Families’ Christmas prayer…”on-line”

By Enrique Gómez-Puig Gómez
Feb 3rd, 2021

Maybe we are a bit tired of virtuality, but it was precisely that format what encouraged us to launch this proposal, since it made easier for us to encounter so many school families. The domestic or home context, allowed us to join this encounter within the schedules every family has at home: the older children still wearing the uniform after doing their homework, in other homes the youngest children in pyjamas a little while before dinner.

Around 50 families joined the proposal looking for a time of intimate and homely prayer, with many little heads leaning out to say hello to partners they saw behind the screens.

Preparing the prayer in Advent season, within a strange pandemic time, was easy. The wish of EMBRACING Jesus, who accompanies us during the academic year, helped us to present our homely and worldly needs to our Lord, writing in the card sent with the invitation. We also lit a light in every home so it could enlighten that path of preparation for God’s renewed arrival. We also shared, with elders and children’s words, how we could become FIRE needed in this world.

We have been checking for a long time how much we need these “green spaces” that help us stop and search for hope, creating silence in the presence of God and strengthening ourselves with what we have shared with the others.

There were prepared guiding notes, slides and sound, tested by the pastoral team, but the spontaneity of a prayer with children, and each of them at home, gave the encounter true life: family`s technological problems, microphones that remain on, voices which did not dare to speak when they wanted, etc. We could verify once more that the richness of a school lies in the people who are part of it: children, parents, teachers…an educational community that shares and grows up encouraged and supported by God.

This time it was just with Nursery and Primary students, but it is our desire to encourage the oldest students to spend some time at home and pray together.

We would like to finish by thanking our colleagues, families and other SAFA-Loyola schools boost, who, with their work and creativity, inspire us to continue proposing and living in Hope.

Pastoral Team. Portaceli School. Loyola Foundation.