for. It discusses the renewed emphasis on domestic church life–especially in light of the pandemic.  My thanks to Sophia Martinson for the piece.  Since we discussed a lot of things that didn’t make the final piece, I wanted to share the full conversation Sophia and I had.  I hope it will  help you discover the importance of your domestic church in God’s plan for bringing the world to him.

AngelusNews: In a nutshell, what is the domestic church — and more specifically, what you call the “liturgy of the domestic church”?

Dr. Popcak: “Domestic church” is a term the Church uses to refer to Christian families.  One of the biggest blessings of the  Second Vatican Council was the assertion of a “universal call to holiness.”  That’s the idea that all the faithful, not just priests and religious, are called to be holy.  The domestic church is part of this larger idea.  It is the notion that every home is meant to be a sacred space and an outpost of grace in the world. Every Catholic household is meant to be place where we encounter God in a real and meaningful way—in all the stuff we do as families, in the way we relate to each other in our homes, and in the way we interact with our friends, neighbors and co-workers.  It is the primary job of the domestic church to consecrate the world to Christ.
Unfortunately, very little has been done to help families live out this vision in our homes. Until fairly recently, the phrase “domestic church” has been employed as, at best, an aspirational term with little practical relevance.
Most of what we think of as “Catholic spirituality” is drawn from the monastic and clerical traditions. There’s a lot of value in that, of course, but the model doesn’t fit well into messy family life.  The upshot is that most Catholics experience family life as an obstacle to encountering God and growing in their faith.  Most Catholics feel like if they want to be spiritually fed, they have to leave home to do it.  That’s absurd!  Marriage is a sacrament. There is superabundant grace hidding just below the surface of every hug, every dirty dish, every diaper change in a Christian household.  Sadly, even families that might be aware of this in theory have never been taught to access that grace consistently in practice. In fact, for most Catholics, it comes as a shock that they should be able to.
The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life is a model of family spirituality that seeks to challenge this unfortunate reality.  The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life  presents an authentic domestic-church-based spirituality that allows families to “bring Jesus home” and make the faith the source of the warmth in their homes.
In the Church there is a “ministerial priesthood” (those who are ordained) and a “common priesthood”  (all the baptized). The thing is, you can’t have a priesthood without a liturgy.  They are inextricably tied to each other. The primary liturgy for the ministerial priesthood is the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
But what’s the liturgy of the common priesthood?  How does it make sense to talk about a “common priesthood “ without defining the liturgy over which the common priesthood presides?   That’s where the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life comes in.  The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life becomes the means by which the common priesthood consecrates the world to Christ by giving us a practical, yet flexible, framework for living out Christ’s sacrificial love in our homes and in the world.
AngelusNews: It seems that the concept of the domestic church is becoming more popular within Catholic circles. (For instance, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently hosted a town hall on the subject, and a few days before the national Catholic Family Conference took place.) Why do you think members of the Church have paid special attention to this subject lately, during the coronavirus?
Dr. Popcak: Catholics have a tendency to think that the parish is meant to be the center of our faith life. But that’s not what the Catholic theology of Church actually teaches.  In reality,  the parish church exists to support the Christian life and ministerial efforts of the domestic church—the family.  In Amoris Laetita, Pope Francis calls the Church “a family of families.” In practice, the lived experience of Catholicism is too inwardly focused on maintaining the parish instead of forming the family.  Our focus is entirely backward. In fact, Catholic ecclesiology demands that our experience of Church be outwardly focused.  The parish is meant to feed the life of the domestic church and empower it for ministry and witness in the world.
The pandemic is forcing a crisis that is challenging this—in my view—deeply flawed paradigm that represents the lived experience of contemporary Catholicism. As truly painful as it is to be separated from the sacraments, the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how we “do church.”  God is giving us an opportunity to rediscover an idea that has been hidden in plain sight since the early Church (see The Book of Acts) and definitely since Vatican II. Namely; it’s the Catholic home—not the parish, the parish school, or diocesan chancery—that is meant to be the crucible of intentional discipleship and primary outpost of evangelization and positive social change. Everything a diocese or parish does should be ordered to the development of the domestic church, which is the “building block of civilization” and “school of love and virtue.”  Although motivated by good intentions, the institutional Church currently suffers by trying to bear burdens it was never meant to carry—burdens that are the rightful purview of the domestic church.
