Forge on!

We know that family prayer is essential to the domestic church.  We pray at mealtimes, at bedtime, before school and in moments of need.  One thing we have not mastered in the seven years since we embraced the True Faith is the rosary.

Who hasn't heard of the tremendous graces that come to a family that prays the rosary?  Who doesn't become a little wistful at the thought of those patient, devoted families who pray a rosary every day together?  Imagine that . . .

My domestic church, you see, is peppered with rambunctious, loud, busy people.  Actually, there is nothing but pepper:  we have one kind of people in this family.  Sitting down to anything for longer than a few minutes just doesn't seem possible, unless it involves some kind of media.  That was the tipoff:  if we can sit together for MarioKart, a movie or some TV, we could do it on other occasions, too.

At the beginning of Lent, I knew that we were being called to more structured prayer time together.  I knew that we needed to gather, to pray and to be still with one another, so we've been taking baby steps.  A decade of the Divine Mercy chaplet on every night except Saturday night.  That would be our rosary night.

That makes two family rosaries that we have prayed so far.  Everyone has his own beads (though there are fights, of course) and we've been fumbling through the Apostles' Creed and the Invocation together.  But when my little Beatle leads us in a decade, fudging the words just a wee bit, it melts my heart.  I can physically feel all the graces we've been promised soaking right in.  It is miraculous:  instead of being the occasion for frustration, irritation and distraction that we were certain it would be, it has brought us closer together.

The thing about Lent is that it calls us to constant conversion--away from our selfish desires for autonomy and independence, and towards our true selves.  Its disciplines and devotions highlight our weaknesses and false assumptions, and if we're honest, causes us to look straight on at the roadblocks we throw up to coming closer to our Lord.

We are the silliest creatures, indeed.  I should know by now that where my power and will end, there his begin if I allow it.

This is not to say that I still don't dread our rosary together yet.  I just know that they'll be little animals, that I'll be impatient, and that the whole thing is a waste--doomed from the start.  But whose words are those?  Where do those doubts come from?  Never from above, from him who encourages us in all things.  This Lent I feel called to push away those temptations and doubts, and in spite of myself, to bring us all a little closer to where we should be.  My efforts imperfect, my will a little weak and wobbly, but onward and upward.

May God strengthen all of us and bless our feeble efforts!