Every home is to be a little church and one of the primary tasks of every Orthodox family should be to create an environment within the home that will foster ‘church’ growth. An Orthodox home should be an environment in which prayer, spiritual education, and outreach are present. Although I cannot guarantee that my children will have faith, I can, through the acting grace of God, equip them with the tools to be saints. And it is with this in mind, that we parents need to invest our energies into bringing church home.

This Thursday, June 5th, marks the feast of Holy Ascension. As stated so beautifully in the Apolytikion, it is a feast of joy. Our risen Lord spent 40 days on earth with his disciples and left them with the great promise of preparing a place for us and of the coming Holy Spirit.

O Christ our God, You ascended in Glory and gladdened Your disciples by the promise of the Holy Spirit. Your blessing assured them that You are the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world.

I am sure all our family schedules vary considerably. Some of us work, some of us are full time homemakers. To answer the varying flexiblities of each family, I will try to offer a variety of activites for you to choose from or to jumpstart your own creativity. The activities I suggest will fall under 3 categories to loosely correspond with morning, afternoon and evening prayers: greeting the day, afternoon fun, and around the dinner table. The idea is to build these activites around a daily ritual of prayer. Afterall, spiritual education and outreach are most valuable when accompanied by prayer!

Greeting the Day: It is a popular custom to take a hike up hills or mountains on Ascension Day to commemorate Christ and the Disciples climbing up Mt. Olives. The Swedes have a tradition of getting up very early in the morning and going to a forest glen to hear birds singing at sunrise. Dependent on when the sun rises in your city, you might want to try some variation of this. Maybe start a morning hike at sunrise and end on top of a hill with a picnic breakfast. Or if time is short, awake your family early and say morning prayers somewhere outside where you can watch the sun rise and hear the birds greet the day with you. If you can’t take a hike in the morning, take one later in the day.

Afternoon fun: Most of the afternoon fun activities will be more craft oriented. I have borrowed the following idea from a British Catholic custom. In the Catholic Church, there is recorded an English custom of a processional involving a banner bearing a lion at the head and a dragon at the rear to symbolize Christ’s triumph in his ascension over the evil one. So, the project for Ascension Day is to make a Banner of Triumph. Here are two links for paper plate lion and dragon crafts. After your children have completed the craft (with or without your help depending on their ages), go ahead and attach them to a banner with the words “Christ is the Victor!” or something of that sort written on it. Then, at the end of the day before extinguishing the Paschal candle, make a processional around the house during prayer time singing the hymn “Christ is Risen from the dead” one last time. Then, hang the banner on the wall until Pentecost and extinguish the Paschal candle together before bedtime.

Around the Dinner Table: One fun tradition is to eat a bird for dinner in memory of how Christ ‘flew’ to heaven. If you were able to make the Lion and the Dragon crafts with your children, continue to follow the plan outlined above. If you were unable to make the banner, go ahead and make the final Paschal procession without one. Before extinguishing the candle, though, go ahead and read the readings for this feast day together as a family. The readings for the feast come from Luke 24:36-53 and Acts 1:1-12. If your children are small, use a children’s bible so that the story is more understandable. Discuss with your children what Christ’s promise was to his disciples and what he commanded his disciples to do.

A good verse to memorize together as a family this week is:

MARK 16:15 & 19 NIV
He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. … ” After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God.

Have a wonderful feast day!

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