All posts filed under: Home

A Cross, a Candle, and a Vase of Flowers

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Thanks to Layne Hilyer for this contribution to our previously paused, but now perhaps ongoing Meaningful Homes Series. If you happen to be inspired by this series (now that we’re all staying at home a bit more), consider writing a guest post and emailing thehomelyhours@gmail.com. I have a confession: virtual church services have left me with a hard heart. The calcification began the first week of the stay-at-home order as my wife and I prepared for worship by propping up a cellphone facing the couch like a little television. On screen was the inside of our parish from an angle I had not seen—I would never sit so close to the front—and there was our priest whose voice I heard microphoned for the first time ever as the acoustics in the small sanctuary make audio equipment unnecessary. These changes among others made me so uncomfortable and frustrated that I considered just waiting for the stay-at-home order to pass before “going” to church again. It seems to me that what is so unsatisfying about church via …

Prayer and a Place of Beauty

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Thanks to Anna-Kathryn Kline for this new submission in the vein of our Meaningful Home series.  When she emailed her post, I was delighted for several reasons: 1.) It’s always very fun to receive guest posts 2.) We here are all admirers and fans of Leila Lawler/Like Mother, Like Daughter and 3.) I’ve been meaning to finish a post on The Little Oratory for months. So, clearly, it’s a pleasure to publish this. If you are ever inspired to write something that you think would fit on the Homely Hours, please email thehomelyhours@gmail.com. One of the most appealing aspects for me as we have journeyed towards classical Christianity is the theology of the Incarnation. I grew up with a healthy respect for God’s transcendence, but leaning into His imminence has allowed me to tap into the spiritually thick atmosphere around me. So, you can imagine my excitement when I found a book called The Little Oratory: A Beginner’s Guide to Praying in the Home by Catholic bloggers Leila Lawler and David Clayton. In it, Lawler encourages families to …

A Window into Helen’s Home

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I’m excited to share with you this next submission to our Meaningful Home series. The series has been inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s advice “It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.” Our friend Helen Moineau is an Anglican missionary in Croatia with her husband and two young children. She writes from the perspective of moving over a dozen times in the last six years. You can find her on Instagram (@helen.wildrose). There’s a battered cardboard box sitting in my closet, where multiple times a year I seem to find myself either packing or unpacking its contents: pieces of our family’s simple prayer corner and home altar. Our family has been in overseas ministry for several years now, and between raising support, traveling, living in multiple countries, plans falling through, and just honest and simple failure at times, we’ve had the odd circumstance of having moved over a dozen times in the past six …

The Sullivan Home and the Moral Imagination

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We’re delighted to share with you a new addition to our Meaningful Home Series — a reflection and blessing for a house from our poet friend Helena Nellie Sullivan. Nellie is a former English and poetry teacher who lives in Carson City, Michigan with her husband and two children (they actually live in a funeral home, where her husband works). She begins by interacting with this quote from G.K. Chesterton, the inspiration for this series: “It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.” I depart from Chesterton on this slightly, in that I do not believe that our own imagination should guide so much as a moral imagination *—an imagination beholden to creeds. To keep a home, then, that fosters moral imagination means that the homemaker will uphold certain “enduring standards”** (as Russell Kirk puts it) in a variety of ways. For us, this means that we hang richly symbolic pictures …

A Window Into Meghan’s Home

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This post is part of our series on making meaningful homes, following G.K. Chesterton’s advice: “It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”  If you’d like to contribute, email thehomelyhours@gmail.com with your guest post! Thanks to Meghan Tarsitano for her contribution and be on the lookout for more “windows into meaningful homes” as we continue this series.  Isn’t it marvelous when things material and temporal point toward truths eternal and unchanging?  Even in small ways, it is better than it simply being a “thing.”  A chair has a purpose; a table has a purpose;  decorative items are best when they have a purpose too.  Certainly, beauty is a purpose in this context, and beauty itself can point toward our Creator.  This is partly why in addition to our more explicitly religious decorations, we frequently have fresh flowers.  God designed those flowers; He called them good; He delighted in his creation, and He wants …