Whatever else God might be doing through this crisis, I believe he is challenging his Church to adhere more faithfully to its own vision for how we are meant to function as his family on earth.
AngelusNews: You’ve written about the parallels between the liturgy of the Eucharist and the liturgy of the domestic church. As you know, most families are now unable to attend Mass in person. What are the challenges of living the domestic church liturgy without the Eucharist?
Dr. Popcak: You can’t have a domestic church or a Liturgy of Domestic Church Life without the Eucharist.  The Eucharist is the summit and source of our faith.  It’s what facilitates communion with God and makes authentic communion with others possible.
Although the church has not defined the term “domestic church,” my working definition is “a household of persons, united to God and each other through the sacramental life of the Church, and committed to living out Christ’s love in their homes and in the world.”
The Eucharist is both central to this vision and the fuel for this vision.  As one Eastern-Rite Bishop who heard me present this model said, in his mind, The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life represents the mystical vehicle that allows the grace of the Eucharist to be communicated to all the world through the living Body of Christ.
That said, there have been times in the history of the Church were people were discouraged from receiving the Eucharist more than once-a-year or even once-in-a-lifetime. I’m not saying that was necessarily good, but I am saying that grace received through the Eucharist does not have an expiration date. Receiving the Precious Body and Blood of Christ, even once, facilitates a personal encounter with Christ that has the power to change everything—especially our home life—forever. A domestic church aspires to be the embodiment of the Eucharistic vision of love.
AngelusNews: You’ve written about different ways for families to live the liturgy of the domestic church — through the “rites” of relationships, rituals, and reaching out. Could you offer a few practical tips on how quarantined families can live these rites?
“Rites” represent the building blocks of liturgy. As we envision it, the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life has three rites, each of which corresponds to three-fold mission we receive in baptism to be priests, prophets and royals.
The Rite of Christian Relationship equips families to grow in the priestly mission of baptism.  By living out Christ’s sacrificial love in the home, Christian families learn to overcome the selfish and sinful ways we naturally tend to treat each other.  Practices that make this possible include things like…
-1) facilitating what psychologists call, “secure attachment”  by responding promptly, generously, consistently, and cheerfully to each other’s needs.
-2) demonstrating generous affection that represents the incarnate love of Christ,
-3) practicing what we call “discipleship discipline” a model of childrearing founded on the “Preventive System” of discipline developed by St John Bosco. This method sees discipline as a two way street that not only sees to the character formation of the child, but leads to fosters spiritual growth and holiness for the parent.  My book, Parenting With Grace discusses this in depth.
The Rite of Family Rituals offers families the means to exercise the prophetic mission of baptism.  A prophet is meant to call people—in word and action—to live authentic Christian lives.  By developing strong family rituals for working, playing, talking, and praying together (four categories that cover almost every type of human activity) Christian families model how to have a godly relationships with work, leisure, intimacy, and faith.
The Rite of Reaching Out represents the royal mission of baptism. To serve with Christ is to reign with him!  God wants to use our families to change the world. Christian families celebrate this rite by cheerfully serving each other in the home, by thinking of others while being a family (by practicing generous hospitality and doing things like passing on gently used clothes, toys, etc to others in need, and making extra meals for struggling neighbors), and by serving together in their parish and community (as opposed to letting service be one more “activity” that tears them apart).
AngelusNews: What is your hope for the domestic church going forward from this time of difficulty? What do you hope Catholic families will learn or gain from it?
I hope this crisis will force us to reckon with the fact that the domestic church IS church.  It isn’t meant to be a patronizing term the Church uses to say to families, “Why yes, dear! Of course you matter too.
My goal is two-fold. First, I would like to challenge families to realize that their homes are meant to be spiritual powerhouses; lighthouses ablaze with the sacrificial love of Christ that serve as a beacon that calls the world into relationship with their Father.
Secondly, I would like to challenge the institutional Church to stop thinking—incorrectly—that “family ministry” is only about doing marriage prep or ministering to hurting families. It is certainly about that, but  “family ministry,” in the fullest sense of the term, is meant to refer to the process by which we equip Christian families to do the heavy-lifting of forming intentional disciples, and serving as the primary outposts of evangelization and positive social change in the world.
TO LEARN MORE: Please join our Facebook Discussion Group, CatholicHOM (Households on Mission)—Family Discipleship or visit CatholicCounselors.com
Dr. Greg Popcak is the Executive Director of CatholicCounselors.com, the author of over 20 books, the co-host of More2Life (airing M-F at 10amE on EWTN/SiriusXM130) and the Consulting Director of the Peyton Institute for Domestic Church Life an outreach of Holy Cross Family Ministries.

