Home remedies: five spiritual cures for what ails families today.

I was meeting with a group of moms and dads about their role as parents and asked them to list what they would consider the biggest threats to modern families. It didn't take them long to begin feverishly writing down their ideas. When it was time to share these ideas, the list built quickly: peer pressure, the economy, drugs and alcohol, teenagers who give up on their faith, the special strains step-families experience, society's sexualization of younger and younger children, and many more. These responses get repeated everywhere I meet with thoughtful parents. * It's clear that families face a number of challenges. In fact, many parents feel beleaguered and at a loss. They're facing all the usual is sues of raising kids in a culture that undermines their efforts. And many parents are doing it without the help of extended family close by. * Polly Berrien Berends, author of the wonderful book Whole Child/ Whole Parent (HarperCollins), says that while family problems tend to manifest themselves as psychological, in the end, "all solutions are spiritual" If she is correct, and I believe she is, Catholic parents will find help in facing modern life's challenges in the traditions of our faith. These are not quick and easy answers, but they are answers that satisfy, answers that last. To even begin to access these spiritual solutions, a few preexisting conditions can help.

First, families need to be intentional. We must be prepared to make tough choices about our lives, our priorities, and our behaviors. If we simply hop on modern life's conveyor belt and live according to society's conventional wisdom, we're likely to end up frazzled, empty, disconnected from our real feelings, and wondering where our lives went.

Second, people who want answers must be willing to look within. The answer to these family challenges is at home, not elsewhere. It's not in buying more "stuff," which is a great temptation for every American family. It's not in attending more seminars or in finally getting that promotion and the corner office at work.

The answers are to be found in the life you're living right now. Jesus said repeatedly, "The kingdom of heaven is now!" He taught that his words were fulfilled in our hearing. So let's listen! The challenge for us is to do the necessary spiritual work so that we can hear the word in the midst of our family lives (no matter what stage your family is in) and to develop the eyes to witness the presence of God even in our most difficult challenges.

Third, you may have to redefine what's holy. When some people talk about family as a spiritual path, they want to focus primarily on those "Hallmark moments" when all is going well and everyone is getting along. But that's sentimentality, not spirituality. The spirituality of family life is necessarily the spirituality of imperfection. It's a spirituality for when feelings are hurt, disappointments abound, and messiness, rather than perfection, is the status quo. Answers will come when we accept our vulnerabilities and invite creativity and grace into the equation.

Fourth, it helps to believe that God is not distant and aloof but concerned about your life and active in your world. The best responses we come up with will not be of our own making but will evolve when we deepen our relationship with a God whose love courses through our lives. The truth is that Jesus is on our side and rooting for us. Why did Jesus come? "I come so that you might have life and have it more abundantly!" And that means for each and every one of us.

With those ground rules in mind, here is my somewhat arbitrary list of five major challenges to families and suggested spiritual remedies:

1. Lack of sufficient time to do all that needs to be done

The problem cited most often by families is a sense of time crunch. While parents might entertain a fantasy of family life as sitting leisurely around the hearth eating popcorn and telling stories, their daily reality is less like Little House on the Prairie and more like air traffic controllers during hurricane season. It's "Take Missy to her ballet lessons, get Jason to ice hockey practice, pick up Seth from detention, and get Caitlin to her tae kwon do competition. Don't forget to sign the permission slips for the field trip, the health forms for soccer league, the enrollment forms for religious ed, and make that cake for the parish bake sale."

Meanwhile, U.S. workers are working longer hours, more families have two parents working outside the home, kids are involved in more organized activities, and the pace of modern life has left us all breathless.

The solution isn't to get up earlier and go to bed later. That may work in the short run, but soon it will wear you down, leaving you exhausted and eventually depressed. The spiritual solution to the time crunch is to practice mindfulness and presence--and also to accept our limits as human beings.

Mindfulness seems to slow time down. Instead of rushing from activity to activity and from distraction to distraction, being right where you are and doing just what you're doing with a sense of calm awareness lets you sense and savor each moment of your life. It's choosing to be awake to God's creation rather than just rushing by it. Life should not be experienced through the rearview mirror. Look at what's in front of you and respond. Thus you will be practicing presence--real presence. And in offering your family members the gift of your real presence you prepare them to open up to the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

Think of those moments of real presence you've experienced in your family--perhaps on a family vacation or camping trip, when a storm kept you all homebound and maybe even knocked out your electricity, when a problem arose and you dropped everything and simply listened. At those moments, there is plenty of time. In fact, there is all the time there is--right now.

