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Worship and Family Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2024

Conrad Pepler O.P.
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To write on worship and family life is nearly as great an undertaking as to outline the world-wide process from its coming out from God in creation to its return to Him in praise and love. For God created the world that He might be worshipped and praised in an unending hymn of love by His creatures, of whom the highest in this world is man. Man is not only the figurehead of creation; he is, with the divine assistance, the continual promoter of this same creation; and it is in the family, above all, that he exercises this noble right to co-operate in the work of God. The family is in a sense the hub of creation, and the very raison d’etre of creation is worship. Even the natural family has an intimate touch of the divine in it, for does not God co-operate by an immediate act of creation in the production of every human soul? The first unmeaning cry of the newly-born child is in reality a cry of praise for the Omnipotent Creator.

We are concerned here especially with Christian marriage and Christian family life in which all the natural aspects of divine worship, voiced consciously or unconsciously by these co-operators in God’s creative act, are raised to a higher order and united by grace to the worship offered by the only-begotten Son of God, made Man that He might harmonize the discordant notes and restore to God a perfect Hosanna and Alleluia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 20 , Issue 234 , September 1939 , pp. 655 - 666
Copyright
Copyright © 1939 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 St. Thomas says: ‘Matrimony at least in its signification touches this sacrament (the Eucharist) in so far as it signifies the union of Christ with the Church, of which union the Eucharist is a figure; hence the Apostle says “This is a great Sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the Church.”’ (Eph. v, 33); (III, 65, iii).

2 Orate Fratres, March, 1935.

3 Cf. Summa, II‐II, 104.3.

4 Ad nxor, 11.9.