Catholic Prayer: Stations of the Cross at Home

Description:

Here are some suggestions on how to pray the Stations of the Cross at home with younger children. Using your homemade Candelabrum for the Stations enhances the atmosphere even further.

Prayer:

Together with these, we use a crucifix and a booklet of meditations suitable for children, although we do not always read these. Often they are used only to acquaint the family with each Station, letting some member supply a short meditation "out of his head." Whichever, the meditations must be kept short and if possible related to something familiar in daily life.

We light all twelve candles at the start, and put out the other lights in the room, leaving one lighted in another room so that little ones will not be frightened by complete darkness. After each Station is identified, we genuflect and say the traditional prayer:

We adore Thee O Christ, and we praise Thee, Because by Thy holy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.

Other prayers are optional. The Stations may be properly said in a church by going from one Station to another and merely making a meditation at each. For the sake of uniformity and in order to include what to our children is synonymous with devotional "praying" we say, after the short meditation, an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Gloria. Then one of the children puts out a candle for that Station. They take turns, a different child putting out the candles every night. When we have finished the twelfth Station, Jesus Dies on the Cross, the last candle is snuffed, and the room is in complete darkness. If you were there, they would explain it to you this way: "It's because He was the Light of the World, and when He died, the Light was gone out of the world."

You start remembering — all the way back to Advent when the wreath and its weekly growing light anticipated the coming of the Light of the World; back to St. Lucy, whose feast and whose name anticipated the coming of the Light of the World; back to the Christ candle, lighted at midnight Christmas Eve to tell us that the Light had come into the world. He is our Light, our Sun, our All.

Prayer Source: Year and Our Children, The by Mary Reed Newland, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, 1956