Forming Saints in the Domestic Church (Bethany)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“Jesus, therefore, six days before the Passover, came to Bethany, where Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised to life, had died. And they made him a supper there. Martha served while Lazarus was one of those reclining at the table with him” (John 12:1-2).

Today is Holy Saturday. It's a special day in the whole of the liturgical year.

It's a day of silence. The Church is in mourning for the death of Christ. There are no masses in any church anywhere in the world today, not because of the pandemic, but because this is the liturgical practice. The Church is silent.

We try to accompany Our Lady on this special day in her mourning for the death of her Son. While there is sorrow and sadness, there's also hope and expectation, because we look forward to the great feast of the Resurrection—the light of Christ who's going to come into the world to dispel all the darkness.

The apostles have fled. Mary is left alone with St. John.

Today, while Mary is the shining star of the Church, she keeps the flame of faith shining and burning brightly. For this reason, Saturday has been depicted as Our Lady's Day throughout the history of the Church.

It's a very Marian day with a special Marian flavor, and we're here to prepare for the great feast of Easter, but also to focus on the theme of forming saints in the domestic Church.

A relevant topic, because on the 19th of March last week, the Holy Father convoked the Year of the Family to highlight family love. Human love and family love are a reflection of divine love, the most beautiful reality on the planet.

Holy Week is all about love. “Greater love than this no man has, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). Christ is love.

And these very special hours that we have been witnessing and living, trying to follow Christ along that pathway, witnesses to love in a very special way. It speaks to us about love.

In the culture that we live in, often we're told that love is feeling. But feelings can be very deceptive. Feel the feeling, taste the feeling, hear the feeling, sense the feeling.

Christ on the Cross did not feel too good. He had three big nails going through Him. Feelings can be very deceptive, but Christ tells us that love is sacrifice.

With great reason, the Holy Father has convoked this special year to highlight family love, fostering new ways to accompany families on their path to holiness. We’re reminded that the goal of the Christian vocation, the goal of baptism, is holiness and apostolate, something that has a daily relevance for us throughout our lives.

This Year of the Family also coincides with the Year of St. Joseph, which began last December.

We could enlist the help of the Holy Patriarch to help us in this year with his intercession for our families, for the families of the whole world, and also that many young people might discover the beauty of undertaking the path of married life while being aware of the Christian family's evangelizing mission.

The family has a mission. We're sent. We're all missionaries.

Christian parents in their Christian family have to try and witness to the great truth of family life, to make Christ present to their children, to try and live like great human beings, so the young children grow, knowing what that means, so that they see a vocation to holiness lived out on a daily basis.

Notice how Our Lord goes up to Jerusalem, but He finds there an atmosphere of hostility, betrayal, iniquity, hatred, envy, jealousy, all the ugly things, and so He withdraws to Bethany, to a home, to the domestic Church of Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and He feels very much at home there.

He's felt at home there on many other occasions. He seeks strength there for what is about to come.

The hours that He spends there are perhaps reminiscent of His own home in Nazareth with Joseph and Mary. He spent thirty long years in family life, and only three years in public life.

Christ communicates a great sense of importance to family life, to that formative atmosphere, to the bright and cheerful home that Joseph and Mary know how to create with their virtue, with their holiness.

All the great things that we see Christ doing in Holy Week, carrying His Cross, falling, getting up again, persevering, not coming down off the Cross—it's as though He learned all these things in the school of virtue that was the family home in Nazareth.

We could never underestimate the power of the Christian home, its formative value to form great men and women, to build the civilization of love and the culture of life that the last few popes, particularly Pope John Paul, have been talking about.

We can ask for the grace to have another look at our own marriage and our own family, to see how we can perhaps begin again, or enrich our family, our domestic Church, to make it a little bit more formative.

I know a priest here in Nairobi who used to work in Rome, and he knew many people there, and he invited an American cardinal to come here to Nairobi some years ago for a conference.

At that time, I was involved in what is now Eastlands College of Technology, a technical school just on the right-hand side at the end of Jogoo Road near the Donholm roundabout.

But at that time, it was just a small little house in Uhuru 4 near Jericho with a Mabati roof. It was a place where kids could come to study because they might not have had room in their own homes, and there were a lot of formative activities there.

