Liturgical Resolutions

Holly Dodd highlights the Liturgical New Year as a perfect opportunity to begin again.  

Advent kicks off the Church’s liturgical year. It’s time to begin again. Have you been yearning to take a step in growing your faith life and you just haven’t found the time? Does adding one more thing feel too overwhelming to consider?  

My journey with liturgical living began with my feeling a bit like I was a complete failure. I was learning about ways families were incorporating their Catholic faith into their everyday lives. All I was seeing was my own missed opportunities. My oldest was halfway through high school and I felt defeated. I was becoming convinced that living the faith in real life at home was a powerful way to raise a family, and I felt like I was late to the party.

In 2018 I read Kendra Tierney’s new book: The Catholic All year Compendium. Something about the way she wrote inspired me to just give it a try, start small, and see what happens. Perhaps I was not too late to begin again. 

I’m an overachiever and a recovering perfectionist; starting simple was difficult for me. I wanted to do everything Kendra was doing with her family. I wanted to celebrate all the things, feast through all the festivals, pray all the prayers. I also knew that I would be setting myself up for certain failure if I set the expectations so high. I had nine children at home and we were at sports practices and scout meetings several nights a week. There was schoolwork and choir practice and chores. If I was going to succeed, I had to swallow my pride and start small.

A real blessing was I felt like the liturgical new year was just far enough ahead into the future that I could set some “resolutions” and have a starting line from which to take my first steps into this new journey.  

Baptismal Anniversaries: a Special Opportunity to Celebrate as a Family  

I began by looking up the baptismal anniversary dates of each of my children so that we could celebrate them in an intentional way. I made a chronological list and added them to my calendar for the coming year. When it came time for a baptismal anniversary, we let the child of honor choose the menu that night. Before eating, we lit a candle and opened the Catholic Book of Blessings to pray the prayers designated for a baptismal anniversary.

As prescribed in the simple blessing, each family member dipped their fingers in holy water (from a jar we filled at church) and made a cross on the forehead of the child we were celebrating. It was so simple and yet, so special. If we happened to have a guest over that evening, we simply included them in the celebration. We’ve found this to be an extra special opportunity for friends who aren’t Catholic. We always invited them to participate in the blessing with holy water as well.  

With this framework in place, we found ourselves recognizing other opportunities to honor the liturgical year as the year unfolded. We attended a festival for Our Lady of Gudalupe at our local parish. We left a little bit of our Christmas decor up until Candlemas. We adopted a friend’s unusual Lenten tradition of not using electric lights on Lenten Fridays. We began abstaining from meat every Friday throughout the year. We grew closer to God by placing Him first in little ways. 

Liturgical Living Doesn’t Have to be Perfect  

Sometimes we had to shift a baptismal celebration to a different night of the week, because there were conflicts or sick kids. Sometimes time just got away, as it does in family life. Despite the challenges, our imperfect endeavors helped us grow in awareness of the liturgical year and of some of the really beautiful aspects of our Catholic faith. Though I began this journey feeling like I was behind the curve, I quickly found myself to be a local expert among my friends who wondered how to celebrate a particular saint or what was coming up next in the liturgical year.  

The new liturgical year offers a natural opportunity for a fresh start. It’s the perfect time to begin again, to set a new year’s resolution. It’s not too late to begin just one new tradition in your family. What will you begin?     

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Copyright 2025 Holly Dodd
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