Family and Church Communities

 I’ve written three previous blog entries about communities and ones that I’ve been involved with. There are two that I haven’t touched on: family and church.

During my thinking about community, the family came up in a number of different ways. With so much mobility in our contemporary world, many parents find their children not close to them. We currently have sons living in New Jersey, Rhode Island and California. Contrast that with my wife’s family where five of her mother’s siblings lived in the same town as she did. Or my parents’ situation where, when they retired, they moved to a town where three of my mother’s siblings were living.

In thinking about family as a community, I think about our situation when our four sons were growing up. Our life, as parents, was focused around our family and our children. Certainly there were times when Pat and I arranged for a baby sitter and went out for dinner. But most of the time, our focus was on our family. Our activities were family activities. Our vacations were family vacations. As our boys got older and started school, we made friends with parents of kids they were in school with. When they started playing sports and got involved in band and theater, we made new friends with parents of kids involved in those activities. Pat and I and our sons formed a small community and the larger communities we were involved in had connections to our family community.

I grew up as an only child. My father left Canada as a teen-ager and most of my relatives on his side of the family are in Canada and I have met few of them. On my mother’s side of the family, I had only 3 cousins, who did not live near us. (One has passed away and the other two now live in California.) My wife, on the other hand, has four siblings who live within two hours of our house in NJ. She stays in close touch with her siblings and through them keeps up with what their kids are up to. Over the last few years, we have gotten together with her siblings and their spouses a couple times a year. I look forward to these get-togethers and sharing a meal and conversation with them. Over the years, there have been regular family gatherings with the larger family (Pat’s siblings and their kids and grandkids). The larger family gatherings give us, our children and grandchildren the opportunity to stay connected to our family community.

The Catholic parish we belonged to for more than 40 years was also an important community for me in a number of ways. Our regular participation at Sunday Mass provided an opportunity to express and deepen my faith in God and Jesus Christ as part of a worship community. Having come of age around the time of the Second Vatican Council, I approached Sunday liturgies as a community experience, not just as an individual worship experience. When I was growing up, attendance at Mass was more of a spectator experience, following along in our English language Missal as the priest, with his back to us, recited the Latin prayers. But Vatican II put the emphasis of the liturgy on the community and spoke of the priesthood of all the faithful, not just the ordained among us.

So I benefitted from the larger community of the parish. But Pat and I also were part of smaller communities within the parish. We were involved in Pre-Cana (marriage preparation for engaged couples) and the Food for the Needy Committee, which organized a Thanksgiving food drive that provided the fixings for Thanksgiving dinner for 400 families. We were also Eucharistic Ministers, so we established connections with others involved in that ministry. I was involved for about 10 years in the parish High School youth group. In each of those activities we established connections with the others involved.  Additionally, when you go to the same Sunday Mass for over 40 years (we almost always attended the 9:30 am or 11 am Mass), you see the same people every week and feel a connection with many of them. Also, when our boys were growing up, the sports teams they played on were teams organized by the parish.

This blog entry is the fourth one I’ve written about community. I’ve described may communities I’ve been involved in: one that involves a reunion with friends I was in minor seminary with; some that I did not actively choose and others I entered into by choice; some that were small and others large; some that were short-term and others long-term. They’ve all helped give my life meaning and a sense of belonging. They’ve provided me with support networks as I dealt with ups and downs in my life. Writing about them has brought back memories of the communities I’ve been involved in during various periods of my life. I’m grateful to all of the people who were part of these communities for their friendship and their support. I trust you have had similar experiences of communities that have supported and sustained you in your life. Be grateful for them!