Living Beyond Sunday

Making Your Home a Holy Place

By Adam and Haylee Minihan and David and Pamela Niles

Ascension Press, 2022

104 pages, $11.95

To order: LIVING BEYOND SUNDAY - Making Your Home a Holy Place | EWTN Religious Catalogue

On the first full day in our first apartment as newlyweds, I carefully unwrapped the crucifix I inherited from my grandparents, a miniature of the wayside shrines found throughout the Austrian countryside. I placed it on a small white cabinet that my husband and I had designated as our family “altar” beside the diptych icon of Jesus and the Theotokos we had received as a wedding gift. Since that day, we have spent time most mornings and evenings over the last 15 years praying as a couple and a family before this altar, now overflowing with religious images, statues and a first-class relic, offering our joys and sufferings to God. Wherever we have moved, the altar has been placed in a central location in the living room, revealing the truth that our domestic life and space are sacred. 

In their book Living Beyond Sunday: Making Your Home a Holy Place, Adam and Haylee Minihan and David and Pamela Niles explain in a very accessible way how to live out this truth in all parts of our family and home life. 

They give the basics of making our homes a reflection of the universal Church, explaining: “When we think about it, we live the majority of our faith outside of ‘church,’ in our homes and with our families. If we want to live a truly authentic Christian life, wouldn’t it make sense to make our homes like a ‘church away from church’?” 

This little book lays down the basic theology of home life and encourages families to be intentional in every part of their home life, from relationships to the liturgical year, to chores, to how they spend their leisure time, to serving each other, to hospitality. 

What makes this book unique is that it guides the reader to consider the importance of their homes as a domestic church, without overwhelming the reader with lots of things for each feast day or liturgical season. Rather, this book pulls the reader out to a broader level and helps the reader to consider the reason for this intentional living. 

It focuses on forming one’s mind and heart and changing one’s view and experience of family home life. From there, it gives simple applications of these concepts to help families begin the process of seeing their homes as a domestic church.

For example, they have a whole chapter on how each room has a special function in the domestic church as a “physical manifestation of the process of sanctification.” 

Each part of our house is a place to encounter God, and we live before God in each space. 

A way I have experienced this in my own family life is through setting up Stations of the Cross images in each room of our house by a cross or crucifix and going through the entire house praying the stations together as a family. We did this more frequently when the children were too young to go to evening stations at church. I love when we pray them throughout our home, for it emphasizes to our family that our home is a place to offer our sufferings with Christ, that this life is a journey to heaven. 

The Minihans and Nileses wrote this book to help families be intentional, to sanctify their homes, to realize that each minute is part of our formation of our families for heaven. 

An important discussion they emphasize is that leisure in family life is not “vegging out” or seeking distraction and entertainment, but seeking a true Sabbath rest as a family on Sunday and even at times throughout the week. My family has also experienced the benefits of true leisure together. Daily quiet times, family dinners, evening prayer, and a bedtime read-a-loud story are all part of our basic routine, for everybody, even our teenager. We take extended leisure through camping vacations in beautiful places.

When families live liturgically and form our domestic churches, we do it not to check off little boxes or to fit some ideal-Catholic-family-life mold, but because these little, intentional, repetitive acts are the things that form souls for heaven. 

As it is put in Living Beyond Sunday, for Christian families, “our goal is heaven” and “[w]e can only achieve this goal by living a sacramental life, cooperating with God’s grace, and keeping our eyes fixed on eternal life.” I recommend this book for any family that is open to embracing these simple mentalities that can then be expanded into fuller, richer home life.