Summer is poised to turn to fall and school is back in session. Families everywhere are getting back into a routine (or trying to). Transitions can be hard for even the most squared away families, but the Hallow App is offering the Catholic ones a curated optimization hack. For $69.99 annually or $9.99 a month, they can jump into the Seven Day Family Rule of Life Challenge. A rule of life is a blueprint for day-to-day life in a monastic community, the most famous perhaps being the one set down by St. Benedict of Nursia. Now, Hallow subscribers can follow the lead of Catholic podcasters Alex and Melissa to develop their very own!
Alex and Melissa keep it pretty general. “We fast. We are not attached to the things of this world. We stay away from addictions” is an illustrative example from their rule as laid out on a Hallow Instagram post plugging the challenge. Emily Wilson, co-founder of her own Catholic app, also shares her family rule of life in a Hallow Instagram post, where she is pictured frolicking on a beach with her family. She assures us “the challenge is VERY manageable” and “perfect for busy family life!” Emily’s rule of life is a little more granular: a list of rituals includes a daily rosary decade and reading together every day. They have a Sabbath practice of sitting in the front row at Mass and not working.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a family doing any of these things. I don’t even really want to critique Hallow’s paid subscription model, which I wrote about for Tablet four years ago when they were still coming up. I want rather to review the “liturgical living” trend itself. You know what I mean. It’s arts and crafts, baking projects, special prayers and practices to fit different holidays and seasons, all meant to sanctify your domestic church. It’s holy! It’s tradition! It’s for the children! Did I mention it’s usually ‘grammable? It has been going on at least as long as I’ve been a mother, so over a decade, and it seems to have dovetailed nicely with the rise of social media, where parenting along with everything else became a kind of performative commodity. It also coincides with a growing interest in traditional Catholicism and looking to the past. The easy critique of liturgical living is that it is yet another way to show your friends what a good, hands-on mom you are. But if we take the liturgical living moms at their word, that they want to raise good Catholics, it’s worth examining their central claim – making cute baggie with an All Saints’ Day snack mix and faithfully decorating your Jesse Tree every Advent – actually turns out good Catholics.
Why am I so cynical about this trend? I guess because part of me is jealous of the crafty, sincere mom. I’m the kind of mom who will help you decorate a Chappell Roan pumpkin for the school pumpkin decorating contest, but I’m not going to sing the O Antiphons around the Advent Wreath en famille. We’ve been known to skip Stations of the Cross in favor of the “Jesus Christ Superstar” screening at the local indie theater, discussing the thematic elements on the car ride home. I don’t have the earnest sincerity gene that would let me be the liturgical living mom (at least not without my husband, kids, and friends making fun of me), and I’m a little resentful about it, ok?
But there’s something else about liturgical living as a trend that troubles me.
Now, I love tradition and I love liturgy. I live in Italy, where as I sat down to write this, the local church bells rang the noon hour, reminding me to recite the Angelus and pray midday prayer on my iBreviary app. It delighted me to no end when we moved in that our local municipal trash collection calendar has each day’s patron saint listed. My town’s parish, St. John the Baptist, launched its annual festival on August 29th, the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. Even though I attend Italian class on the base belonging to the U.S. Army, under whose auspices my family has been brought here, yesterday I received an email that class would be cancelled on Monday for the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to a 2018 Pew Research study, Italy had the highest number of church-attending Christians in Western Europe. The well-kept roadside Madonna shrines and the busy Masses I’ve attended here also seem to attest to a lively engagement with the faith here. In such an environment, it turns out that authentic liturgical living looks a lot like everyday life. And I think social media-driven liturgical living misses that key factor.
Authentically living the liturgical seasons and rhythms should feel organic, instead of like a self-consciously adopted ritual mom learned about from some influencer, who let’s be honest, was also probably hawking accompanying tie-in merch. When American Catholics bring up holidays, practices, and recipes from the storeroom of (mostly Western European) church tradition and try to resurrect them, it often has the distinct patina of phoniness.
But it speaks to a desire for stability and meaning, which I don’t want to discount.
Outside of Catholicism, other faith traditions are involved in a form of bricolage – sometimes called “remixing” – of religious practices. In the conclusion to his book The New American Judaism, Jewish Theological Seminary professor Jack Wertheimer observes an increasing “receptivity of Jews to traditional practices that in the past were foreign or even repugnant to them, such as deciding suddenly to observe the kosher dietary laws, even while continuing to reject others.” Evangelicals and nondenominational folks are incorporating more liturgy into their services –concluding services with the Anglican doxology, reciting the creed, observing Palm Sunday and Advent. Tradition – everyone’s doing it!
Speaking as a Catholic, the cringiness of liturgical living comes when it’s done in the context of the “domestic church,” a Vatican II term that I like, but that I feel is sometimes taken a bit too literally by the “St. Lucy Eyeball Punch on December 13th” crowd. Parents are definitely the first, best teachers of their children. Whether they need to assume the role of “lame CCD teacher” to fulfill that obligation is up for debate.
The reason I stayed Catholic isn’t because we left out our shoes for St. Nicholas every December 6th (although we did do that). It isn’t because she frantically insisted on a picture perfect adherence to some medieval holiday tradition she read about five minutes ago. Our family had traditions, but they weren’t reconstructed or self-consciously imposed rituals. We watched “A Christmas Story” every year and had corned beef and cabbage for dinner on St. Patrick’s Day. But really, our primary tradition was the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic one we shared with millions of Catholics all over the world dating back to when Christ gave St. Peter the Keys to His Kingdom. I saw my parents taking their faith seriously at home and in their day-to-day lives and talking to us about it.
I didn’t need Catholicism to make me a weird atavistic nerd, because I already was one. Catholicism gave me the relationship with God that helped me know who I was when I ventured out into the world.