The other remedy is to accept our limits. Our economy is based on the principle of getting more, producing more, consuming more, discarding more. Yet we are creatures, finite beings. We cannot do everything, and we will not be able to experience everything the world has to offer. We need to make choices. The sooner we come to humble acceptance, the sooner the pressures of unrealistic expectations will ease. We pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," not "give us this minute our own bakery plus a different bread from around the world each day."

How can you experience more time in your life? Here are a few suggestions:

* Add rituals to your life. They help you plumb the depth of moments to enrich the time you have. These rituals can be as simple as how you celebrate birthdays, baptismal anniversaries, a new job, a good report card, no kids having to serve detention for a week, or even "just because!"

You can make time special by lighting a candle at dinner, developing consistent bedtime rituals and prayers, by the way you do your chores on Saturday morning, or how you enjoy a big brunch after Sunday Mass. Rituals provide an anchor for our children. They make our kids emotionally resilient. They prepare them to see the "moreness" to life that is the heart of all religious experience and the foundation of faith.

* Decide when "enough is enough." In his wonderful book on depression, Protect Us From All Anxiety (ACTA Publications), Father William Burke wrote this poignant prayer: "I have spent far too many years trying to live up to expectations you never set for me, Lord." Unrealistic expectations of how organized our life must be, how clean our house has to stay, and how available we have to be to our jobs or friends need to be given over to God for safekeeping. Martha Stewart doesn't live in your home! Your family does.

* Observe the seasons. There is a wisdom to nature's ebb and flow, as well as to that of the church calendar. To everything there is a season. Make the most of them.

Pay attention and take up Advent practices like lighting the Advent wreath before dinner each evening. During Lent, change your eating patterns and do something for the poor. Find out when every family member's favorite saint's feast day is and celebrate with a special meal. Don't let every day be just like the one before it and the one to come after. Use the celebration of the seasons to help you see the unique glory inherent in every single day.

2. The omnipresence of the media

According to one report, average American children see more than 20,000 murders on TV before they're 11 years old. I hate to think of how many commercials they're exposed to. We like to tell ourselves, "It doesn't really affect them." But the people who measure the effectiveness of advertising and who know for a fact how to target and influence our kids are spending billions--billions--of dollars annually to reach your child's mind.

If any of us were approached by a slick-talking stranger who said he wanted to come into our house and talk to our kids for a couple of hours a night--just to give them suggestions about what to wear, what to eat, what kind of music they should like, and what they should consider dorky--we would call John Ashcroft and try to have that person arrested. And yet we let that slick-talking salesguy (and a whole host of his colleagues) into our homes regularly in commercials without batting an eye. The best and the brightest minds in our country are hard at work trying to persuade your child that only one kind of action figure or fashion doll will make them happy. They even coach kids in how to whine their way to getting what they want. It has an effect.

This is a dilemma for parents. We know we can't move into caves. But we don't have to throw in the towel, either! There are things we can do. Here are three:

* Fast from TV and other media. Not forever, not always, but you can schedule one night a week when there is no TV or Internet allowed in your home. Instead, you can take turns reading aloud to each other. This can be an ideal religious practice to take up during Advent or Lent. And it's a great way to maintain your sanity during the holiday frazzle.

* Teach media literacy. You can do this by analyzing commercials with your kids. Comment on values you don't like in programs you see. You can (and should) talk back to your TV. Explain to your kids--to the level they can understand--who creates ads and why. They want to sell stuff. It's not necessarily good stuff. And the people selling it maybe wouldn't even buy it. But they want you to buy it. So they will do everything they can to make you feel bad if you don't buy it.

Explain that our faith has a better way to deal with that emptiness we feel as human beings, and that we have a name for unfettered greed and desire and acquisitiveness--we call it sin. That state of want, want, want is not our intended state. Our purpose on Earth goes far beyond being a consumer. The Internet has lots of help in this area. I recommend you visit www.medialit.org.

