Month: October 2019

All Saints’ or Reformation Day?

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Thank you to Anna-Kathryn Kline for this reflection on All Saints’ Day. Anna-Kathryn is a military spouse who uses the liturgical year to provide stability and familiarity to her home. She is the privileged stay-at-home mother of three little girls and spends her days rediscovering her childhood by coming alongside her girls in the pursuit of wonder. This is the first year my family will be celebrating All Saints’ Day and I’m really excited about it. And, quite frankly, I’m excited to be excited. For the past few years, October 31st (Reformation Day) and November 1st (All Saints’) have been strange days for me full of new feelings. Our new catholic (lower case) beliefs have given us a strong desire to see the unity of the Church and grief over the lack of brotherly love and unity we see before us: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.” 1 Cor. 12:12 “Forbearing one another, and …

If You’re Looking for All Saints’ Ideas….

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All Saints’ Day is coming up on November 1st! I thought it would be helpful to put together a quick post with the resources that we have for the day. Preparing for All Saints’ Last year, I wanted to prepare a little more for All Saints’ — make a bigger deal of explaining why we celebrate this day. So, I wrote a series of daily thoughts to read to my kids in the week beforehand. Here are the topics for each day: What is a saint? (on holiness and wholeness) Lots of Different Saints (on the variety among God’s saints) How to Be a Saint (on The Communion of the Saints and the Beatitudes) Welcoming the Saints (on the question, why do so many saints die for Jesus?) Death and the Saints (on why sometimes it’s not easy to want to be a saint) Dealing with Scary Things and Halloween (self-explanatory) Today is the Day! (on doing small things with great love) If you’re interested, you can download “Welcoming the Saints” here.   Here is …

Some Lovely Books for St. Francis’s Feast Day

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St. Francis of Assisi’s feast day is October 4th — tomorrow! Here on the Homely Hours, we have a post with the story of St. Francis that we use in our Godly Play program at church. At the bottom of that post are some book recommendations and I wanted to take a moment to share one more with you. Saint Francis and the Animals: A Mother Bird’s Story  I was grateful to receive from Paraclete Press the lovely children’s book Saint Francis and the Animals: A Mother Bird’s Story by Phil Gallery, illustrated by Sibyl MacKenzie. I had seen it online and thought that the illustrations were stunning, so I was excited to have the opportunity to review it. Creative Framing of the Story Gallery shares the story of St. Francis through the eyes of the birds. Apparently, for the birds living around Assisi, the rite of passage from nest to flight means the passing down of the story of St. Francis. I thought this was a fun and creative way to frame the story. Each young bird (Benjamin …