Hearth & Altar

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come. Ecclesiastes speaks directly to someone young today, and it does not wait until later in life to say it. The whole passage is built on that word before - before the years when pleasure fades, before the body starts failing in the ways the poem describes in careful, almost tender detail. The instruction is not a warning about old age. It is advice about timing: form the habit now, while forming it is still easy, rather than trying to build it later when everything else has gotten harder.

That is squarely a lesson for a household with children still at home. Faith formed early does not need to be relearned from nothing later - it becomes part of how a person already sees the world, the same way a language learned as a child never has to be studied the way a language learned at forty does. Children who learn to pray now are not just being taught a habit for later. They are being given something that will already be theirs by the time they need it most.

Today's optional memorial belongs to Cosmas and Damian, twin brothers and physicians in the early fourth century who treated the sick without charging for it. Their names are still spoken aloud in the Eucharistic Prayer at every Mass that uses the Roman Canon - among the oldest company any saint keeps. They give today's lesson a concrete form: whatever you were given, given away, freely, while you had the chance.

• For our family, that we would form good habits now rather than waiting for a more convenient time, we pray to the Lord.
• For our children, that faith planted early would grow with them rather than needing to be relearned later, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who are in the later, harder seasons Ecclesiastes describes, that they would still find joy in their days, we pray to the Lord.
• For the intercession of Saints Cosmas and Damian, that we would give freely what we have been given, we pray to the Lord.

Teach your children one prayer tonight that they do not already know by heart - short enough to actually memorize in one sitting. Say it together three times before bed.

Ecclesiastes describes old age in images your children will find strange and maybe a little unsettling - the guardians of the house trembling, the grinders idle because they are few, the windows growing dim. Those are old poetic pictures for arms, teeth, and eyes. You do not need to explain every image tonight. What matters is the instruction that opens the whole passage: remember your Creator now, before any of that arrives.

Tell your children plainly that faith is easier to build young than to rebuild later, the same way any habit is. That is not a reason to rush childhood. It is a reason not to assume there will always be a more convenient season to start.