I know I’ve written about liturgical homesteading before, but I’d like to take the time to give the idea of liturgical living a more complete treatment. I suspect this subject is often misunderstood. I know that I misunderstood the term for a few years before I really began to grasp what it means.

When I first came across this idea, I thought it was basically about the saints and about what crafts we make and what recipes we cook. True, these things can be a part of liturgical living, but they really miss the mark of what this is all about. Liturgical living is not a checklist of saints’ days, meals, or crafts. It’s supposed to be faith lived, active and vibrant, and eventually, with time, a natural part of our lives. In some ways, living liturgically is to be culturally Catholic. In other words, our Catholic faith defines how we think and live and act. It determines when we go to Mass, how we pray and what we pray, when we fast or feast, or how often we make it to the sacrament of reconciliation, among other things.

As I mentioned in the post on liturgical homesteading, I asked the Abbot of the local monastery if he could define the term “liturgy” for me. I said that I knew it wasn’t just about saints’ days or the Mass or the “work of the people” (which is what it’s Latin root means). I was missing something, but I didn’t know what. His replay was exactly the piece that I was missing. “Liturgy is how we sanctify time.” In other words, liturgy makes time holy. Liturgical living is a way in which we live that helps us to sanctify all we do.

Abbot’s recommendation when I asked how I might live more liturgically was that I pray the Liturgy of the Hours or even the Angelus. But if we really want to dig deeper, it’s important that we consider how we spend our time. Catholics in America really struggle with this one. In many historically Catholic countries, there is a rich tradition of cultural Catholicism. In some countries, essentially everybody makes an Easter Basket to bring to Mass on Easter morning, filled with their Easter breakfast, to be blessed by the priest. Each of the items it contains bears a special meaning:

• eggs – symbolize life and Christ’s resurrection
• bread – symbolises Jesus
• ham or sausage – symbol of great joy and abundance
• salt – represents purification
• horseradish – symbolic of the bitter sacrifice of Christ
• white lamb figure (often made of butter) – represents Christ

Today, Easter baskets in America are filled with candy and gifts, though there are plenty of Christians who are trying to put Christ back in Easter: empty plastic eggs that symbolize the resurrection, or that are filled with little symbols of Christ’s death and resurrection, chocolate crosses or fish or lambs, storybooks about the meaning of Easter, etc.

Sadly, today, many of the holy days that we celebrate have become secularized to the point that many people no longer understand that these began as Christian holidays. Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Ss. Valentine’s, Patrick’s, and Nicholas’s feast days have largely been coopted in favor of secular practices. And many of our other Catholic customs have slowly dissipated, such as the blessing of crosses to put in fields (on May 3rd). These customs have been lost for a few reasons, one being that because we’ve become a far less agrarian society today, there was no longer such a wide-spread use for certain traditions, but the other reasons are really important to understand

For Catholics that immigrated to the United States, they faced three major problems. The first was that early in the nation’s history, Catholics faced some very severe persecution at the hands of non-Catholics. In the original 13 colonies on the East coast, Catholicism was illegal in all but 2 of the colonies (Maryland and Rhode Island, I believe). Parents could have their children taken away and be arrested for teaching their children the tenants of the Catholic faith. In certain areas of the south, Catholics were harassed, and the harassment continued as settlers moved out west. The Salvatorians who went to minister out in what would become Washington state could not wear their religious attire in public because they may be stoned or otherwise attacked. So for many people, Catholicism had to be practiced in secret. (To learn more about this, you can read Pioneer Priests and the Making of America, American Catholicism, and the history of the Salvatorians in America.) Growing up in an area where several of the villages began essentially (or intentionally) as Catholic settlements, I never understood how controversial Catholicism can be. Everyone was essentially Catholic or Lutheran, and for the most part, got along without negativity.

The second problem they faced was that as people immigrated, they tended to settle along lines of nationality. The Irish stayed with the Irish, the Germans stayed with the Germans, and so on and so forth. The divide was so extreme that priests and bishops could not get the people to mix, even though they were all Catholic (universal), and so they had to find ways to unify the communities. In the process of joining these communities together, unfortunately, some of the culturally Catholic traditions that they held were lost, and nothing filled the void.

The third problem some faced is that they moved to areas of isolation, particularly as people settled out West. People largely settled the west as individuals, and not as whole communities. Oftentimes, there were no Catholic churches for these families to join, and so one of three things happened: they stopped practicing their faith at all, because they lacked support, they joined whatever churches popped up in the area, because a Christian church was better than no church at all, or they had to wait for Chapel cars or traveling priests to come to their area, which could leave them without spiritual guidance or nourishment for months or even years at a time. Without community, without priests, many of the traditions they would have liked to carry with them eventually faded away.

Further exacerbating these issues, the changes after Vatican II (often unjustly and not according to actual recommended changes) even more customs were lost. Corpus Christi processions ceased, and people slowly stopped praying the Way of the Cross (stations). These things, whatever customs were held as ways in which everyday life was sanctified, were lost. Traditions that served as a wonderful form of catechesis from generation to generation were gone in the blink of an eye.

As people have been coming back to the life of the Catholic Church, they are seeking for ways to incorporate their faith, and so the idea of liturgical living really begins to take root. Many of the people exploring this concept are starting from scratch, no idea where they are going, only feeling a prompting from God to move in this direction. The resources they find are often in cookbooks and websites that have cute saint coloring pages and fun party ideas, which are great places to start, but it leaves one with a misunderstanding of what the point of it all really is.

Though I love the resources that are out there, I’ve realized that they will only take me so far if I want to live liturgically in the long-run. My older children no longer want to sit and do coloring pages, and they don’t want to make fun cupcakes. They are willing, however, to take part in other traditions of the Church, especially as I learn and get excited about them myself. Liturgical living, at it’s core can be considered cultural Catholicism. When done well and by a larger community, it becomes a way of living for all. The beauty in it, either way, is a way in which we pass on our faith as a means of teaching generations to come, a way to teach our faith, and in the process, it helps us to sanctify our lives and the world around us.

The traditions I’ve been writing about on this blog are just a sampling out of the treasury of traditions that the Church has, and yet we can create our own traditions! Yet, these are only some of the aspects of liturgical living. Making time for Mass, every week and even during the week if possible, reconciliation as a regular feature of our faith life (not just once a year), carving out time to sit in church and pray in front of the tabernacle or to go to Adoration, joining or starting a Bible study, participating in faith-building activities at our parishes, praying the Liturgy of the Hours or the Angelus, Lectio Divina, observing the fasts, feasts, memorials, and solemnities of Mother Church, observing name or saints days and baptismal anniversaries for family members, all of these things and more are how we live liturgically.

Through this blog, though I may occasionally share a craft-type project or a particular recipe we enjoy, the bulk of what you will find on this page are prayers and traditions that you can implement on your homestead, as well as posts that share how my understanding of living liturgically is developing.

Have questions? Drop them in the comments!

In Christ,
Danielle