“It’s Just Easier to Do It Myself” (And Other Lies Satan is Using to Undermine Your Domestic Church)

The following article is part of our ongoing series on the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.  To learn more, join our Facebook discussion group:  CatholicHŌM (Households on Mission)–Family Discipleship.

One of the most important ways families celebrate the Rite of Christian Relationships in the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life is by “responding promptly, generously, consistently, and cheerfully” to each other’s needs. That said, a recent poll of Catholic HŌM members found that this was one the most difficult practices in the Rite of Christian Relationships (which also includes “extravagant” affection, and “Discipleship Discipline”).

In the follow-up discussion, the most popular reason members gave for struggling with “meeting each other’s needs promptly, generously, consistently, and cheerfully was, “it’s easier to do everything myself than to ask for help.”   Not surprisingly, the second most common concerned expressed was, “feeling overwhelmed.”

The Rite Way to Work

The  Liturgy of Christian Relationships is intended to challenge the selfish and sinful ways families to treat each other and, instead, learn to care for each other with the love that comes from God’s heart. A big part of this relates to the way families must work together and learn to function as a team.  Not surprisingly, the secular world and Christians have very different attitudes toward work–especially the work involved in maintaining your domestic church.

Generally speaking, the following attitudes reflect a more worldly vision of  work.

–Work is just about “getting stuff done.” The best way to draw “meaning” from work…is to finish it.

–Because work is just about “getting stuff done,” the most efficient way to get something done is always the best way.

–You get a gold star (i.e., approval, certain rights and privileges) for getting stuff done yourself (even if it makes you grumpy and resentful).

–“Running away from everyone and everything” is the just reward we earn for “doing everything ourselves” (especially if that makes us grumpy and resentful).

 

Contrast this with a Christian attitude toward work.  (see Catechism 2427 and following)

–Work is a way to praise God for the blessings we’ve been given and to say, “I love you” to the people God entrusts to our care. Cultivating these attitudes makes household work a “little way of holiness” by enabling us to do small things with great love.

–Even if it is less efficient, the “best way” to get things done is to work side-by-side, caring for each other.  The “stuff we have to do” is, in a sense, just an excuse to get people who love each other in the same room together so they can strengthen on their relationships and build community. Viewing work this way is how Christian families “choose the better part” (Lk 10:42).

–“It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2:18).  We aren’t meant to work alone.  In general, the more we work alone the more resentful we become. Working side-by-side–especially with the people who love us– builds intimacy and “mutual self-giving” (see Theology of the Body). It also creates a discipleship relationship with our kids. Having our kids work alongside us teaches them that doing work and chores promptly, generously, consistently, and cheerfully is one of the most important ways we can say, “I love you.”  Love isn’t just words.  It’s working for the good of the people you love.

–The reward for doing work in a rightly-ordered way is the permission to pace yourself so you don’t burn-out, and the opportunity to create closer, more loving relationships with the people you’re working side-by-side with. Working in a rightly-ordered way actually makes us want to spend more time with the people we love.  Doing everything by ourselves makes us feel like we have to run away from the people we love to save ourselves from being sucked dry.

When we consciously reject the lie that it’s “just easier to do things ourselves” we…

  1. use household chores to create a close, loving, supportive family team
  2. help our kids develop more loving, communal, humane, Christian attitudes toward work.
  3. remind ourselves to  praise God for all the blessings we have been given and to feel grateful for those blessings.
  4. cultivate the peace, joy and gratitude that comes from being part of a group of people that work hard to look out for each other all day long.

Action Item:

It takes a pretty big mental shift to move away from the more worldly “it’s easier to do everything myself so I can just get stuff done and reward myself by running away” mindset and embrace the more Christian, “I want to look for ways I can work side-by-side with the people I love so we can take better care of each other, build a stronger sense of team, and feel more grateful to God for the blessings we’ve been given.”

You can start today by creating some simple “family work-together rituals” that allow you to…well, work together.  Choose one of the jobs around the house that tends to make you feel burned out/bored.  Ask yourself, “How could we do this job together as a family in a way that feels like we’re saying ‘I love you’ while we do it?”  In other words, if you didn’t just focus on “just getting things done” but rather “using the work that has to be done as an opportunity to build relationships” how would you approach the job differently?

Then, sit down with your kids and spouse.  Talk about wanting to change the way you approach work in your family.  Explain how “working well together” is an important way families say, “I love you.”  Elicit ideas from the family about the jobs you’d like to do together and how to do them in a way that would make you all feel taken care of.

Just having these conversations can create an important change in your family dynamic.  Use these conversations to create Family Work Rituals that help you cultivate a Christian attitude toward household chores.

Let the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life free you from the tyranny of having to do everything yourself and feeling so alone while you do it. Let the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life help you heal the selfish and sinful ways your family relates around work and chores and empower you to create a stronger, more loving team.

“I’m Just Not Affectionate” A Wound God Wants To Heal

The following article is part of our ongoing series on the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life.  To learn more, join our Facebook discussion group:  CatholicHŌM (Households on Mission)–Family Discipleship.
“Extravagant affection” is one of the recommended practices in the Rite of Christian Relationships, the first of three rites that makes up the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life. The practice of “extravagant affection” in the Rite of Christian Relationship isn’t just something that’s good to do for your kids. It’s a way to reclaim the natural inheritance of love that sin tries to steal from us.