This priest brought this American cardinal there to see this place and to have a bit of a get-together with some of the kids who grew there. There were ten or twenty kids in the get-together, very frank and very fresh with their questions.

I suspect they never met a cardinal before or didn't know too much of what it meant. One of them asked him a very frank question, “Now that you're a cardinal, can you be demoted?”

They didn't hold back; they weren't put off by human respect in the questions they were asking.

Then one of them asked him, “What made you become a priest?” The cardinal told a rather beautiful story.

He said, “When I was five years of age my father was dying of cancer.

“I was the youngest of five children and the priest would come once a week to bring Communion to my father, and my mother organized for us five children to be at the hall door with lighted candles.

“We had a Eucharistic procession from the hall door to the bedroom of my father on the second floor. Once a month, we would wait outside while my father went to Confession and then we continued with our procession.”

The cardinal said, “I thought what a beautiful thing…to be a priest to bring the Blessed Eucharist to sick people, to comfort them in their souls in moments of difficulty.”

It was a rather beautiful story, but that's not the major point of the story.

I often like to think about that mother, his mother, who doesn't figure too much in the story, but yet she's the one who makes it all happen. She's a young mother with young children and with a husband dying of cancer.

But yet she has great faith in the Blessed Sacrament, and she organizes this Eucharistic procession in her domestic Church. Now think about that for a moment.

In the school where I live, there is a priest who has been the Chaplain here for twenty-two years and he says, “One of the things I have learned in twenty-two years is that children love fire.”

This mother gives a lighted candle to a five-year-old. He could have burned down the house, but that was a minor problem.

This mother didn't know that she was forming a future cardinal prince of the Church, who one day would come to Eastlands College of Technology, no less, and share this story with little kids, which I am now sharing with you.

That took place on another continent on the other side of the world. Five or six decades later, here we are talking about the example of that mother on that particular occasion—how she used that opportunity to form her children in Eucharistic piety.

She could have had no idea of where that example, that seed of virtue, was going to end up, enlightening our hearts and minds today, and helping us to see the great formative value of a Christian home, of a mother, of a father, of the power that is there.

We don't have to worry about all the evils in the world or the ways that we find the devil is having a heyday. Holy Week was a great victory for the devil in some ways, until the victory of Christ.

He overcame death, He overcame the devil, He overcame evil. With Christ in our lives and in our homes, we can overcome every single evil there may be in the world.

The transmission of family values: family values, which are family priorities. Our family comes first. The best times in our lives should be at home and with our family.

I heard somebody say once that a dead father is better than an absent father, because at least if the father is dead, at least the children know where he is.

The importance of presence in the home to form those future saints, so that they grow up seeing what real virtue is, what real holiness is.

I was talking to a Loreto nun here in Msongari a few months ago. She died in January, aged 99, having spent something like 73 years here in Kenya.

I asked her about her vocation and how did her parents react to her vocation. She had two other sisters who were in religious life.

She said, “My father asked me to wait a year. But my mother had no problem because she was a saint.”

Those words stuck with me. What a beautiful thing if our children can see at the end of our lives that their parents were saints.

As her coffin was being lowered into the very deep grave in St. Mary's in Msongari, I couldn't help but think of the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, but yet yields an abundant fruit (John 12:24).

If we spend our lives transmitting values to our children, we will transmit values to other people.

This is the great treasure, the great strength that we have, the strength that can overcome every single possible evil there may be in the world.

From looking at this topic and looking at Bethany, where Christ felt at home, where He drew strength, where He found peace and joy, where His heart was able to relax, that heart that was going to be “pierced by a sword” just a little bit later, “blood and water were going to flow”—the fountain of the sacramental life of the Church (John 19:34)—but He finds this human strength and human friendship in that human warmth of that home.

There's consolation there. There's a good time there. There's grace there. We all need those things.

Christ was perfect God, but He was also perfect man, “like us in all things but sin” (Heb. 4:15). He also enjoyed that rest for His soul that He found in that home.

We will form saints in our children if we recreate that atmosphere. In the ordinary life that God has called us to live, Christ communicated that great sense of importance to ordinary life. We can be reminded that there is something divine there.

God is present there in your home, in your efforts to form your children, in the example that you give them, in your effort to be a bit more Christ-like, and to use every opportunity to form your children in virtue.

