Family Prayer is Not Performative

teaching, modeling, serving, sitting

Photo by Luke Michael on Unsplash

It recently struck me, as we said our “goodnighttime prayers” with our daughters, that I often treat our family prayer routines as primarily performances of prayer, rather than prayers in and of themselves. In other words, I consider my role to be primarily “teacher” or “guide” in those moments, not “pray-er”. As the parent of a willful and active toddler, family prayer can often feel chaotic. Either we are so focused on wrangling her into some semblance of stillness that we are not focusing on the prayers, or we are choosing to ignore her running around and exclusively focusing on the prayers, left wondering if she is absorbing anything at all. I, at least, struggle to know how to actively invite her to participate. Her being the oldest child means that she has no peer role models in the home to imitate, and even in our wider community, most of the friends we see regularly are less than a year older than she is.

Our goodnighttime prayer routine is fairly simple. We face the crucifix and (if we remember) we light a candle. James and I recite a few memorized prayers that we want our children to know by heart, and then we talk about the things we’re grateful for and the intentions that we want to bring to the Lord. We ask for the prayers of our children’s patron saints (the women and men they’re named after), and then we finish with the sign of the cross. There is nothing earth-shattering, but we carefully chose this routine because it contains many of the main “postures” of prayer that we want to model for our children. However, because it is very routine, because it comes at the last stretch of the day, and because it was created with a teaching/modeling goal in mind, I frequently find myself getting distracted, running through the list without really thinking.

My own personal evening prayer, which also includes items of gratitude and prayer intentions, looks far less uniform or consistent, and usually includes items that are quite different from what we “talked about” in our family prayer. This should have been my first clue. I’ve been using our family “Thank you, Jesus” time as a chance to relate to James what happened during our day, a chance to remind the girls what we did, and a chance to process it all. I haven’t been taking the time—even just a moment—to really ponder what experiences that day have left me filled with gratitude, taken my breath away, or been so obviously grace-filled that I cannot help but return them to the Lord in some way.

Is this the habit of gratitude that I want to pass on to my children? A cursory, unthinking, un-grateful gratitude?

Likewise with our litany of prayer intentions: I remember being a child and rattling off a similar litany. No one was ever removed from the list, under any circumstances, such that we were praying “for everyone, for everything, for the rainbows, the man in the white hat, the pope, the people in the war, the people in the rack…”¹ and so on and so forth for years and years on end. I don’t want to claim that the Lord can’t or didn’t use these prayers, that they didn’t somehow change us or teach us. But I also don’t want to claim that this is the full extent of what I desire for my children. Just like with prayers of thanksgiving, I think that we too often miss out on an opportunity to lay ourselves and our loved ones at the foot of the Cross when we standardize and litanize our intercessory prayer.

All this to say: it shouldn’t be a shocking realization to me that my primary “job” during family prayer time is to pray. And yet, here we are.

I ought to be taking the time to really and truly “check out” from the distracting and often overstimulating circumstances around me so I can “check in” with the Lord. I ought to make an active effort to be truly present with Him, alongside my husband and daughters. I ought, dare I say it, to enjoy our family prayer time as a moment of genuine leisure and spiritual refreshment. Instead of fretting about the degree to which our two-year-old is or isn’t ~ p a r t i c i p a t i n g ~ in the way we’d like her to, can we simply set the example for her and trust that she will follow our lead as she learns and grows? Can we lean into the “smells and bells,” the very embodied nature of our faith, and trust that the signs and symbols will speak to her heart more deeply than anything we could verbally say? More seasoned parents, I’d truly love to hear your experiences with this.