You can also explain why you object to certain music, movies, championship wrestling, or Temptation Island. Don't just ban, educate. My friend Steve Saso tells about a mother whose teenage son bought a CD with offensive lyrics against her stated wishes. Instead of ranting and raving and grounding him, she called him aside, read the lyrics aloud to him (surely embarrassing the heck out of him), and explained why as a woman she objected to having that level of "entertainment" in the house. Without fanfare, he got rid of the CD.

* Join with other parents on this. Don't try to do this alone. What you prohibit at home may be quite available at your kids' friends' homes. Yet if you check in with other parents, you might find them to be allies in your desire to create media-savvy and media-protected kids.

It doesn't even matter that you might have different flash points or limits they feel comfortable with. That's OK, but agree on what you can agree on--what will be shown or not at group sleepovers, for example. What concerts your kids can go to at what age. What videos they'll have on when your kid is over there playing. You don't want your second grader coming home knowing how to chant "Jer-ry, Jerry." Parents can be great resources to one another. The media are huge and powerful. Don't fight them alone.

3. Lack of clarity about our mission as a family

"Thomas said to him, `Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?'" (John 14:5). A lot of families are just drifting. They have no clear sense of why they are here or what their purpose is. For many Americans, the myth or grand narrative we live by has lost its power. Life is shallow. There's little worth committing to or sacrificing for.

As Christians, we believe that our individual stories are part of and take their meaning from a larger story--we come from God and we are going to God. If that's true, it's important that we don't lose our way.

As Christians, we first receive our commission at Baptism. Our mission in life is to use our particular talents to bring about the reign of God, to heal the world, to make incarnate once again the message of the gospels and the person of Jesus. Specifically, our mission comes from Jesus: Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, and so on.

How are we to do this great work? The family is a central place we are taught about fairness and virtue and caring. It's the school where, having been fed, clothed, and cared for, we are sent forth to do likewise for the world. The state of the world clearly shows that we are far from finished.

Thankfully, we are not doing this all alone. We have each other--and that includes faithful men and women and children all around the globe--and it includes our savior Jesus Christ. And we need a savior.

How can you gain a clearer sense of your family's mission?

* Keep first things first. Management guru Peter Drucker is famous for this message, and it was adapted in Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Families (Covey Leadership Center). In the introduction to that book, Sandra Merrill Covey tells this story: "Stephen once told a group of high-powered businessmen, `If your company were falling apart, you know you'd do whatever you had to do to save it. Somehow you'd find a way. The same reasoning applies to your family.' Most of us know what we need to do, but do we want to do it?"

Spend some time figuring out where family stacks up on your list of priorities. It's easy to give it lip service. But be honest with yourself. Are you happy with where you rate it? Do your actions back up your stated goals? What can you change? What will you change to bring it all into alignment?

* If you want to understand an organization's true mission, don't bother reading its mission statement, look at the budget. What about your family budget? Does it reflect, even in small ways, what your mission in the world is? To get specific on this, have a family meeting to decide what charity you want to support. Divvy up how much you have set aside to give. If kids are old enough, have them make suggestions. Think about time and talent, too, not just treasure.

* To carry out a mission takes discipline and practice. We have a strong history of religious practices and disciplines in our tradition. Too often they got jettisoned because they got disconnected from their real purposes and became empty actions. But if you want to prepare for the marathon, you better take on some disciplines. For parents, that means practicing such things as consistency, honesty, patience (lots of patience), forbearance, charity, and many other virtues. It involves hope! Pick a virtue you would like more of in your life, ask God for help, then practice that virtue daily.

4. Lack of knowledge of the faith

This may seem an odd threat to family life, and I have to tell you quite frankly I have never had any parent name this as one on their list of five threats. But for many people, their faith is irrelevant to their daily lives, and thus God seems far away. Many of the rich traditions of our faith that can help them access God are foreign to them, and so they search for answers where they are not to be found. In the words of the old country-and-western song, they're "lookin' for love in all the wrong places."

Many of today's parents say they didn't get a very good religious education. While there were surely some great places where religious education shone through the '70s and '80s, in many places religious educators were still scrambling to catch up from seismic shifts in religious education and in the church's own sense of self.