I heard a story recently of a mother who was driving her Standard 2 child home from school, and she got stuck in a traffic jam. Matatus here, matatus there, and she was getting very impatient, banging the steering wheel.

Her eight-year-old Standard 2 pipes up and says, “Mommy, today in school we had a talk about patience and the teacher told us that we have to learn to be patient. And if we're in Standard 2, we can't expect to be in Standard 8. We have to take one step at a time. We have to live our age. We have to do this thing now. Sometimes we have to walk instead of running. We have to plan out our activities.”

And he went on for five minutes, blah, blah, blah, giving his mother a talk about all the things he had learned about patience that day. The mother listened patiently.

Then she said, “I felt like turning the car around, going back to the school, and paying more fees.”

In spite of her feeling boiling on the inside, it was a great joy to see that her son had learned such wonderful lessons.

There can be great moments just driving in the car or at the breakfast table, or other very practical moments to transmit messages to our children. My mother used to pray the Morning Offering with us when she remembered at the breakfast table.

We never reminded her if she forgot, but if she remembered, she prayed it. But if she had never done that, I think I would never have heard the Morning Offering.

When I was in Standard 2, there was a teacher who prayed the Memorare every single morning for a whole year. I came from a Catholic family, but for some reason, we never prayed the Memorare.

I never heard that prayer for ten years until I came in contact with Opus Dei when I was 17. I said, “Oh, that's the prayer that the teacher used to pray in Standard 2.”

I feel very grateful to him now because if he hadn't prayed that prayer, I would never have heard it. So, use ordinary moments to pray those basic prayers with your children.

A father has told me recently how his two-year-old is beginning to talk. He's trying to teach him or sing to him the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.

The kid can't quite enunciate the words, but he could just about get some sounds out that you can more or less decipher that it's the Prayer to St. Michael that he's saying.

It's a rather beautiful thing, that at a very early age, we teach our children these things. Teach them to turn to God, where their real hope and joy can be.

I often think that the prayers that a child learns around the time of their First Communion are the prayers they will say on their deathbed. The things we remember, often the greatest period of spiritual formation, are in those early years.

Give a lot of importance to that. Think of ways, with your spouse: How can we make our family life more formative? How could we think, possibly in these times of holidays, to do something for the very young and the very elderly?

If your kids haven't phoned their grandmother recently, maybe that's a nice thing for them to do.

I brought a university student to Moranga a few years ago who hadn't seen his grandmother in two or three years. He'd been at boarding school, many things.

The grandmother was out of the gate of the house, looking down the road to see if he was coming, three times before we arrived. And this 85-year-old, when we arrived—she did a dance around her grandson.

The joy of that 80-plus-year-old lady was magnificent to behold. Sometimes some small things like a phone call can go an awful long way.

Likewise, the effort that you bring your family to visit, maybe an orphanage, or handicapped children, helps them to realize the gifts that God has given to them.

Maybe not now, but over time. It may take many decades before the penny drops. Then they realize the lesson you were trying to teach them, to thank God for everything.

They learn how to lift their heart and soul in thanksgiving to God at every moment of their life. They learn also to live like saints and to build that domestic Church.

I heard a chastity educator in California one time saying how difficult it was to teach California kids to be chaste.

I suppose you could say the same thing about young people all over the world. She said it was a rather hard-sell job.

“But,” she said, “you know, my parents never had to talk too much to us about these things. Because every time they brought home a baby, that baby became the center of our life, of our whole family. He was the most important person in the whole house.”

She said, “They did this eleven times, so we had many opportunities to learn those lessons.”

One of the greatest ways you can teach your children to be saints is in your openness to life, to bring new souls into the world—souls which will give God glory in this world, and they will then go to heaven and give Him glory forever and forever and forever.

I heard a Protestant theologian once who was musing on this reality. He was thinking, “That's the purpose of the soul in the world.” The greatest thing in life must be to bring souls into the world, to give God glory forever and forever.

And on that basis, he came to the conclusion that contraception must be wrong. So he became a Catholic. Rather an unusual pathway of conversion, but it shows you the power of that truth.

To be open to life at every stage of your marriage requires great faith and great generosity. You become a saint. You don't just talk about it; you put it into practice.

The happiest women I have known in my life are women who had babies in their 40s, who left everything in the hands of God.

Of course, He rewards them, not just in the next life, but also in this.