A Window into Amy’s Home

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This post is part of our new series on making meaningful homes, following G.K. Chesterton’s advice: “It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”  If you’d like to contribute, email thehomelyhours@gmail.com with your guest post! Thanks to Amy Rogers Hays for her contribution and be on the lookout for more “windows into meaningful homes” as we continue this series.  Above our kitchen table on a 45 inch Mosslanda Ikea picture ledge sits our version of a little oratory. We have very small children (3 and 11 months) and a very small house (728 sq. ft). Our kitchen table, a handmade counter height butcher block table, is both kitchen prep space and our only eating space in our 9 x 12 kitchen. We have icons scattered across the house, in a cube in our 25 square Ikea Kallax bookcase in our living room, in bedrooms, and above desks in the basement. But …

A Candlemas Gift from Hearthstone Fables

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Kristin Haakenson is the artist behind Hearthstone Fables. I truly gasped when I opened Kristin’s email with these Candlemas images. What a gift! When I think of Hearthstone Fables, I think of St. Francis of Assisi. In his Canticle of the Sun, he saw all creation as family —  “Brother Sun,” Sister Moon,” Brother Wind…” The legends say that he preached sermons to birds and befriended wolves. In this way, Kristin’s art at Hearthstone Fables seems very Franciscan to me. And, with these beautiful Candlemas gifts, I think we can look to “Sister Swan” and “Brother Fox” as we carry the light in our homes. In her lovely website, Kristin says: “In the magical world of Hearthstone Fables, I’ve sought to express my passion for faith, nature, & mythic storytelling through art.  I aim to create simple, quiet narratives that convey a sense of wonderment at the sacred world, with the various flora and fauna of nature weaving enchanting stories together. I’ve always been enamored with mythic storytelling, both through written narrative and the visual arts.  Humanity so often expresses a sense of displacement…a nagging feeling …

Preparing for All Saints’ Day

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I’ve been working on an explanation of All Saints’ Day that my children can understand. We’re going to start reading it tomorrow (Thursday) and read a section each day as part of our family morning prayer time. Here are the sections: 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) Here is an excerpt: “You may think that to be a saint, you have to be big and do big things for God. This is not true. You need to do the same things that all of us followers of Christ are trying to do – whether we are old or young, big or …

Great Prayer Book Online Resources

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During Lent, I (Amanda) started a practice of knitting while listening to the Cradle of Prayer, recordings of the 1928 Prayer Book daily offices. I was surprised by how much joy and peace this practice brought to my days.  (And, I found my three year old would sometimes even quietly play and listen!) The possibility of listening to the Daily Offices — though it seems so obvious, like “why haven’t I always done this?” — has been rather revolutionary for me. So, we’ve put together a list of some great online resources and apps that may help you to “dwell richly” in the Scriptures through prayer, by means of the wise ordering of the Prayer Book. The Cradle of Prayer The Cradle of Prayer uses the 1928 Prayer Book (for those of you who aren’t Anglican, this is the version that sounds like the KJV Bible — “vouchsafe,” “succour,” and lots of “beseeching”). The best thing about the Cradle of Prayer is that they include a hymn and the canticles are sung (she cycles through the …

Daily Prayer, “By the Book”

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Thanks to Fr. Isaac Rehburg for submitting this guest post to our BCP in Daily Life series. Fr. Isaac is the curate at All Saints Anglican Church in San Antonio, TX, where he lives with his wife and daughter. When out of his collar, he works as a residential real estate appraiser, or plays music with his family.  As a bi-vocational priest, I spend at least as much time “in the world” as I do working in the Church. One of my favorite aspects of the Book of Common Prayer is how its pattern of living out the Christian faith is designed to work equally well for folks in “regular life” as for folks who spend most of their time in and around the church building. While one of my duties as a priest is to pray the Daily Offices, I have long found them to be much more than a duty; they are a means of grace whereby I meet with the Lord and hear from him in the Scriptures, Psalms, and formal prayers of our tradition. …