12 Ways to Live Holy Week in The Domestic Church

Holy Week.is Blessedly here – finally!

As usual, Lent has been full of hits and misses.  If you’re like me, perhaps you didn’t accomplish everything you wanted during this Lenten season. Maybe you didn’t purge your home of as many things, be as diligent in your prayers, rosaries, or stations of the cross.  This is not the time to give up. When we watch a track meet or cross-country race, the kid coming in dead last still gets applause from the crowd just for finishing! Those kids keep trudging forward to the end – and so should as we head into Holy Week.

Here are ideas to make good use of the time left.

1.  Keep abstaining from meat this Friday and especially next Friday- Good Friday.

2.  Consider fasting on those days as well. The tradition is fasting on Wednesday.

3.  Take down any and all unnecessary decorations from Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, or (gulp) Christmas. Replace them with seasonable printable artwork from Catholic Icing.com. Make your home, especially the table look stark.

4.  Good time to make sure pretty tablecloths are ready for Easter Sunday! They don’t have to be expensive, but you want a festive contrast between this week and Easter Sunday!

5.  Get Morning Prayers and the Office of Readings done in the morning before anyone else is up.

6.  Try to get to one or two daily masses. If not, for sure go to Holy Thursday and Good Friday services.

7.  Read anything by Father Lovasick or Fulton Sheen this week.

8.  Pray the  Stations of the Cross for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. 

9.  Pray a family rosary.

10.  Meditate on the words of  St. Alphonsus Liguori,:  I embrace all the sufferings You have destined for me until death.

11.  Make it to confession!

12.  Watch a Christian-oriented movie this week as a family.