I apologize for my part in that. I was teaching in the '70s, shortly after the pre-Vatican II books all became outdated in one afternoon, and if you believe the caricature of those times, all we did was make banners, set balloons free, share our feelings, and sing "Kumbaya." Surely it was nowhere near that bad, but it was a time of great confusion and change.

When it comes to their role in passing on a living faith, many parents feel the need for remedial help. Here are some strategies:

* Get a good book on lives of the saints. Robert Ellsberg's All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (Crossroad/Herder & Herder) will open your eyes to how Christian heroes have lived the faith throughout the ages. You can also find "saint a day" calendars or popular biographies of key people in our Catholic history.

* Participate fully in your children's sacramental preparation and religious education. The curricula today are wonderful. Most programs offer information sheets for parents on materials being covered. Take part in sacrament preparation nights and spend time talking with your kids about what they're learning in religion class.

* Join adult education of some sort. Look into faith sharing, classes in the parish, or online resources. I can recommend a fantastic book: Invitation to Catholicism (ACTA Publications) by U.S. CATHOLIC columnist Alice Camille. It's a great overview of the faith and gives more than just dry content. It invites you into a relationship. It's good to wrestle with your faith and make it your own. Then you'll be exposing your children to a living faith instead of a relic of days gone by.

5. Insufficient joy through lack of intimacy

This is really an amalgam of a lot of parents' comments about lack of connection, closeness, and joy. The points we've covered so far contribute to this malaise--overwork, overscheduling, distraction by the media, confusion about our roles, failure to see life's sacredness.

There's another contributing cause that's worth noting: technology. This idea comes from University of Notre Dame professor Richard R. Gaillardetz's book, Transforming Our Days: Spirituality, Community and Liturgy in a Technological Culture (Crossroad/Herder & Herder). He says the point of technology is to give us life's goods without some of the attending burdens.

For example, having a washing machine in your home gets you clean clothes without the trip down to the river to beat the clothes on the rocks. Likewise, a microwave gets you a complete meal cooked in minutes rather than hours. We get the results we want without as much of the burden.

But sometimes the burdens aren't only burdens. They may also be opportunities. Often those burdens involved tasks that brought us closer together. Think, for example, of a community barn raising as opposed to bringing in a prefabricated structure. Certain groups like the Amish decide whether to use technology based on whether it furthers community or breaks it apart.

A lot of our technology has the potential of breaking down community: four televisions in the same house; people eating microwaved meals all at different times; people walking down the street side by side but each on their cell phone to somebody else. Let's look at some ways that those burdens could also be opportunities:

* Washing the dishes by hand while a family member dries them allows you to stand and chat in ways you might not otherwise do.

* Preparing meals from scratch heightens your sense of connection to nature, farmers, and the web of life. Using a microwave to make dinner, you can miss out on the camaraderie of cooking together.

* Phone answering machines can help you protect your dinner hour and still stay connected. Or they can become a way in which you never really communicate person to person, with everyone leaving messages, faxes, e-mails, etc. High-tech can lead to no human touch.

The key is to know when to hang onto our burdens, to recognize that sometimes those burdens are occasions of grace. And so, rather than buying the pre-made sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, we make them special according to Great-Grandma's recipe. Instead of driving to the local store to pick up milk and bread, some nights it's better to grab one of the kids and say, "C'mon, we're going for a walk."

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a good model here. She was open but wary; ready to trust but nobody's fool. She watched and waited and went on with her life, anticipating that God would irrupt into the world. It's that anticipation and openness that we should emulate with our choices as parents. Let's be open and ready for God to enter into our life in a real way--sometimes through the very burdens we were hoping to avoid.

There are many other challenges to families, and the good news is that it's getting so bad that parents are becoming aware they can't continue on with "business as usual." We need to create new habits, behaviors, and routines that increase our family's resilience and emerge from our true values and move us toward our true goals.

This returns us to our first principle: Be intentional. When you make choices that further your connections and your presence to one another, you will be in a better position to handle any threat that comes your family's way.

TOM MCGRATH is a contributing editor of U.S. CATHOLIC magazine and author of At Home with our Faith, the family spirituality newsletter published by Claretian Publications.