Sound trumpets, bang drums

This month’s column is about music and noise and celebration this time, as you will see. I don’t believe it is normally appropriate to blow one’s own trumpet or bang one’s own drum, but there are times when banging one’s own drum is also taking the trouble to let others know something that might be useful for them. After all, banging a drum is a means of communication.

MARFAM has been about communication since 1995, specifically about issues dealing with family life and very often in a specifically organised way. I suppose I have been lucky to have been in a position to set up structures that help to make family enrichment possible.

After my husband Chris died, naturally much changed in my life, including involvement in couple programmes Catholic Engaged Encounter and Retrouvaille, a programme for hurting marriages.

One change was having more time, with the children grown up and doing their own thing. When I was offered the opportunity to set up the Family Life Desk at the SACBC, it was a challenge but also a joy. The challenge is how to address the enormous need for family relationship building as well as family spirituality. The joy has been setting up parish family ministry programmes, and especially reaching out personally to widowed people and grandparents, who don’t get on the radar too often.

The annual family calendars that has been produced for the Family Life Desk since 2004 have been fun and lots of hard work. The beauty is that through the themes each year and each month all different aspects of family life can be highlighted, as I normally do in this monthly column.

The Southern Cross column is possibly the best known of my activities as I get most comments about it. Now that Radio Veritas is on medium wave, 576AM, maybe more listeners will tune in to “Family Matters”, the weekly programme that I have hosted for a number of years.

However, my biggest joy is writing creatively about the family as the little church of the home and its various elements. MARFAM has produced a magazine since its very first days. Originally it was MARFAM Ties (do readers still remember that?); the Marriage and Family Living.

When sales started to slacken we did an evaluation. I was told that the word “marriage” in the title put some people off, because most Catholic families in Southern African are not based on marriage.

That’s sad, frightening and challenging, because MARFAM’s mission is exactly to promote healthy families, stable families that are firmly rooted and know and understand the Catholic teaching on the spirituality of marriage and of family life. So I press on but take cognisance of what is going on around us.

The newly revamped magazine also has a new name, Family Matters, and it is aimed at the more discerning reader.

Then there are the booklets, “Day by Day with God and Family”, which were another outcome of our evaluation. These booklets have proved very popular, but they are not enough to provide information and formation to deepen valuable knowledge for individuals, families and Church personnel.

The first issue of Family Matters (the magazine) is now available and how I wish it was “on the shelves”! Sales are mainly through parishes and individual subscribers.

The focus of the debut issue is on a particular topic, one that was chosen at a Family Leaders Conference in August 2011 and it’s also the main focus of May, the month for Families and Life: “Parenting is For Life”. Articles in the magazine, by a number of writers, cover the area in some depth.

Family Matters has for more than ten years been MARFAM’s free e-newsletter. This also develops current family themes; the one for April is “God and Family”.

Family does matter in the Church and in society too and it is up to us, families ourselves, to take ourselves seriously. Read what you can, apply what is possible, change what is necessary, but remember that being “Family Friendly” is making our home a home for God, a place that needs bells and whistles, a sense of joy and fulfilment, a place where Easter joy can overcome the pain and ugliness that sometimes threatens to overwhelm us.

In the Eastern churches this proclamation is a greeting: “The Lord is Risen. Alleluia”, to which the response is, “He is Risen indeed. Alleluia, alleluia! ” It’s something we ordinary mortals should celebrate with the angels and saints, in our families, with all the trumpets, drums and fanfare we can muster.

Visit www.marfam.org.za/blog for more information, and maybe an excuse to blow a trumpet or two.