Monday night, the LSU Tigers play in the National Championship Game. Those who know me know that I am an avid LSU fan. Those who do not know me, trust me when I tell you, “I bleed purple and gold.” There was no doubt that when Chris and I became parents that we would pass our love for the LSU Tigers onto our children. As infants, they were given gifts by our family and friends, also strong members of the LSU community, such as LSU sippy cups, pacifiers, blankets, and clothes. Chris and I have taught them our cheers, our pre-game rituals, and our traditions. Our children understand what purple and gold stands for. They see a tiger, and they say, “Geaux Tigers,” before even thinking of saying “roar.” They have experienced the community of Louisiana State University fans that occurs instantly when two LSU fans see each other. In essence, my children have been fully immersed in this way of being.

As parents, it is our responsibility to be the primary educators of our children’s faith also. This means that Chris and I are charged, as parents, to share our faith with our kids with the same passion that we share our love for LSU. Why does it feel easier sometimes to share our love of a team rather than to share our love of our faith? We, too, as Catholics have rituals and traditions. We, too, have a Catholic community that extends far beyond where we live and creates camaraderie between people instantly.

I think it feels easier sometimes because sharing my love of a team does not require sharing deep matters of my heart. With passing on the understanding of God to my children, I am asked to attempt to put words to something that matters deeply to me, an understanding that has evolved and deepened over time. It is hard for me to describe what I know within.

Thankfully, our Church captures the depth of our hearts in outward expressions of love and of grace. I realize I do not have to lean only on my words, but on the rituals, sacraments, and traditions that also express God, who ultimately transcends all words.

So while we will continue to expose our kids to all things LSU, we will remain focused on fully immersing our children in our faith, to expose them to our sacraments, to our rituals, and our traditions, and to introduce them to men and women living authentic, sacred lives. Our hope is that one day they will be as passionate about their faith as they are about their favorite team!

Kimberlee Conway Ireton writes about her family’s practice of praying the examen together:

Our nightly practice of the examen around our dinner table helps Doug and me to recognize the gifts in our lives and to be more aware of God’s presence with us. It also helps our kids reflect on their lives, to be grateful, and to notice what they like and don’t like, which helps them discover who they are.

The examen also creates a rich tradition for our family of listening and being heard, which is, I hope, helping all of us learn how to hear and speak not just to one another but to God as well.

She has also written some guidelines for others who want to try it.

In the motherhouse of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, Pittsford, NY (artist unknown)

This past Sunday was the feast of the Holy Family, and it calls to our imagination that “longest sermon” of Jesus first thirty years, as Cardinal Seán O’Malley called it.

I remember, as a teenager, wondering what Jesus was like as a teenager.  (What did he do with rushing hormones, for example?)  As a father, now, I find myself wondering what Joseph was like.   I sometimes find myself thinking about their ordinary life–Joseph heading off to work, Mary making bread, Jesus helping clean up or doing lessons.  What were weekends like?  Holidays?  Dinner time?  How did they pray together?  What was it like at the Temple?  How did Joseph show affection towards Mary, or vice versa?  Did Jesus ever do anything that really irritated his parents?  Did Mary ever feel overwhelmed?  Did Joseph ever second-guess marrying Mary?  Did Jesus ever wonder what he was going to be when he grew up?

I love the sculpture in the photo–it struck me as a very human portrayal of the family.  (I took the photo when I was there last month, during a delightful visit to Nazareth College.)  During this week, perhaps we might try a little Ignatian imaginative prayer, paying a new year’s visit to this young family and learning more about them.  What does their home smell like?  What do you see?  How do they greet you, and what do you talk about?

A meditation on the Holy Family might help us recall that theirs is not the only holy family.  Family life is vocational: it is a calling from God.  Every act, every decision within the life of the family, when done with great love, is a real symbol of Christ’s love.  During this holy season, let us recall our holy families and reach out to them with ever more generous love.  Let us too reach out to those without families, recalling the words of the mature Jesus who redrew the lines of family: “those who hear and do the will of God are my mother and my brothers” (Lk 8:21).  The love we learn and practice in families is ultimately the love that ought to govern our way of relating to all people.

Fat Man's Misery, Purgatory Chasm, Sutton MA

I took my girls to a place called Purgatory Chasm and had a metaphor experience.  Metaphor experiences are of course those things you do which, once they are accomplished, emerge as perfect metaphors for life.  And I tend to encounter them frequently because I look for them, and that, according to my wife, makes me unusual.

Entering the place I had visions of Dante running through my mind (purgatory and all that, though the place looks much more like the entrance to Dante’s inferno).  But I’ll cut to the chase: a place called Fat Man’s Misery–a cleft in a massive wall of granite which some people can slide through sideways.  So here’s the story: of course I wanted to do it, and so I lowered myself down into the cleft.  A man high above the rock indicated that there was another way down and out of the cleft, a way which was not visible from where I was standing.  I trusted him, and went further down and into the cleft, lowering myself again to another level before emerging out the distant side.