To frame this topic in another light, James often tells me that he wants our girls to grow up to love reading. Not, I think, an unusual or unexpected attitude for the man who writes a Substack called

The Classical Learning Digest

. It’s an attitude that I share with him. We both agree that reading is a wholesome and disproportionately beneficial practice, besides being simply delightful. Nonetheless, it is illuminating to consider that the way I try to encourage this habit is to read books with or to our children, while James more frequently reads books around them. In other words, I am trying to accompany and teach, where James is trying to model. When either of us is reading with our two-year-old, I typically read “age appropriate” board books with simple stories, where James typically reads her children’s books that he enjoys, such as the Paddington series, Mother Goose nursery rhymes, or Curious George stories.²

It’s also illuminating for me to reflect on the annoyance I often feel when James is reading while I am “parenting” or “homemaking” on, for example, a Saturday afternoon. Why is it that I only grudgingly allow him to participate in leisurely activities during so called “family time”? Why do I insist on working and completing tasks around the home during that time? I only just now, in the drafting of this post, came to the realization that he and I are, in very obvious ways, living out the age-old story of Mary and Martha:

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

- Luke 10:38-42 ESV, emphasis mine

There is room, of course, for both. There is even need for both. But, contrary to what my Saturday Self might want to acknowledge, I too have room to learn and grow here, not just James. I think that I can hear, with St. Martha, the Lord’s words to me in the midst of my frantic going-about-my-business. Writing this post reminded me, almost viscerally, of this song from Audrey Assad to which my heart beat for much of my time in college:

I'm Mary and I'm Martha all at the same time
I'm sitting at His feet and yet I'm dying to be recognized
I am a picture of contentment and I am dissatisfied
Why is it easy to work but hard to rest sometimes?

- Audrey Assad, Lament

I’ve told several friends recently that, in some confusing and unexpected ways, two kids has been easier for me than one. There’s a good chance that this is largely due to not carrying a ten-pound baby around inside my body all the time. There are some other things, too. Reflections for another day. But all in all, I’ve never been more content, more at peace, more fully myself than I have been in this season, even with all the soul-crushingly long nursing sessions at three o’clock in the morning. I am, truly, a picture of contentment… and yet I am still so often dissatisfied.

How much of that restlessness comes from a view of myself as primarily a performer, rather than simply a person?

Here we are, miles from where we started and from where we thought I’d finish, pondering once again the relationship between the hustle and bustle of daily life and the restless inability to sit still. Wondering how, if I relegate most of my leisure time to naps and nights (our Little and Great Silences), I will be able to teach my daughters to really and truly rest: rest in the Lord, rest in their cherished relationships, rest in hobbies and activities that give them life.

I think of the saints-raised-by-saints (Therese of Lisieux and John Paul II, among others) who speak to the impact of walking into their parents’ room and finding their mother or father on their knees, beads in hand, whispering the rosary. I am deeply convicted that modeling is a more effective formation than lecturing. And yet, I cannot shake the habit of “performing” our family prayer time rather than simply praying. Does this indicate a need to change what our family prayer looks like? I am a firm believer that spousal or family prayer doesn’t have to look like the preferred type of prayer of the individuals involved, but perhaps the format we have needs a little bit of tweaking? Surely the writing-related adage applies here too: “If you don’t enjoy writing it, your readers won’t enjoy reading it.” Not that prayer is always a pleasurable experience, but that if we as parents are clearly detached and disengaged, our children will pick up on that, will develop a similar attitude by default.

Or, rather, is this moment an invitation from the Lord to reevaluate my own relationship with prayer, with Him? Is this His way of revealing to me that I am allowed to—indeed, must—simply be, and in so doing will be what my daughters need me to be?

I have no answers here, friends, only questions and half-baked thoughts that I will be bringing to the Lord time and again as our children grow. But if you, too, are wresting with the dynamics of performance and experience in your family life, know that you are not alone. Let’s walk this walk together.

What does your family prayer routine look like? Do you find it difficult to really enter into prayer during family—or other communal—prayer times? Do you struggle to rest or to model rest, or do you have your life figured out already?

1. “The man in the white hat” referring, obviously, to a man in a years-old newspaper clipping framed on the wall of a pizza joint we visited on vacation halfway across the country as young children. I think he had cancer? “The pope” being now-St. John Paul II, added during his final illness and remembered in our prayer long after his death. And “the people in the war” and “the people in the rack” were, if I remember correctly, the men and women fighting in Iraq. You know, the war. In the rack. Ah, childhood.

2. The best of both worlds being, of course, the Lit for Little Hands series that I am obsessed with.