bright and cheerful homes

Bright and cheerful homes

Just attended the wedding of Victor and Sabrina, prayer of the faithful: 

For Victor and Sabrina, that they may grow in greater love and union each day 

that passes, and that they may be blessed with children, and the grace to raise a 

bright and cheerful home, let us pray to the Lord.

And it is really a grace, a blessing from God. Beautiful expression coined by St Josemaria, that our homes should be bright and cheerful.

I truly experienced this recently. So, my birthday just passed. My wife asked me what I want to do?

I said, the usual, staycation or have dinner at a fancy place or do sth nice together. She then chided me cause I didn't really include my family in the picture. She was like: huh? What about your parents? Not celebrating your bday with them? How can u be like that? 

 And it's true, I neglected my family for my birthday in that sense.. in the end, thanks to her feminine genius, I celebrated bday with my family, and it was very fun. My sis in law bought a cake. My parents were happy. And I was very happy as well.

What is our ideal family life?

The family ideal cannot be equated with the industrialized consumer family.

where the family members leave the home each morning by the clock and on a strict schedule to pursue careers, education, recreation, and so on. 

But the ideal family was the productive home with its creative kitchen, its busy workshop, its fruitful garden, and its central role in entertainment, education, and livelihood. 

Unlike the industrial home, life in a productive household is truly having life in the family. 

And it is quite interesting how WFH suddenly changed the way family life is lived. No longer do we have a clear boundary of work and family time. Lines become blurred. 

- increased family time spent 

- people starting to book workspaces in order to spent time away from home

- family become a state of shock of how to juggle this

- but you know what. 

After having adjusted to the Changes in working style, 

The world economic forum new survey shows:

Two-thirds of people around the world want to work flexibly when the COVID-19 pandemic is over, 

And almost a third are prepared to quit their job if the boss makes them go back to the office full time.

The survey of workers in 29 nations also shows people have coped better with homeworking than some feared.

I won't dare to put a value judgement on WFH, but it changes the tune back to family and back to the home as a productive place.

I know all the young parents who are working will 100% prefer this work arrangement. More time to bond and help out with the baby caretaking

That's how a home should be, with the active involvement of both parties to make it bright and cheerful.

I once read a statement one time : Home is the place where family members go after they are tired of being nice to other people 

- and there is some truth to that statement, how we are just not as polite to our family members compared to our colleagues

-how we can just let loose with our family members because they understand 

- gotta go home after I'm tired of smiling 

- we treat our family members worst than other people or even pets

- we are harder on our family than others 

- working young professionals get exhausted at work and come back, and have hardly any time or energy to spend with wife or children, shuts the door. 

This is the problem of what St Josemaria calls living a double life. We live one way with those outside the home, and another way inside the home. A good professional but a poor family man. There's a lack of unity of life. That's the consequence of an industrial home. We get fully drained, and have no energy for family. How can we overcome this? 

I once heard an excellent tip, of a family man, who before going back home, will drive his car to the gas station. Over there, he will take 5 to 7 mins just to prepare himself for going back home. In that time, he will settle what he need to on his phone for work. So that he no longer have to look at it while at home. He also take the time to recharge himself so that he can go back and fully give himself to his family. And we too need to find our own gas station, where before home, we can refuel ourselves or even settle all that is urgent at work so that at home, we can fully give ourselves to it.

You know, there was an interview with John Maxwell, an American author for many Leadership books which are NY best sellers, was asked: what is the most important thing in his life, and he said hands down, it's his family. He said the most important success in life is family. And the biggest thing that he's fear failing is his family. 

- and that is so true. Our biggest fear should be to fail in family life. 

- because unlike a job in which you can be rehired, once you fail in family life, there's no turning back. 

- sharing from a friend SY and family. Their marriage breaking apart because the husband isn't interested in spending time with his wife and kid. He prefer to outsource it to his parents to take care of the kid. He is too busy in his own man cave which is his room, doing his own things, surfing net, selling things online and other insidious things that he watch online... The wife is now thinking of a divorce... And this is very sad..

.

Principles for bright and cheerful home

1. Develop family appreciation 

- to truly understand the temperaments of your family members and children

- we can accept them better, we know why they do what they do

- we can relate to a choleric person from a melancholic or sanguine personality

- gain a new appreciation for what they are rather than what we want them to become

- are we being the spouse we need to be based on the temperament of my wife

- a good book to read is Personality Plus by Florence Littauer , really shares in depth the different personalities, their styles, and how to approach their outlook in life, love them as they ought, to understand yourself and others. 

- only once you understand their mannerism and personality do you understand why they do what they do. 

- the pope talks about expansion of the heart - this is it. Understanding is expanding the heart 

2. Develop sensitivity to each other

- not about being sensitive, but about being sensitive to others 

- to build snowball conversation. 

They are opportunity to learn someone’s true feelings and motivations.

> snowball - keep getting bigger, keep understanding and asking, don’t allow themselves to get distracted by other activities or let their mind wander, because they know their undivided attention will help the conversation grow like a snowball as it unfolds 

- leave their judgment at the door. We all have biases and make judgments—that’s only human. But as a family member, listening and learning are more important than expressing your own point of view. This doesn’t mean you have to agree with what’s being said, just that you’re willing to keep an open mind.