Now on one level this is not a bad metaphor for the spiritual life: we trust those that have gone before, those who tell us that the path may be difficult but that it gets us where we’re going.  Trusting people is part of the spiritual life, and a certain amount of courage is necessary.  So far, so good.

But here’s where it gets interesting: my two girls wanted to go through the cleft as well, and so now the trusting of the other had an altogether different import.  I was responsible not only for myself, but also for my girls.  I could not make a reckless decision which I as a younger man might have made just for fun.  When I emerged out the other side, I had to proceed up and out of the chasm in order to judge whether the way was safe for them; otherwise we would have had to retrace our steps through Fat Man’s Misery.

Here’s my point: faith takes on new dimensions of meaning when one acts upon it mindful of how it will affect those he loves.  (I think of someone like Thomas More, whose martyrdom left five children without a father.)  As I left the chasm, I considered how fatherhood has affected my own faith, and what is most clear is that it gives shape to the kind of decisions I make about how to be a disciple of Christ.  Whatever I do, I do as a husband and as a father, not as an individual.  And in my experience, those relationships add depth and meaning to faith.  At the end of the day, I can return to a basic question: how have I loved my wife and daughters?  (A good question to include in an examen.)  As I look back over seventeen years of marriage and ten years of parenting, I think that above all else, the vocation to family life is about beginning a pilgrimage of learning to love, and that pilgrimage constitutes the life of faith.  It is not always easy or fun; sometimes the way is difficult and unclear.  Sometimes I need people like the guy up above the rock to tell me what the path is like.  But always I am traveling with my family, and when I finally meet Jesus face to face he will ask me how we managed to stick together through it all.

It occurred to me just a few days ago that without thinking about it, my family and I were doing a group Examen at our dinner table.  I don’t know why it took me so long to recognize this fact, but now it’s obvious to me that one of the very important reasons families and friends should eat together is that it sets the perfect stage for reviewing one’s day in a thoughtful, and potentially prayerful, manner.  “How was your day?” — we ask this of each other, wanting to share in each other’s experiences, to deepen our sense of community.  When my girls were still very young, we started the practice we call “two things,” a simple exercise of sharing two reflections on our day, after beginning our meal with a shared prayer.

So it’s gotten me thinking: I wonder if other traditional spiritual practices might be ways that people pledged to lives of celibacy might substitute for practices embedded in family life.  In families, spiritual practices can be seen as ways that families come together after the centrifugal force of various activities.  If meals are opportunities for an Examen, perhaps it’s possible to see wakeup and bedtime routines as a kind of liturgy of the hours, a way of structuring the day around acts of love and attentiveness.  Laundry, cleaning, planning around work and school and sports and various lessons–perhaps all these can be seen as opportunities to reflect the basic Benedictine motto of ora et labora, pray and work.

For many, the paradigmatic expression of a lived Christian faith is monasticism.  To be sure, it was a foundational movement in the history of the Church, arising as it did from those women and men who went off to the desert to live radically in imitation of Christ as spiritual athletes.  But with the Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit and various women’s orders, there developed complementary models of living one’s faith in the world.  It was Ignatius’ right hand man Jeronimo Nadal who famously described the place where Jesuits worked, in contrast to monks: “the world is our house.”  For the early Jesuits (see John O’Malley’s fine book The First Jesuits for more on this), too much prayer in chapels or churches took time away from building God’s kingdom.  There’s even a letter from Ignatius himself dissuading some Portuguese novices from staying in choir too long.

I am a lay person.  What I see today is a new movement among many other lay people to develop yet another movement in the history of Christian spirituality, one that sees work in the so-called “secular” realm as itself an expression of a deep, sustained, lived faith in Christ.  I work among Jesuits; I visit monasteries for retreats; but I live at home, and that is the place where I live out my salvation in fear and trembling.  I do not think God calls me to live in the monastery, or in the community of Jesuits on mission, but rather in the home and in the world.  And to the extent that my living in those places is rooted in the sustained desire to serve Christ our Lord, it is (I think) no less a religious vocation, no less a spirituality, than that of the monk, friar, sister, or priest.  We are, after all, all members of the one Body of Christ, and we all break bread at the same dinner table.

There were two stone masons, each doing the same job.  The first, a melancholy man, was asked what he was doing.  “I lay stones,” he replied, looking sullen.  “Every day, stones and mortar.  No difference from one day to the next.  I lay stones, I get paid.”  His was a dreary life.

His colleague was asked the same question.  His eyes brightened as he carried the next stone and laid it upon the others he’d laid.  “I’m building a cathedral!” he exclaimed.

The difference between living a spirituality of family and going through the tedious motions of work and parenting is a vision of the big picture, the cathedral-building.  To the extent that I can see the cleaning up, the doing chores, the driving children around, the to-do lists, the time for family and in-laws, and so on, as the stones in a cathedral, it is easy to have a spirituality of family life.