Created for Love
The fact is, we were all created to be affectionate and enjoy receiving affection. Biologically speaking, affection is an even more basic need than the need for food. It isn’t that some of us are born with a greater or lesser need for affection. We all need it. The absence of affection tends to trigger our inflammatory response (causing aches and pains and diseases related to inflammation) and causes problems with our immune response (making us both more susceptible to infection and more reactive to normally harmless input–i.e., food sensitivities and allergies. Note. I am not saying these disorders are caused by a lack of affection. I am saying that the lack of affection stresses the systems of our body that normally protect us from these problems making us more susceptible to them). In the extreme, people can die from a lack of affection. Babies, in particular, are susceptible to the condition known as “Failure to Thrive” which is the refusal of even food for want of affection.
 
Theologically speaking, in Heaven, we will spend eternity dwelling in God’s loving embrace. We are literally destined to spend eternity being held in God’s arms. Sin (not necessarily personal sin, but certainly cultural, familial, and institutional sin) wants to take the joy of this reality away from us.
 
The theology of the body reminds us that biology is theology. We can understand God’s plan for creating abundant lives and relationships by reflecting on how he designed out bodies to function. Because we know–biologically speaking–that we need affection to thrive on every level, we can say that recovering the ability to be affectionate is something that God wants facilitate in his children. As physical beings, we need affection to feel his love through the bodies he gave us and that are an intimate part of us.
 
In short, we should never make the mistake of thinking that being unaffectionate is just the way we are. In fact, it represents the way we were hurt. We were born–as all babies are–to revel in affection. Under normal circumstances, the enjoyment of affection is a lifelong, universal, human pleasure. If we don’t enjoy affection as adults, it means someone took that joy away from us along the way. They may have done so by hurting us, or neglecting us, or shaming us, or lying to us, or abandoning us, or letting us down. But they took it away nevertheless. God wants to give us back this inheritance. Through the Rite of Christian Relationship, the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life seeks to heal this wound (what psychologists call an “attachment wound”) so that we can fully experience and share in human and divine love–in this life and the next.
Facilitating Healing
 So how to do we heal the attachment wound that makes it hard to fully enjoy giving and receiving affection?  One step at a time.  Here are a few suggestions to get started.

1.Realize this is a Physical Process--The reason affection feels uncomfortable for some people is that their social brain is literally overloaded by it.  Like an extension cord running too much power through a thin gauge electrical wire, if the desire for affection is not fed in our families-of-origin, the neurons that make up the social brain get shorted out by “too much” affection. The good news?  Just like exercise can grow new blood vessels and muscle tissue, actively working to become more affectionate can “beef up” the neural connections in the social brain, enabling you to process more affectionate input and find it pleasurable rather than painful (or at least uncomfortable).  That said, like exercise, you can only do so much at one go before you wear out.  But like exercise, if you keep it up, the more your body becomes accommodated to it and more you will benefit from it.  Be patient with yourself but keep it up.  It takes time and effort to grow new neural connections in your social brain but it will happen with consistent effort.

2.Start with your Baseline--Identify how much affection comes naturally to you.  Make a point of doing at least that much PLUS a little more every day. Do you normally hug for a second?  Hold the hug for 3.  Do you normally give 1 or two hugs a day?  Give 3 or 4. Build from there. A little more every day. Be patient with yourself.  You are working to make physical changes in your social brain.  Like any other exercise designed to create bodily change you have to start with where you’re at, and then just do a little bit more every day until it comes more naturally to you.  Then repeat.
3. Remember Why–Unaffectionate people literally don’t know what they’re missing. They will tell themselves that they feel perfectly happy not being affectionate. They really don’t understand what the big deal is.  At best, they mostly try to force themselves to be more affectionate for the benefit of others or because someone told them they have to try.  This just breeds resentment.  If you find yourself in this place, it’s important that you remind yourself that you are not doing this for anyone else–even when it feels like you are.  Remind yourself that God wants to give you a new and wonderful gift so that you can be happier and healthier and help the people around you be healthier and happier too.  Challenge the tendency to give in to self-talk that breeds resentment and undermines your efforts to heal the damage that the Enemy wants to do to you and your relationships by preventing you from feeling God’s love in your body and communicating that love to others through your body.
4. Don’t Go It Alone–Openly share your struggle to be more affectionate with someone you love and trust.  Ask them to gently help you to stay on course.  If you need more support than this, seek professional help from a counselor trained in attachment theory.  By doing the hard work necessary to stimulate the growth of the affection network in your social brain, you can develop what psychologists call “earned secure attachment.” Get the help and support you need to experience both God and other’s love for you fully and share that love with others in kind.
Dr. Greg Popcak is the director of CatholicCounselors.com a Catholic Tele-Counseling practice that provides faith-filled solutions to tough marriage, family and personal problems.