In the past year, I’ve endeavoured to dig a little deeper into the ethos of our family culture. With my “mom brain” slowly lifting out of the sleep-deprived fog of the diaper years, and entering into a new season of school-aged youngsters, I am challenged more than ever to usher in this era of life with intentionality and focus.
I started with going through Tsh Oxenreider’s Rule of Life workshop, inspired by St. Benedict’s efforts to notate his monastic community’s daily habits to cultivate virtue. Through this exercise, I was able to write down a Rule of Life for my own family, a tool that my husband and I can often return to and reference as we make decisions – big and small – for our family.
I examined five areas in our family life: Worship, Work, Study, Hospitality and Renewal. I wrote down statements and identified habits that our family can commit to in order to cultivate virtue in those particular areas. My husband and I also discussed and identified a few family core values to use as a guiding post as we shape our family’s worldview.
Having a Rule of Life for our family allows us the freedom to shape our core values and guide the process of knowing where and how to invest our time, our attention, and our finances. We want to cultivate Christ-centered virtue and integrity right into the roots of our identity so that our kids can be influenced by the right things, and not discipled by popular culture. We want to be resilient in this always-changing world, and having a family Rule helps us feel anchored whenever life gets overwhelming.
I won’t do a deep dive into the entirety of our Rule of Life; instead, I have highlighted 3 areas in our family’s Rule as well as some of the practical ways that we live them out in our daily life.
Worship
We are an ecumenical household and we are committed to leading each other to Jesus and His Church. We encourage each member in their own unique expression of faith practices and devotions.
Because we are an ecumenical household (I am a practicing Catholic while my husband is a member of a local evangelical church), we are often faced with faith-related decisions for our family. For example, we have chosen to send our kids to a Christian school where they can gain foundational knowledge of the Christian faith. Additionally, we have also committed to a weeknight Catechism class at our parish to learn about the Catholic Church and prepare to receive the Sacraments. My husband and I also take turns with bedtime routines so that we can attend our own men’s and women’s groups (respectively) once a week. Because these are permanently blocked off in our calendars, we almost never accept any invitations during these evenings, including speaking engagements for church ministries. It certainly makes for a full evening and weekend calendar!
Sometimes we feel the tension of our kids being pulled into too many church services (like during the Eastertide, for example!). In cases like these, I can choose to attend the Easter Vigil with the older kids and then the whole family attends the evangelical Easter service in the late morning the day after.
Being dedicated to an ecumenical expression of faith in our household means that we intentionally prioritize our commitments to help foster each person’s spiritual growth.
Hospitality
We prioritize space and time for our community, family, and friends. We acknowledge that our home is a gift and can be a blessing to others. We care for the homeless and find ways to alleviate their suffering.
We have the tremendous privilege of living next door to some of our best friends, so our children are often in each other’s company, shuffling to and from each home. In the past two years, we’ve co-hosted an annual New Year’s Eve sleepover with our community, transforming our living spaces as make-shift forts and beds for dozens of people. This doesn’t always come easy, especially for an introvert like me! However, reorienting my heart towards our core values of community and charity help me to see situations as a gift rather than an inconvenience.
Additionally, because we do not live in the same city as most of our family members, we also try to be more intentional about how we cultivate our long-distance relationships, knowing that hospitality can extend past just the physical spaces that we inhabit. Often, this means relying on technology to bridge the gaps: weekly international FaceTime phone calls and sending picture/video messages to aging (great) grandparents to bring them into the fold of our day-to-day lives. Lastly, we also realize that we can pursue a common good in our community by having gift cards to restaurants/grocery stores and preparing bags of necessities always ready in our vehicle so that we can hand them out to homeless people that we come across.
Renewal
We renew our spirits through cultivating a sense of creativity, wonder, and awe in our home. We create playful and imaginative environments where we can seek, create, and experience beauty. We prioritize adventures both big and small.
We care for our bodies and our minds through engaging in activities that rejuvenate us. This often feels counter-cultural because of the societal norm to glorify busyness and productivity. As a mom, I also tend to feel guilty for indulging in some of my hobbies, thinking that my time is better spent cleaning or tending to our home. However, having a Rule of Life committed to renewal affords me the freedom to acknowledge that I can serve my family better when I feel rested and restored.
Practically speaking, “renewal” takes the form of creative endeavours in our home. We prioritize books, art supplies and open-ended creative toys, and orient our space so that it is conducive to enjoying these forms of leisure. For example, our living room is the most used space in our home; consequently, books as well as crafting/journaling supplies are kept there within reach. We dedicate most of our Friday evenings for our family pizza and movie night.
We also prioritize adventures - whether it takes the form of a weeknight jaunt to our favourite local ice cream place, or a multi-city adventure through Europe or Asia. Instead of investing in sports, camping, or musical equipment, we opt to allocate a decent portion of our time and finances to go on yearly adventure trips. We acknowledge that extra-curricular activities bring value to our family life as well, so instead of being part of gyms and sports teams, we opt for more affordable short-term lessons through our local Recreation Centres.
These three areas of Worship, Hospitality, and Renewal are just a few examples of how we orient our lives towards cultivating our family culture. We are still learning how to adapt and adjust, knowing that seasons of life change. Our Rule of Life is not meant to be a static document; we hope to revisit it at least once or twice a year and make revisions as necessary depending on our current realities and where God is leading us. We also do not always get it right – but having our Rule written down allows us to look back and reflect on different areas of our lives so that we can become better disciples – individually and as a whole family.