Family Ethics: Practices for Christians

Chapter Eight: Family Prayer as Practice of Resistance

C H A P T E R E I G H T Family Prayer as Practice of Resistance Prayer: Beyond Platitudes Praying is perhaps the most important practice for Christian families. Yet addressing family prayer adequately is more difficult than it may first appear . One does not have to read far into any Christian text on prayer to find the affirmation, “The family that prays together stays together.” Stanley Hauerwas questions the appropriateness of this aphorism, pointing out how an overemphasis on family stability can displace the fundamental role of the church and misconstrue the point of prayer. He asserts that “if we have not first learned what it means to be faithful to self and other in the church, then we have precious little chance of learning it at home.”1 Character , Hauerwas says, is formed in Christian community and through Christian tradition. When people say, “the family that prays together stays together,” they suggest that family is more significant than church or that prayer is good simply because it strengthens family ties. Instead, Hauerwas suggests that the church as first family of Christian believers provides the primary foundation for ordinary families.2 While the role of the Christian community is important, families, I have argued throughout this book, play a key role in forming believers in the faith. Thus prayer ought to be a practice of the home as well as the church. Family prayer is a good practice for families because it has the potential to draw spouses and their children closer together, connect them with God, and strengthen them in their common struggle to live a more meaningful person-centered life in and outside the home. However, coming together to pray is not necessarily easy for modern families . Many give up on it altogether. The busyness of modern family life leaves little time for constructing meaningful family rituals, little energy for bible study, and little patience for quiet reflection. Morning and evening prayer become more difficult when family members rise and eat breakfast at different times before going off to multiple job sites and/or schools; when working parents bear the burden of getting everyone out of the house in the morning and taking charge of chores and meal preparation in the evening; when children are shuttled to an increasing number of practices and lessons ; when TV, computer, and cellphone are poised to interrupt at any time of the day; and when spirituality is more likely to be sought in private than in community with others.3 Bonnie Miller-McLemore notes that even the best-intentioned people of faith often end up giving up on family devotions because of time pressures.4 She calls for thinking less about traditional practices and more about being attentive to the presence of God in everyday life.5 Such attentiveness is a good thing to cultivate. Still, though the practice of prayer is no doubt difficult to sustain in the context of modern living , it is crucial if parents and children want to see the rest of life through the eyes of faith and practice resistance to more typical forms of middleclass family life. Yet the experience of contemporary families does not sit well with the advice from typical Christian prayer books.6 For the most part, these books assume uniform Christian belief between husband and wife and among children, and they imply that if families were sufficiently motivated to put aside the time and overcome feelings of discomfort, prayer would come to be a joyful practice rather than a continuing problem. However, if my discussions with students in fourteen years of teaching courses in marriage and family at Catholic universities are a reliable indicator, prayer is not a common practice in Christian homes. Only the most committed couples pray during engagement or in the early years of marriage. Even after children arrive, very Prayer: Beyond Platitudes 215 few Christian families consistently practice anything but grace before meals. Bible reading, rosaries, and other intentional practices are even rarer among post–Vatican II Catholic families.7 Sustaining a vision of one’s family as a Christian community seems to be an extremely difficult task.8 An important contributing factor to the neglect of prayer may be that a unity of belief is not as pervasive as one would think. At least 40 percent of Catholics today marry a spouse of a different Christian faith or a different religion, and...