Preparing our Homes for Holy Week (Part 1)

We are entering into the holiest week of the year, a time when we remember not only our Savior’s triumphant entry as king in to Jerusalem, but more importantly his passion and death. 

This year, in particular, brings with it a certain sense of disquiet.  Our hearts are restless.  Our hearts are anxious.  So what are we to do during this holiest time of year, when we can’t go into our church’s and meet our Lord there to walk with him?

We must use this time to create and retreat to our own Domestic Churches.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the Domestic Church as “a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues and of Christian charity.” (1666)  Just as a home is much more than a collection of rooms under one roof, so our homes are meant to become much more than a place where a family dwells – they are meant to become a place where our Lord dwells with us.  They are to become in a sense, little churches, where families come together to share and grow in their faith. 

So what can we do to bring the sacredness of Holy Week into our homes and transform them?

For brevity’s sake, we’ll focus on the beginning of Holy Week in this post, with more to come on how to remember the Triduum and celebrate Easter in posts to come.

If you’d not already done so, now would be a good time to up your sacrificial game for the coming week.  If you’ve been praying, what is one more thing you could add to your prayer life?  If you’ve given up chocolate, consider giving up all sweets during Holy Week.  We are living in difficult times, times which require heroic virtue.  This means we shouldn’t be content to focus solely on prayer.  We must focus on sacrifice and fasting as well.  This helps us to really exercise our spiritual muscles, helping us to renounce earthly pleasures in anticipation of something much greater.  Jesus even tells us that in order to rid the world of certain demons, it requires not only prayer, but fasting. (Mk 9:29)  So focus this week on upping the ante with your prayers and mortifications.

The first few days of Holy Week are a good opportunity to really do some deep cleaning around your home.  Those closets that need organizing, the windows that need washing, the floors that need scrubbed – yes, now is a good time to tackle as much as you can.  We are embodied spirits, which means that what we do with our bodies really matters.  What affects our bodies affects our souls, and vice versa.  If our Domestic Churches are untidy and unclean, you can be certain that it has an effect on our souls as well.  So take some time to clean and prepare our homes for our Easter celebrations. 




Holy Wednesday is also known as Spy Wednesday, because this was the day that Judas betrayed Jesus by arranging to turn him in for 30 pieces of silver.  In Kendra Tierney’s book, The Catholic All Year Compendium, you can find an interesting activity you can do with your children.  Parents hide 30  pieces of silver (quarters) somewhere in the home.  Then the kids find the money.  As she writes in the book, it becomes an interesting social experiment.  Seemingly good children become greedy and may shove smaller siblings around in order to find the silver first.  It becomes a good way to discuss as a family how Judas’ greed is not so unlike our own sinfulness.    

Another way to enrich the life of your Domestic Church on Spy Wednesday is to participate in the Czechoslovakian tradition of making Judases, or Jidáše.  These are honey breakfast rolls which are shaped in such a way so as to represent the rope with which Judas hung himself. 

So take these next few days of Holy Week to prepare not only our hearts, but our homes, our Domestic Churches, for the upcoming passion and death of our Lord.