Bless Your Home

A tradition that we have in our Catholic faith is that we can ask the parish priest to come and bless our home. We did this with our first home, and we wanted to do it again with our new home.

It's a very easy thing to do, just ask a priest to come by and he'll likely set a date and time to do so. It's a great opportunity to invite the priest over for dinner and get to know him a little more. Most priests enjoy being invited out for dinner, I haven't met one that doesn't. For the blessing, the priest will recite prayers and read from the Bible. Tonight, our parish priest (Father R.) read from Luke chapter ten verses five to nine.

Into whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this household.’ - Luke 10:5

The priest will then walked around the home and sprinkled each room with holy water. It's a great way to give priest a tour of your home. Of course, he will only go into rooms that you let him into, so if there are areas you don't want him to see, he won't. On the flip side he'll bless your closets and patio if you ask. He blessed our rabbits (grin).

Blessing our home helps us realize that home is not just a place where we eat and sleep. It's a place of loving, learning and growing. Blessing our home sets the stage. We are far from a perfect family but we need to help each other become, as Matthew Kelly would say, the best-version-of-ourselves, or as Blessed Mother Teresa would say "all of us must be saints in this world. Holiness is a duty for you and me".

Having our home blessed also helps our family be grateful for having a home, a roof over our heads, and to recognize that there are many people who have no home. By being grateful we look for ways to share the gift of having a home with others. So just in case you're wondering, we do have a spare room for visitors.

Picture courtesy of my father-in-law. Yes, I am short, 5'1" to be exact :)

If you aren't Catholic there are still ways that you can bless your home. If you have a pastor, he/she might have some suggestions for prayers. People of other faiths may have their own way of blessing their home too.

So would you have your home blessed? Have you? How did you do it?