Marriage & Family Life: Habits of Faith

August 18, 2017

Fall is almost here, and for my family that means watching Sunday night football while eating homemade pizza, trips to the apple orchard and bike rides after work.

Largely thanks to my wife, Kara, my family has a certain rhythm to the year that helps us establish our identity as Storeys and tend to the important things first. It protects us from the consuming busyness that we’re all faced with, and it reminds us of what we want our family to be about. It’s predictable, but not rigid.

We certainly don’t live this out perfectly, but we do it intentionally, which always draws us back to our family. I’m willing to bet all of our families have these rhythms, these habits that help make us who we are. And just like these rhythms should exist in our family life, so too, they should be present in our faith life.

In fact, the Church invites us to these rhythms through our liturgical calendar, through devotional practices, and through the celebration of the Sabbath. Our rhythms aren’t meant to be rigid, but they’re meant to be ways in which we can intentionally shape our identity, and keep the first things first. Each person’s personal faith life will look different, and so too, each family should have different habits of faith, and yet we should all be deliberate about the ways that we live out our Catholic identity.

So this fall, I invite all our families to think a bit about what habits and traditions we can cultivate to make the faith more alive in our homes. These habits should always be freeing, not constricting. They should be adjustable. And they should help shape who we are. Developing these habits is always hard. If your family is like mine, it will involve a lot of failure and frustration.

Yet, just like Sunday night football, once the tradition is established you’ll find that it becomes easy to live, and each year you’ll look forward to it more and more!