The early Jesuits saw themselves as contemplatives in action.  (So did the early Franciscans and Dominicans, for that matter.)  Their work in the world was to “help souls.”  Parents and spouses are similarly invited to be contemplatives in action, rooting themselves ever deeper in the life of Christ so that they might bear fruit in the joys and struggles of family life.  Each family is a “domestic church,” a small example of a place where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name to manifest Christ’s presence.  We too can see our daily work as helping souls–those of our immediate and extended families, our schools and communities.

Christ gives each family member a unique mission: to be a saint building not only a cathedral, but a palace in which will unfold the kingdom of God.  And that mission will unfold one diaper at a time, one act of forgiveness at a time, one chore at a time, one stressful day of balancing work and family at a time.  No mission is easy; but the struggles that make its execution difficult are also what make the mission glorious.  And the glory is all God’s.  And the joy that emerges, sometimes only in retrospect, is all ours.

The Examen works for children too. Kimberlee Conway Ireton writes about her experience with it.  “The examen creates a rich tradition for our family of listening and being heard—which is helping all of us learn how to hear and speak not just to one another, but to God as well.” Go here for another look at families praying the Examen together.

It is possible to bring an Ignatian perspective to parenting. My wife Sue and I don’t claim to be the best at this all the time, but the basic thrust of it goes like this.

Taking the First Principle and Foundation (FPF) seriously means seeking to discover what kind of person God has created our daughters to be. I paraphrase the FPF this way: God creates us to render praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and everything on earth ought to help us achieve this primary end.

Parenting—especially the adoptive variety, which we’re in the midst of—is about helping our daughters in the process of self-discovery. (In a way, adoption makes this discovery easy; we have no preconceptions about our girls having the same interests as we have.) It’s about cultivating time and places for reflection, always asking God for insight into how to render praise.

Another way of thinking about parenting in an Ignatian vein is by seeing the formation of character as a process similar to Ignatian discernment. We want to encourage practices that help form them—practices like prayer and liturgy, reading and exercising, friendship-making and so on. Ignatius’ spirituality borrowed heavily from Thomas Aquinas, who borrowed heavily from Aristotle—who said that all actions aim at some fundamental good. For Ignatius, that good was expressed in the FPF. As parents, then, our job is about helping our daughters to both praise God in the everydayness of their lives, but also keep an eye open for the larger question of who God is inviting them to become through their gifts.

We can’t impose that vision upon them; too many parents, it seems to me, drive their kids to some vision of excellence they’ve decided is necessary in a market-driven world. They must be outstanding students; they must excel at some sport; they must have all sorts of activities which help build their applications to the best colleges, and so on.

For us, the different challenge is to find the ways that their personalities unfold, but not to drive them always to succeed. Rather, we provide them opportunities for self-discovery, and rejoice or lament with them at respective successes or failures. And through the whole process we (hopefully) take time to simply marvel at their beauty, which is (as for all of us) a reflection of the God who has created us in his image.

The fruit of the regular practice of the examen—or more broadly, the life of regular, cumulative, formative reflection—is living with greater attentiveness, greater readiness, even greater anticipation of God’s whispers.

I felt it this evening, running an errand with my older daughter Grace. We searched six stores for an item she needed for a science fair project—in the middle of rush hour!—when at one point it just occurred to me “I am really enjoying this.” Just she and I, spending time together—it was wonderful. She has a foot in childhood, and a footfall poised above tweenhood, and I was so delighted to be spending this moment appreciating her.

Love allows us to perceive mystery, the deep fountain of the beloved’s personhood. At that moment I was drinking the memories of our trip to China to adopt her, a ten month-old baby; I was recalling moments over our nine years together; I was looking forward to middle school, high school, college, married life. My fears for her, my great hopes—all there. And gone in a moment as we entered the car, re-entering ordinary time.

The unexamined life is not worth living—so said Plato; so, in essence, said Ignatius. It is easy to see why: you’d miss too much.

Blogger Cynthia Kirk proposes a way for families to use the Examen around the dinner table:

1. For what time or event today are you most grateful (thankful/happy)?
(Initially, you may have to name a few things in a young child’s day to help them catch on to the practice for #1 and #2.)

2. For which moment are you least grateful?

3. How did you show love today?
(For very young children, you may ask additional questions as your family begins this spiritual practice. Ex.: Who did you share with today? Who did you help today? It won’t be long before they understand the question and can reflect and respond without your assistance.)

4. What was one time your actions or behavior were negative or you withheld showing kindness?
(Again, for young children you might ask: Was there a time you did not share today? Was there a time you said a hurtful word or did not help?)

5. Briefly give thanks for this time of reflection and sharing and for God teaching each of you to be more loving.

Read the whole thing.