One of them told me that ten years later, their peers were looking after their grandchildren, and they were still going to the swings with their own children. Kept them young.

Some of the saints say that maternity makes women more beautiful. It’s one of the greatest witnesses that's needed from Christian homes in the world at the moment.

For families who are not able to have children, that also opens up a wide panorama of family apostolate—to also form saints, maybe with other people's children—to give an example of sanctity in the middle of the world, and to see that they're called, with their mutual love, to provide an example of a bright and cheerful home for those around them; to share that home, maybe with friends, or relatives, or acquaintances.

We help to transform our world into a better home. We don't know what God is wanting to do with the family formation that we give.

I visited a 95-year-old Irish priest in hospice in Thigio, Limuru in the last few weeks, who said his mother died when he was four. There were eight children. They were farmed out to different relatives.

Their father was a vet; he had to travel around the place. Three of those sons became priests, and one of the daughters went into religious life as a nun.

He came here as a Kiltegan missionary. He was the first priest to go to Pokot in 1952. But he said the Pokot people—they had no education, they had no medication, and they had no Revelation. He spent the next 49 and a half years solving that problem.

Just imagine the family that fellow was entrusted into, somehow formed him in those virtues which were to have such an impact on the people of Pokot.

He told me he tried to learn Pökoot, and after two months he thought he was going mad.

He got on his motorbike and drove 250 kilometers on a Murram road to Nakuru to talk with Bishop Dunne, who later went to Kitui.

The bishop asked him how long he'd been learning Pökoot. He said, “Two months, and I think I'm going mad.”

The Bishop said, “Ah, don't worry. You're only early days yet. Get back on your bike go back to where you came from and keep at it.”

That's what he did, and a couple of years later he translated the New Testament into Pökoot.

Forming our children to be saints, to give an example of virtue to those who come after us.

John Paul talks about the family being “a school of deeper humanity” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981 and Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, December 7, 1965). I love those words.

He had a couple of short little phrases that are so rich: the culture of life, the civilization of love, the family is the school of love, the school of virtue.

It’s very interesting if parents have little meetings from time to time to see how we can improve our school of virtue.

And now, in the holidays, it’s a great time to put new virtues into practice: teaching order, industriousness, generosity; to spend time helping other people, perhaps people less generous than themselves; or to find a way to earn some money or something.

The Holy Father has called the next World Meeting of Families on June 26, 2022, with the theme, Family Love: A Vocation and a Path to Holiness. Very relevant for this particular topic.

This is on the mind of the Vicar of Christ on earth; it’s ours. The family. Family love. Vocation. Calling to live like great human persons, to reach for the stars, to seek the things that are above.

We can ask St. Joseph to help us to really derive an awful lot of fruit from this year dedicated to the family.

In his letter on St. Joseph, the Holy Father says, “We can ask the Holy Patriarch to grant us the grace of graces: our conversion” (Pope Francis, Apostolic Letter, Patris Corde, December 8, 2020).

Our conversion on this Holy Saturday to tell Our Lord, ‘Lord, no more messing in my life. I want to take this calling to form saints in my children more seriously, to see it as a daily challenge, to have a concrete battle plan, so that we may be better witnesses to God, particularly to God's love in our own environment, especially in the family, so that we transmit to other people what that means.’

I was at the celebration in Msongari a year or two ago of a Loreto nun who was commemorating her profession, I think, sixty years. She gave a talk at the end, after the Mass and the lunch.

One of the things she said that struck me was, “You know this thing we say very often, ‘God is good all the time.’”

She said, “I don't like that. I don't like it: ‘God is good all the time.’”

She said, “God is love.”

She took this little phrase and lifted it up onto a completely different level: to seek the strength we need to bring about that conversion and the conversion of the souls entrusted to us in the form of your children.

We just need to think in a regular way of that simple phrase, “God is love.” When we contemplate the Cross—Christ taken down from the Cross—we're contemplating love.

On this day, as we try to accompany the sorrowful Mother in a special way, keeping her company with little aspirations of the Hail, Holy Queen throughout this recollection, being a little more silent, a little more recollected, thinking of Our Lady—we can place great hope in the future, like Our Lady did today.

The hope of the Resurrection, the joy that is coming, the optimism—we have all the answers. And with Mary, we can always be victorious because she is always with Christ.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW