November, the month of remembrance, is at hand.

Traditionally, it’s a time to visit the graves of our loved ones, spruce up their resting places, sprinkle them with holy water and adorn them with flowers.

In our homes, it’s also a time to share memories of departed loved ones with children, old folks and those in between.

And what better way to set off on that journey of memory than with family photos says Therese Boucher.

Spend some time with Boucher, who teaches a class in family history at Mercer County College and who has created a workshop on praying with family photos, and it’s easy to understand her viewpoint that family photos can be catalysts for encountering God’s love in new ways.

Against a backdrop of scores of photos of her own family members and family homesteads, Boucher, a religious educator and author, explained what sparked her interest in using pictures in a prayerful context.

“About four years ago my dad died and left all of the family photos to be divided among his children,” she said. “As I began to go through those photos, I realized that I didn’t have the heart to divide them.”

And so, Boucher, who is married to John Boucher, director of the diocesan Office of Parish Life, and gives workshops throughout the diocese on a variety of topics, began scanning the photos and putting them on discs for each of her siblings.

Boucher was really grieving for her dad at the time and as she went through the process of creating the disks she realized that her spirits were lifting.

“As I began putting the photos on disks I realized I was feeling better and better about loosing Dad,” she said. “I had perhaps 60 or 70 photos of him. Sometimes certain ones would make me cry and others would bring me happiness.

“In his final years, my Dad was suffering so from illnesses and coming across a photo of him as a young man made me feel better.”

To illustrate that point, she produced a World War II-era photograph of her dad in his Army uniform and her mom in the fashions of the day.

The couple was situated on a legendary outcropping of rocks in Central Park where many young lovers have posed for pictures over the decades. Their happiness was evident in their smiling faces.

“Mom was a great recorder of events,” Boucher said. “She often made notations on photos and she noted on this one that Dad had a three day leave and they spent a happy time in New York.”

It was easy to see how the photo had eased her sorrow.

“After a person dies, we miss them and I began to realize that we can use photographs of them to pray with and to give that person to God,” she said. “It’s also a way of giving our feelings to God. A lot of emotions come with the experience.”

And, she explained, a lot of healing.

Boucher describes herself as a very visual person. Using visual aids when at prayer has greatly enhanced her spiritual life, she said.

“The thing that’s most important about prayer is that it is a conversation with God,” she said. “It’s not about trying to have a conversation with the deceased, it’s about coming into God’s presence with that person.”

Using the Psalms as a model because a great many of them start with a lament and end with an affirmation of the love of God, she encourages those who attend the workshop on praying with family photos to begin by describing a problem.

“Your adult child may be newly divorced, for instance. Use the name of that person in prayer, offering the child to God. You might pray something such as ‘Tom is still lonely God. I’m giving him to you asking you to stand next to him. Give him your blessing.’”

Over the years, Boucher realized that there were people she prayed for every day and decided to take things a step further and create personalized prayer cards on her home computer.

“I made myself prayer cards with their pictures at the top and I would write a prayer about the person. I would work with the text to make it fit and if it didn’t fit, I’d do it over again,” Boucher said.

This is in keeping with old tradition, she pointed out. “Years ago when people died, prayer cards with their photos were handed out. When a person is gone, you need something to help you pray. To help you come into God’s presence. For me, that something is a photograph of the person.”

When Boucher gives her workshop, as she will on Oct. 27 at Francis House of Prayer in Rancocas, she asks participants to bring family photos with them so she can give them a little guidance: think about what happened as you pray with the photo; journal about it later and by all means, share stories about the person or people in the photos, especially stories of their faith.

“One of the disconnects today is that people don’t freely share family faith stories,” she said. “Many of us, if we were to dig, would find that we had grandparents and great-grandparents that were very close to God. Let me share one: my grandmother was in a nursing home for 12 years. To her, it was heartbreaking because it was not a Catholic nursing home.

“She watched Mass every day at noon on television and she would invite other residents to watch with her. When they changed the lunchtime at the nursing home, the (Mass group) decided it was more important to watch Mass than eat lunch” Boucher said.

It didn’t take long before the nursing home staff realized the depth of the devotion and brought lunch down to them every day when Mass was over.

“How many people would do that? People in my family need to know that story.” For more information about Boucher’s workshop Photo Prayers and Family Faith Stories that Reach Across the Generations and other programs, go to www.christkey.com E-mail Boucher at tmfboucher@comcast.net