Anecdote of father and daughter in the car and the car wheel punctured... Daughter kept complaining and whining how this is the worst day ever, and she is cursed and it sucks to be her. Father just said, I'm sorry you have to go through this..

The next day, daughter apologised for being a prick and told her dad that she appreciated that he didn't scold her but listened to her. 

Families must be a school of love. If families fail to be as they were meant to be, it is almost always because the founders of each family, the husband and wife, have not well established their own initial love. Families are not always schools of love; they are as parents make them. Parents will not give unconditioned love to their children unless they have been trying to give it to each other.

Marriage is easily lived as long as love is kept alive; it can come to appear as an impossible burden if love is neglected and gradually let die. Blessed Josemaria often dwelt on this point, and on the importance of the little things which show and nourish love. He had original and characteristic ways of advising couples, telling wives, for instance, that they should maintain themselves attractive in their dress and person; they have an obligation towards their husband to do so. "Your husband is delighted when he sees you keeping yourself beautiful for him. Besides, it's your duty to do so, for you are his. And then he will keep himself strong and clean for you, because he is yours."[5]

That spouses must always love one another "as sweethearts," was a phrase habitually on Msgr. Escriva's lips. They must know how to keep coming back to that ideal-filled love of their courtship and of the early years of married life. "It would be to have a poor concept of marriage and of human affection to think that when one runs into difficulties, love and happiness have come to an end. It is precisely then, when the real nature of feelings appear, that self-donation and tenderness find their roots and are shown in a genuine and deep affection which is more powerful than death."

3. Continual verbal and non-verbal expression of love

- of love, of squeezes of the hand

- I've read that for every negative thing you say to your family, you need to overcome it with four positives. It takes 4x positive energy to revert the damage done

- constant affirmation 

- people say it's not the quantity but the quality. Sorry no, it's both quantity and quality. Some would liken it to oxygen, you need a minimal oxygen to survive. 

- finding time to be good husband, to make choices and time priorities. 4 things:

1. Establish time for significant events e.g. anniversary, bday etc

2. Significant needs

- one on one attention 

- dedicate time in a day to really just catch up with each other

3. Fun time 

- project , trips, travel plans, baking classes, cycling, nature walks, date nights

4. Family traditions 

- I love this quote: family are more than X number of people living together. Families are chains of individual linked to the past spanning many generation. And tradition give your family a shared sense of identity. 

- for children, traditions are anchors in the home 

- to understand and link up with, to be done together 

A survey done with children: What do you think makes a family happy?

- When they are doing things tgtr. 

4. Crisis management 

- a family grows closer together with every crisis faced and overcome

- family break ups and divorce happens not because they have many problems, but because they don't know how to handle the problems 

- because there are many couples who stay tgtr for 50 years and have faced so many problems, much more than those divorced couples who face problems 

- not the issue of marriage but the issue of handling problems

- A speaker once said a problem is a problem when i can do something about, if I can't do sth about it, it's a fact of life

For example, let me tell you what's not a problem when many of us think it's a problem. It's your child's temperament. It's not a problem, it's a fact of life. And you can't change that or do something about it. What is the problem is how you deal with the temperament 

How do we manage the problem?

1. Communication - need to communicate, even if it means to argue, so be it. Let it out, the other party need to understand. First, we need to learn to let it out. Once you've mastered letting it out, secondly, learn how to let it out nicely. The problem with most couples is that they think they are doing another a favour by not telling, but by inwardly suffering, that Messiah complex. You know what happens when a sealed toothpaste keeps getting compressed? We see the path of the least resistance happening. It will explode at the weakest point, where there is the least resistance. It's a matter of time. 

So learn to talk, to tell, what frustrates you, what you like, what you dislike. 

2. Ask! If you never ask what's the problem, you won't know what's the real problem

3. Give time. Some people need time to process the problem. 

4. Never withhold love. Don't withdraw from the problem, but don't withhold love. 

That's why you can say “family as ‘uni-versity.’” Because the family is able to combine unity and diversity, it serves as the foundation for society. The family, not the individual orthe state, is the answer to the problem of societal organization. The home is greater than the government 

and it also supersedes the individual. The family best balances the 

impossible see-saw of individual vs. state. For this reason the home is the sentinel for freedom. It keeps 

both individual and state at bay by combining the essence of both within itself. Thus the family supports both: individuals by birthing them and states by 

populating them. For either individual or state to work against the family is to cut off the limb upon which they sit.

That's why St. Josemaria really saw Opus Dei, not as an organisation, but as a family. Centre of Opus Dei is not religious houses. St Josemaria clearly saw Opus Dei as a family. And everyone who comes here enters and is accompanied as a family. We have the Prelate who's affectionately known as the Father, and the members are really his children who write to him, and the Father writes to the members as his children. He will always start the letter with, my dear children. The centres are maintained by the administration, very much like how mothers would maintain the household, with feminine touch and elegance, to really make it a home, home like that of Bethany, which St Josemaria likes to say. In the centre, we celebrate the anniversary of the father, of grandmother, grandfather, aunt Carmen, very much like a close knit family would.

And of course, the model for bright and cheerful homes has to be that of the holy family. Let us all strive towards the holy model of self giving love to another, how Mary would love Joseph in the household and how Joseph would love Mary with such affection. And how much Jesus grew in wisdom and stature to be in the presence of such beautiful parents as role models, who are schools of life and love.