A Home is a Place of Holiness:

I’ve been helping my 9-year-old explore the  theme of seeing the “home” as the expression of God’s divine love.

We have put a collage together of family photos and mementos that illustrate all the loving and life-giving relationships helping to form them in to a young disciple of Christ. It struck me that when we walk into a Catholic church or Eastern Orthodox church we see the beautiful images, statues, icons etc. of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph and a whole plethora of countless Saints and angels.

From time to time, a Saint stands out for us and to whom we feel deeply drawn in our personal sentiments and they become for us a ‘patron’ – a friend- in the heavenly realm.

Creating Our Own Holy Images:

Family photo albums are like the amalgam of statues, icons and sacred images adorning our churches and places of worship. Think of all those deceased and living family members we have so deeply loved and been loved by in the past and those for whom we have immeasurable love for in the present. And those we see every day and those perhaps only from time to time whom we couldn’t imagine life without.

All of them [like the saints in heaven] have in some small way brought God’s love in to our lives and hopefully we have reflected it back to them to. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Thessalonians; “The life and death of each of us has its influence over others.” So when it comes to our influence over others in our family and relations and friends –like the saints- we have to simply try our best to be a positive and wholesome influence.

St. John Chrysostom’s Words:

“To each of you fathers and mothers I say, just as we see artists fashioning their paintings and statues with great precision, so we must care for these wondrous statues of ours. Painters, when they have set the canvas on the easel, paint on it day by day to accomplish their purpose. Sculptors, too, working in marble, proceed in a similar manner; they remove what is superfluous and add what is lacking. Even so you must proceed. Like the creators of statues, give all your leisure to fashioning these wondrous statues for God.”