Michael Casey, an actual Benedictine monk, is the author of Strangers to the City: Reflections on the Beliefs and Values of the Rule of Saint Benedict. According to Casey, nonconformity to the age “is primarily a matter of beliefs and values. It is not an advocacy of antiquarianism or neo-primitivism.” We must be “proactive in ordering our life,” he writes, but for stability we must look not to “the non-variability of community life, the Church, or society,” but “on the unchanging fidelity of God.” He likens persevering in a rule of life to standing on a surfboard. A surfer needs to be cognizant of how the wind and water are moving so he can balance and remain upright.
Look, this is probably just me, but the combined commercialization and backward-looking nature of the liturgical living trend reminds me of Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in “The Wicker Man.” In a bit of key exposition, Summerisle explains how his dad invented a bunch of ancient-feeling rites to keep in his thrall the denizens of the island that also bears his name. If you want to gather your loved ones together at Lammastide to sing “Summer is Icumen In,” that’s your own affair, obviously. But if one or more of your eight kids ends up becoming a neopagan or just a garden variety “none” after leaving home, you can’t be too surprised, because kids have great bullshit detectors. I can tell you as a cradle Catholic who knows lots of lapsed cradle Catholics, if your domestic church feels less like real life and more like “mom’s weird thing she makes us do at home,” that could be a problem down the road. Tradition’s value comes from the stability it provides, not from evoking a backward-looking nostalgia.
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Of all the things to complain about in this day and age in the Catholic world, you are *really* going to complain about families trying to cobble together a life lived in touch (as much as possible) with the liturgical calendar, saints feast days, and create fun memories tied to our faith? In a scattered, shallow, wasteland of a digital age with no roots, no family passing down tradition let alone faith in God, you are going to critique moms trying to build faith in whatever little day-to-day activities that connect food and lighthearted but memorable activities for kids to deeper stories and lives of saints who can offer a picture of faith in Christ lived unto death? As soon as I saw the words “I live in Italy…” and that faith lived out where you are “looks more like real life” as you proceed to talk about an ancient city that keeps Madonna shrines, etc. I just rolled my eyes. I live in a little, extremely political town in a rural area in Oregon, full of Protestants with one parish much maligned by this Prot town. I converted to Catholicism here and one of the most meaningful, grounding things that immediately attracted me was feast days, fasting, and hand-on-“liturgical living.” It’s brought a depth and groundedness to my faith and life in Christ that I never experienced in the Protestant world. My husband and I volunteer at our parish OCIA and I can’t even tell you how many new Catholics are first introduced to the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church from the Hallow app, and are introduced to (and have fallen in love with) living a life following the liturgical calendar because of something they saw online or read. It definitely feels like you are going against the grain of society when you choose to carve out space to say the O Antiphons with your kids at night during Advent, and maybe even have cookies that have something to do with an Advent feast day. It may sound silly, but if you’ve NEVER had that, if you are a convert and never even grew up Christian (I in fact was raised anti-Christian and Jesus changed my life when I was 20), these practices can be life altering. We host a spiritual formation group in our home for new Catholics and we are just about to start a year-long study living out the liturgical year together and delving deeper into practices, global traditions, and celebrating feast days together. The ages of the people range from their 20-70’s and they are all really excited to create these traditions in their lives. Not a one of them grew up religious. Hallow, and a woman like Kendra Tierney at Catholic All Year, are doing more to bring people into the Church and a relationship with Christ than any of the people who criticize them. My husband and I are Benedictine oblates at an abbey 3 hours from us…I guarantee the monks and even the Abbot would not criticize mothers and fathers taking the time and effort (Lord, help us) to create a domestic church using everything at our disposal in this cultural moment to sanctify our daily lives, no matter how “trite.” And you better believe that when we have grilled kabobs on St. Lawrence’s feast day my kids can tell you who he was, why he was martyred, and that he had the courage and supernatural grace while tied to a grate over fire to say, “flip me over, I’m done on this side!” as they eat their skewered chicken, because Jesus is THAT life altering. If that’s dumb and meaningless, I’m here for it.
I grew up in a family and parish community that practiced many of these liturgical living "trends" in the late 80s and early 90s. I have also taught in Catholic schools over the last ten years where most students had no exposure to their faith other than boring CCD and mass on Sunday at a parish with a banal liturgy. They were starving for more. Really the only problem I see/saw with this as a trend is that it can get too focused on the small t traditions and at times may lose sight of Jesus. This is particularly an issue if you go too far into the waldorf direction, with syncretism and an amalgamation of Christianity with other traditions without a knowledge of Christ. And I have seen some folks lose their way in that vein. But as long as the developmentally appropriate transitions are made and older children really learn the philosophical and theological grounds of the faith that they liturgical practices have rooted in their bodies and souls, I think it is a beautiful way to give shape and structure to family life and to cultivate a sacramental imagination. Since so many people sadly live isolated from other families, it is important to invite others (Catholic and non-Catholic) into these traditions rather than just doing them on your own. As an example, my husband and I and our housemates invited Catholic and Protestant friends from multiple different communities in our lives (traddy parish, Catholic Worker house, regular parish, ecumenical Christian school) to a Michaelmas party where we mostly just ate food and drank beer and cider, but also had the kids attack a dragon pinata stuffed with candy, and sang compline together at the end of the night. It was a blast. Particularly for friends coming into the church who might get pulled into the trad wars online, it was an example of the joy of life and the open, missionary heart of the Church, without being pushy. It really seems to come down to motive. Are people doing this to keep up with the jones's on instagram, or for a different reason. If it is social pressure, probably don't do it. But if not, it can be a beautiful and fruitful way to live and build the community of the Church.