Keeping the Liturgical Year in Your Home

The Church does not measure time the way the world does. While the calendar on the wall counts months and quarters, the Church counts Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, the long green stretch of Tempus per annum, and the feasts of the saints scattered through it like lamps. To keep the liturgical year at home is simply to let your house remember what the Church remembers.

The home keeps time too

The domestic church has always marked the seasons in small, tangible ways — a wreath in Advent, ashes carried home on the forehead, a candle for a name-day saint. None of it is decoration. It is the same instinct that gives us vestments and processions, brought down to the scale of a kitchen table: the conviction that what we believe should be visible, and that beauty is owed to God.

Let your walls follow the seasons

One quiet way to live the year is to let the sacred art in your home change with it. An image of Our Lady through Advent, as we wait with her. The face of the Risen Christ through the fifty days of Easter. The patron of the month, or the saint whose feast falls near a family birthday. A wall that changes is a wall that teaches.

Marking the feasts

A feast day asks to be kept, not merely noticed. Light a candle for the saint of the day. Set their image where the family gathers. Let the children learn the saints the way they learn their cousins — by seeing their faces often. Over a year, the great cloud of witnesses becomes familiar company.

Ordinary Time is not empty time

The long weeks of Ordinary Time are not a pause between the great seasons but the ground in which ordinary holiness grows. This is the season for the patron saints and the smaller feasts, for steady devotion rather than high drama. A home that prays well in Ordinary Time is ready for the feasts when they come.

Begin with one season and one image. Let the year teach you the rest.

Find art for every season in our collection of Catholic wall art.