Family Prayer

My wife and I were invited to a Family conference a few years ago as part of a panel discussion on conflict resolution in families. As the building block of society and the church, what happens within families is vitally important and perhaps that is why it’s always under attack. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions!” 

One of my grandmother’s catch phrases was ‘he played (H)amlet’ which she used to describe the annoyance and often over-reaction people have when they argue. Perhaps we can all relate and recall occasions when the top was left off the toothpaste (or the seat left up) and we recited a demented monologue from a Shakespearean tragedy in response.

Our contribution to the family conference discussion was more on prevention rather than cure though. For many years now, we have the practice of praying together each morning, before any fuse can be lit. As a discipline it has been transformative in our lives and it really does work; we offer the day to God, pray for mercy and forgiveness, for protection during the day, our work and activities, seek the intercession of the angels and saints, bless the house with Holy water regularly too.  This morning prayer together, has become more important than breakfast. If we don’t lay the day’s foundation in prayer, someone else will, in discord.

Family prayer is often neglected nowadays and family members can often have their day ruined even before they leave the house in the morning if they go into the day unprepared or unprotected. That has been our observation. The challenge we gave to the participants was ‘try it and see’.

The Power of Holy Water..a story from Spain (from the Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila)

From long experience I have learned that there is nothing like holy water to put devils to flight and prevent them from coming back again. They also flee from the Cross, but return; so holy water must have great virtue. For my own part, whenever I take it, my soul feels a particular and most notable consolation.

In fact, it is quite usual for me to be conscious of a refreshment which I cannot possibly describe, resembling an inward joy which comforts my whole soul. This is not fancy, or something, which has happened to me only once; it has happened again and again and I have observed it most attentively. It is let us say, as if someone very hot and thirsty were to drink from a jug of cold water: he would feel the refreshment throughout his body. I often reflect on the great importance of everything ordained by the Church and it makes me very happy to find that those words of the Church are so powerful that they impart their power to the water and make it so very different from water which has not been blessed.

One night, too, about this time, I thought the devils were stifling me; and when the nuns had sprinkled a great deal of holy water about I saw a huge crowd of them running away as quickly as though they were about to fling themselves down a steep place.

I will only describe something that happened to me one night of All Souls. I was in an oratory: I had said one nocturne and was repeating some very devotional prayers which follow it -- they are extremely devotional: we have them in our office-book -- when actually the devil himself alighted on the book, to prevent me from finishing the prayer. I made the sign of the Cross and he went away. I then began again and he came back. I think I began that prayer three times and not until I had sprinkled some holy water on him could I finish it. At the same moment I saw several souls coming out of purgatory: their time there must have been nearly up and I thought that perhaps the devil was trying to impede their deliverance.