On parish life

Can I add my two cents on the parish life conversation? (link, link, link, link and slightly different link. Can you tell my class is over? I'm reading blogs again.) Good points all. This topic is a conversation starter - good for creating community, evidently. It’s a conversation that my husband and I have had a various points in time when we were in parishes that were successful at involving parishioners and when we were at parishes that weren’t.  I don’t have a formula for what makes a great parish, because I agree with my sister that there is no one size fits all community.  I also think my sister is right that we shouldn’t expect our Church to fulfill all our needs. On the other hand, I think Melanie’s quote of Cardinal Ratzinger is great – our Church must be a source of brotherhood and community.  We meet for communion at Mass not just to receive Christ in the Eucharist, but also Christ in the Word and Christ in the People. In Christ, we're all family, so we should try to act like one.

When we were growing up, my parents did not hang out with friends from church. Since they were converts, they didn’t grow up with the people in our parish, and we had moved out to a rural area where we had to drive 15 or 20 minutes into town to go to church, so we didn't have any neighborhood connections, which create community naturally (as do school connections, but we were public school heathens). Additionally, my grandparents and some cousins lived in town, so my parents hung out with family or friends they had from the neighborhood or from school. 

True friendship can’t be forced, but it can be facilitated, especially in communities where people come and go. Like lots of bloggers, apparently, I am not a great one at small talk.  I tend to either have nothing to say or too much. But I appreciate when other people come up and talk to me. And as we’ve moved around, I’ve gotten better at being the person to start conversations. I don’t know that coffee and donuts after Mass is THE answer to creating fellowship, but it certainly helps.  You can tell after a couple of Sundays which families have kids that would mesh well with your own by the way they are rushing up to grab donuts. 

A couple of our parish experiences stand out. Both had priests who would tell you what to do. At our parish in Mississippi, the pastor told me in during my confession that we were going to start taking communion to the old folks’ home. Brilliant! It was not easy, but so worth it.  He also told people what they were doing for the parish festivals, told people he’d see them at the parish dinner, gave your kid a reading for the stations of the cross, made sure he assigned different people to bring stuff to this meal, that prayer service, the other event… He had a gift. And he said it all with an Irish brogue and a smile, so everyone obeyed.

This parish was large and dynamic (I just read a review of a Matthew Kelly book about what makes a “dynamic Catholic” –as opposed to just “active”, ie. churchgoing – and the short answer is prayer, study, generosity and evangelization.) There was always something going on, and usually someone reached out a personal invitation. (Southern Hospitality?)

In Virginia, our priest wasn’t quite as assigning.  In fact, he was rather shy and bumbling, but good-humored.  The effect was that he made people want to take care of him.  Pasta with the Pastor during Lent was huge, although this was not a large parish.

It’s worth noting that both of these parishes had schools. We were homeschooling in Virginia, but our kids were involved with the parish scout troop and CCD.  They made friends, so we made friends through them.  And our homeschooling friends also got together for spiritual activities like Armata Bianca and saints’ day activities. The Mississippi parish also had a school, plus an active youth group and lots of opportunities for kids to get together for service work. The teens had a yard work group that cleaned elderly parishioners' yards.  There was Friday night PLAY, where parents could drop their kids off for food and games with a catechetical bent (I can’t remember what the acronym stood for) and then go out for a date or stay and visit with each other.

I also have to give credit to Regnum Christi when we were in Illinois and Indiana for providing spiritual connections. The gospel reflection groups were what kept me involved – real, nurturing friendships were formed through them. Although I was uncomfortable with the large group’s “recruitment” mentality, I did benefit from the small group’s spiritual sustenance.  Another friend in Illinois who had a large yard and a basement hosted a rosary group with a few women from different parishes  - people she liked or thought she would like. Kids prayed the first decade with the moms and then they played, while moms finished praying and then talked. The shared prayers created an intimacy that led to real friendships – these were the people who would bring you dinner when your baby was born or take your kids for an afternoon while you napped with a new baby.

In our current situation, we attend chapel on base. It’s a very small community with almost no “ministries” except CCD  - and coffee and donuts.  We know some families outside of church from our neighborhood or the command, so we socialize together without officially organizing anything.  I keep wanting to start a youth group, but my boys don’t want me in charge. Fortunately, some opportunities have come up for the kids to get together – a dinner for foster kids, a parish picnic at the beach, a group getting together to go see a movie on base. Most of the kids go to school together so they have that connection, too. 

Wanting a little more spiritual nourishment this season, I just invited a few women over for a gospel reflection group for Advent.  Only 5 showed up, and I kind of bumbled through, not having any real vision for how to facilitate with a group of peers (didn’t want to be in teacher mode), but my daughter made delicious sour cream coffee cake and cranberry walnut bars, so maybe they’ll come back for the food!

Every time we move, the best new friends we make are those from our parish.  I do tend to show up at our new parishes and check out the faces in the pews looking for potential friends. I scan the bulletins looking for opportunities to meet people. We look for parishes that have kids in the pews about the same age as my kids because my kids often make my friends for me. 

Lately, one of my conundrums has been keeping track of the people who were my good friends at different times and places, especially as I think about writing our Christmas letter. I wonder how many of these friendships can I sustain over time and distance?  

But I don’t want to lose track of these people who really went out of their way to help me when I was struggling with small children. As I’m sitting here trying to remember what we did in different places, what I really remember are the kindnesses of a few individuals, the personal invitations from people who weren’t afraid to invite someone with 6 kids over to their house (or to a beach barbecue, at any rate). These are the people who taught me by example how the faith should be lived: they welcomed the stranger, not with idle chitchat but with real concern.  They went out of their way to offer assistance and kindness.  Thinking of them fills me with love – and sorrow that I haven’t always lived up to their example -- and wistfulness that we can’t all live in some Catholic ghetto somewhere, where we might annoy one another sometimes by too much proximity, but we might also sometimes get a foretaste of the joy of the communion of saints.