All posts filed under: Little Oratory

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 …

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 …