Make life liturgical again!

On liturgical living this Advent and Christmas

Family traditions get made, repeated and remembered at Christmastime. From setting Christmas puddings ablaze with brandy to finding stockings at the end of the bed first thing on Christmas Day morning, families celebrate the season with festive traditions new and old.

As the mother of a one-year-old son, I’ve been reflecting on these traditions more this year than before. In the hope of integrating more traditions into our family life that are both festive and Catholic, the concept of “liturgical living” has provided me with food for thought.

Many Catholics will already live liturgically. Indeed, practising Catholics cannot avoid living a life directed by the Church’s calendar. Mass attendance on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, coupled with broader celebrations for Christmas and Easter, along with abstinence from meat on Fridays, offer the most obvious examples of ways in which the liturgical calendar holds sway over our lives.

The liturgical living concept, however, as popularised by some Catholic authors and social media accounts, would challenge Catholics to adopt a more pervasive approach, bringing something of the liturgy found at church actually into one’s home.

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The above is the introduction from my latest piece for The Catholic Herald, which was published today. You can read it in full here.