For suggestions and prayers for Lenten activities see attached and go to https://marfam.org.za/2025-jubilee-families-and-lent/ also MARFAM publications STATIONS OF THE CROSS FOR FAMILIES in different languages. GOD’S PLAN OF LOVE, a children’s booklet and more.

SPECIAL PEACE PRAYER OF ST FRANCIS for POPE FRANCIS.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen


HOW FAMILIES PRAY

MARFAM WEEKLY E-NEWSLETTER 5 MARCH 2025

Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin the Season of Lent, a day of fast and abstinence and hopefully reflection with MARFAM’s Lenten focus of PILGRIMS OF HOPE AND SIGNS OF HOPE. I suppose I could start by saying, “Do families pray, or do families pray together?”  before asking,  “How do families pray?”    Very many of us Catholics grew up saying many Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s and Glory Be’s with other prayers,  but how deep and sincere are we when repeating those prayers, wonderful as they are while also recognizing there is a time and place for them.   A found a helpful focus note for family prayer from the Alpha course running in Bryanston parish at present.   Prayer is about a relationship with God.   Through prayer we connect with the Father, through Jesus, by the power of the Spirit.  Eph 2:18. Three basic principles. 1. Keep it simple. God hears our hearts, not just our words.    2. Keep it real. – Be honest, he welcomes us as we are.   3. Keep it going. It should be a conversation not just a one-time request.

MARFAM’s little FAMILY PRAYER BOOK which has had some 1000s of copies distributed around the country over the years,  is a collection of simple prayers for a whole variety of family occasions for old and young, couples, parents, grandparents, sports, old age, life and death ++.   While it does apply the principles of keeping it simple and being real, the problem remains that we are using someone else’s words. In our daily life we don’t greet a friend by giving them a speech, but give them a hug or handshake and start a conversation.  

When it comes to prayer, I personally find the aspect of a two-way conversation most difficult. Listening to God, Jesus or the Spirit, to whoever one is directing one’s prayer, has to be learned and practiced, starting quite young, but with greater depth as we grow through life.  Maybe individual but especially family prayer – as Pilgrims of Hope becoming Signs of Hope – could be a special skill to be developed during this Lent, something to be hoped for.   And then it won’t do any harm to build in a little introductory or closing prayer which can help and be a worthwhile contribution.  When presenting a simple prayer at a family workshop some time ago one little girl came up to me later and said, “I’ve already learned it off by heart.”  Nice, but is Jesus listening?   Of course he is!.   Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Blessed Trinity…………… 

The current Synodal Conversations in the Spirit approach of sharing and listening from the heart would also employ these principles but apply them in a sharing situation not for individual prayer.   For more mature pray-ers there are meaningful prayers e.g. the Liturgy of the Hours, the psalms and writing from saints and others, that can be used for contemplation, meditation alone or together. 

Hope is a central theme for the Jubilee year but also for Lent.   Some extracts from a speech made by a journalist Chris Hedge, and reported in Daily Maverick on 4 March struck me as particularly appropriate to the complex and seriously problematical times we are living in right now.  

“Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something.  “The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. 

“Hope never makes sense. Hope is absurd. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbour is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good.  “This is the secret of hope’s power. It is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our neighbor, even our enemy, our own face.” “Those who succumbed to apathy or complicity, said Hedges “are enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.” 

In our own lives and families, young and older,  may our Lenten family prayer life include the simple, real and a serious conversation and reflection on the need to develop our sense of hope and its action, which Pope Francis in his document Spes non Confundit  direct us to eternal life.      TR FAMILY WEEKLY 5 MARCH.  

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

March 5.  Ash Wednesday.  Even now return to me with all your heart, All the learners from St Pius XII school, whether they were Catholic or not went to get their ashes on their foreheads.  “Why do you do this?” the RE teacher asked the class. “Dunno.” “We just do it every year.” “It’s tradition and then we all give up something during Lent. , But we’re not really supposed to tell what,“ one Grade 6 girl said.  Josh called out the three tasks of Lent: prayer, fasting, almsgiving. “That is the penance part, but we can also take up some extra sacrifice to challenge one’s willpower.” “In our family at home we often do things together during Lent. Ashes remind us  it is time to pull up our socks as we’re all just made of the dust of the earth.” “Of course it is a day for fast and abstinence, so we won’t be eating meat and just having one full meal.” Prudence thought to herself, “Isn’t that what we usually eat?”

Reflect, share and act. Scripture: Even now return to me with all your heart, with fasting with weeping and mourning and tear your hearts and not your garments” says the Lord. Joel 2:12 .   Pope Francis:  The life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature or from worldly realities but lived in and with them in communion with all that surrounds us.LS 216.  JUBILEE.   Hope is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross. SNC.2-3    Choose an act of love and sacrifice from the list, also published at https://marfam.org.za/2025-jubilee-families-and-lent/