It is always exciting when we get to celebrate a new feast day that has been recently added to the Church Calendar. And today is one of those days! Thanks to Pope Francis this rarity has become a tiny bit more common with his reinstatement of the historic Feast of Our Lady of Loreto as December 10th and the creation of the Feast of Mary, Mother of the Church commemorated on the Monday following Pentecost.
This happened once more, last September 30th, the Feast of St. Jerome, when Pope Francis released "Aperuit illis" his Apostolic Letter, Motu proprio calling for the third Sunday of Ordinary Time to be observed as the Sunday of the Word of God.
The tile of the Apostolic Letter, meaning "He opened their," is from the document's opening line found in Luke 24:45: "He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures." This passage from the final chapter of Luke recounts Jesus time with the eleven disciples before His ascension, but also voices what should be our present-day prayer when hearing the Scripture readings at Mass.
Pope Francis' choice of date for the document's publication is also of importance given St. Jerome's history. Not only is it he who said in the prologue to his Commentary on the Book of Isaiah that, "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ," but St. Jerome also translated the Bible from Greek to Latin at the request of Pope Damasus I in 382 A.D.
This newly established feast is "to be devoted to the celebration, study and dissemination of the word of God," with our hope in doing so being, "to experience anew how the risen Lord opens up for us the treasury of his word and enables us to proclaim its unfathomable riches before the world." Pope Francis further illustrated the necessity of this feast saying in "Aperuit illis" that as Catholics, "we need to develop a closer relationship with sacred Scripture; otherwise, our hearts will remain cold and our eyes shut, struck as we are by so many forms of blindness." Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, whose conversion we commemorated yesterday (Jan. 25th), we too have scales on our eyes if we willfully remain ignorant of or ignore the unchanging truth present in the inerrant Word of God.
With the purposes mentioned above in mind and to help our family and yours implement them in our homes, I've pulled together 5 ideas to solemnly mark this Sunday.
1. Review or Explain What the Bible Really Is.
The word Bible comes straight from the Greek work for book, scroll, and parchment: Biblos or βίβλος. In the Catechism we are told that Sacred Scripture is God the Father's love letter of one word to mankind and that Word of God made flesh is our savior Jesus Christ. (CCC 101-102) Therefore both the Word of God and the Body of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament are venerated because both are the Bread of Life. (CCC 103) All Scripture is divinely inspired by the Holy Ghost which makes God the Father it's sole author. (CCC 105) This also means that all of Scripture is true and without error. (CCC 107). In his second letter to Timothy, St Paul affirms this: "All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice, that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work." (2 Tim. 3:16-17)
Of course we make these timeless truths more digestable for our children. As with many of the complex mysteries of our Faith, they do not understand all these things the first time we tell them, but as they grow and hear the truth over and over again it will begin to click in their minds and make sense. We hit these simplified bullet points with our littles and reiterate them time after time. For our youngest ones the first 3 bullets are most important to us because they help prepare a foundation fertile ground to receive the other seeds of faith here and in the Bible itself:
- God's Word is True.
- God's Word can not change.
- God's Word can not be wrong.
- God the Father is the author of the Bible, that is why it is called God's Word.
- God the Father told men His words to write down in the Bible through the _inspiration_ of the Holy Ghost.
- God's Word was born as a man to save us - Our Sweet Jesus.
- The Word of God and the Blessed Sacrament both deserve our reverence because they are both the Bread of Life.
We haven't introduced our little ones to the Four Senses of Scripture yet, but we plan to use the same medieval couplet from Augustine of Dacia's Rotulus Pugillaris (1260 AD) recited in CCC 118:
The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Analogy our destiny.
or
Lettera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.
2. Read Scripture as a Family
This can be as easy and you want to make it. Go over the readings from Mass again, inviting friends to join your family in looking up and reading aloud their favorite Bible verses or passages, or randomly selecting a place to begin reading from. Some popular passages to consider are The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), The Love Chapter (13) in 1 Corinthians, The Parables of Jesus in the book of Matthew (chapter 13), Hebrew stories from Genesis (Joshua ch. 91-94, Ruth ch. 95-98, David and Goliath ch. 112-114) or the moving story of the first reading of Scripture following the Hebrew return from exile in Babylon (Nehemiah 8).
This Sunday is also a perfect time to institute or revive the traditional practice of reading the Bible together on Sundays. Since the resurrection of Our Lord, Sundays have been set aside as days to bring glory to God, a time for rest and relaxation. Our family believes Sunday should be the best - most looked forward to - day of the week and a short while steeping in God's Word during Sunday Supper or before bedtime can be a beautiful part of that. Kissing (venerating) your family Bible after reading it, like the priest does after the Gospel reading, is a simple way to show a little more reverence in the moment as well as make the occasion more meaningful and memorable for the children. The book of Psalms is a painless place to start because if your skip the week of Christmas and Easter, your family can go through all 150 Psalms in a year by only reading 3 psalms each Sunday.
Reading the Bible for 30 minutes is also a PLENARY INDULGENCE, under the usual conditions, if you need a little more motivation. For the usual conditions you must be:
• In a state of grace (not excommunicated)
• Detached from all sin
• Go to confession 20 days before or after
• Receive Communion 20 days before or after
• Pray for the Pope’s holy intentions
3. Start Learning All the Books of the Bible
The 3 following songs to help your family learn the books of the Bible contain all 73 books of the Catholic Canon. Protestants do not accept the 7 Deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament that are part of the Bible's original canon put together by the Church. The Deuterocanonical includes 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom, and small portions of Esther and Daniel.
4. Make a Plan for Your Family's Study of the Bible
The Psalms tell us," Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." But if we want to keep the fire of God's Word burning in our homes we need to tend it often or it will go out from neglect.
The first thing here is to confirm that your family has a hardcopy of the Bible. Yes, you can google free copies of just about every translation, but there is just something remarkable about holding a tangible book of God's Word in your hands. It would be very fitting to buy a Bible _and get it blessed_ for this this feast. It is also an apropos time to plan and budget for when you want to give each child their own Bible. Because it is also the Bread of Life, in our family the Bible is our gift to our children at their First Holy Communion. We are saving for this Vulgate with the English Douay Rheims translation side by side version here. It is online here.
For family study of the Bible we should at least be looking over the upcoming Sundays readings before Mass. For an actual book or what we in our modern day call a "Bible Study" you can not go wrong with the timeless Scripture commentaries by the saints like Sts. Thomas Aquinas, Jerome, and Augustine, as well as Cornelius A Lapide. Just read and devour a little at a time with your family.
Another beneficial family practices is memorizing key and favorite verses and passages. St. Anthony of Egypt had the whole Gospel of Luke memorized! And priests had to know Scripture well enough to be tested over it's entirety before ordination. Let's bring back that level of familiarity with God's Word to our Catholic homes!
Taking time to teach your family and practice lectio divina is another powerful option. For our littles we read a short passage and they draw what it makes them think of. For young kids it can be as simple as that. For ourselves, and later our older children, we follow the 4 traditional steps of lectio divina and often add the common extra step of discussion:
- Lectio - Reading
- Meditatio - Meditation for mental or academic understanding
- Oratio - Prayer
- Contemplatio - Contemplation for the revelation of the internal spiritual truth
- Collatio - Discussion
5. Have a Sword Drill
As part of the Armor of God found one Ephesians 6, the Bible is refers to as the Sword of the Spirit. And as the Church Militant we should know how to wield our weapons. If the practice is unfamiliar to you older children, you can take time today teach them how look up specific scripture references within it. While they are holding their Bibles, it is a convenient opportunity to instruct your family that it should be treated gently with reverence and respect because it is the most precious and important book of all - the Book of Books.
At out house we do Sword Drills periodically and for the feasts of specific saints like St. Anthony of Padua (the Hammer of Heretics), St. Jerome, Our Lady of Sorrows, and any other saints that penned books of the Bible (The 4 Evangelists, Paul, Peter, etc...). Everyone holds a Bible above their shoulder then someone calls out the Scripture reference and we race to look it up.
Bonus Ideas:
- Sing "The B-I-B-L-E" (It doesn't have to mean Sola Scriptura)
- Listen to The Donut Man's "Love Letter" song or album. You can listen to this whole album on Spotify along with some of his others albums. Our kids give them two thumbs up!!
- Have a lasagna for Sunday Supper and decorate the top with vegetables to look like an open book. The same decorating could be done to cheese toast as a side dish.
- Make your own little chocolate Bibles with candy melts and this candy mold.
I pray these ideas aid your family in commemorating this new feast not only throughout the week but as Pope Francis encouraged in his homily for the day while y'all continue to "make room, each day, in your [family's] lives for the Word of God."
Pax,
Genie
But He said: Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it. -Luke 11:28