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!

Communities We Choose

 In a previous blog, I wrote about communities I have been part of where I had no choice about the community, but became part of smaller communities that developed out of the larger ones. In this blog, I want to talk about communities that we choose to be part of.

As I said in previous blogs, I believe that communities give our lives meaning and a sense of belonging. I think they also provide a support network for us as we deal with life’s ups and downs. And, people develop communities our of shared interests.

I think of two communities my parents belonged to because of their choosing. The first consisted of couple other families of French Canadian descent. (My father was born in Canada as were my mother’s parents.) I remember that, when I was a child, my parents would visit regularly with these other families. We also shared holiday meals with one or other of the families. Both families had sons who were the same age as I was. After my parents retired, they moved back to the town in Connecticut where my mother grew up and where some of her siblings still lived. My parents joined the local senior center and for many years attended the Senior Center five days a week and participated in activities, got their lunch there and attended trips organized by the Center. The Senior Center and the friends they made there were a big part of their lives.

My wife, Pat, has written a number of children’s books. For many years, she belonged to a writers’ group based in Bucks County, PA. The group met monthly and she became friends with the members. A smaller group evolved out of the larger group and also met monthly on a different day. Although the groups met to review each others’ writing efforts, they seemed to develop friendships that were based on more than just the writing. The larger group would go out to lunch after their monthly meeting. Even after a number of them stopped writing books, they have continued to get together periodically for lunch. During the pandemic, the smaller group continued spending time with one another over Zoom. Members of both groups continue to keep in contact with and support each other through emails.

As for me, I have belonged to a number of groups/communities of my choosing, including our local Habitat for Humanity affiliate, our town’s Democratic Committee and a couple peace groups located in the Lehigh Valley. I have been involved with the Habitat for Humanity for more than 15 years. I enjoy working with the people involved in actually building the houses and my time with them provides me with really the only group I am physically with on a regular basis at this time. For a number of years, I was involved actively with Catholics for Peace and Lepoco (a peace group started during the Vietnam War and still going strong). For the last few years, I have been involved with the local Democratic Committee. I ran for Town Council five years ago and have been involved campaigning for Democratic candidates for various offices. Each of these gave me a sense of belonging to a group that shared my interests and provided support in my efforts to achieve different goals.

Sometimes we get involved in communities that seem to have a special character or have more significant impact on our lives than most other groups or communities. I can think of two communities in my life for which this was true. When I was 31 years old, I started working at a public residential facility for people with developmental disabilities. The State of New Jersey had just started to participate in a Medicaid program that provided funding to improve services to these individuals. One of the requirements was that interdisciplinary teams had to meet to develop Individual Habilitation Plans (IHPs) for each resident. I was part of a department that would be the leaders of these interdisciplinary teams. Initially there were 9 of us in the department and we were charged with developing procedures and processes for developing these IHPs and monitoring the their implementation. It was a very intense time, we all had desks in a 3 room office suite, met daily to work out the details and even discussed issues during lunch. I believe these things helped forge a strong bond among those involved. The office gradually grew larger but the bonds seem to hold. We would go out for lunch regularly as a group. We celebrated birthdays each month. We had after-work get-togethers for a yearly picnic and other activities such as bowling.

An even more special community for me involved my time at a private residential facility in southern NJ. Again, it was a residential facility for people with developmental disabilities. But the experience did not involve an intense process developing a new program. Rather, it was an immersion into an existing program. The facility had a residential program and a school program for the younger residents and some others who were day students. I worked in the residential program as a houseparent for a group of 8 teenage boys. Many of the residential staff lived on the campus, either in the dorms with the residents or in a couple of staff buildings on the grounds. As houseparents, we ate our meals with our group of residents in a central dining hall. But, we were also able to eat our meals there on our days off, if we chose. During the summer, we took all the residents to a camp in mid-coast Maine. The facility provided housing for all staff who came to the camp. Some staff lived in the cottages with the residents; some lived in staff housing provided on or off the camp grounds; and some chose to rent a place on their own. The camp situation, away from our usual homes and friends, probably forced even more interaction among the staff. I worked at the facility for 8 years and made a number of friends. 

Some of those friends have remained friends even 50 plus years later. Because of our connection to mid-coast Maine, for many years as our sons were growing up, we spent a week in Maine each summer with friends from New Jersey, who had sons around the same age as ours. While in Maine we would get together with two other couples who lived in Maine and had kids around the same age as our boys. All of us had a connection back to the school and the summer camp. We continue to go to Maine and get together with these friends that we made so long ago. We have also traveled with some of them. Over the last couple years we have had Zoom get-togethers with some of them. Although we don’t get together physically very often, I feel a deep connection to this group of friends and consider myself closer to them than to others that I see in person more regularly.

The communities we choose to associate with provide us with a strong sense of belonging and an important support network that celebrates with us in the best of times and holds us together in the worst. Some are short-term and some are long-term; but they all play an important role in our lives.

We Don't Always Choose Our Communities

In my last blog entry, I wrote about a group of former seminary classmates with whom I have been doing Zoom get-togethers for the last two and a half years. In writing about this experience, I came to believe that what kept a small group of 10 to 12 of us coming back each week was that we had developed a community. That led me to think about other communities I had been a part of during my lifetime.

Some of the characteristics of communities are that they can be small or large, based on geography or social interests, short-term or long-term in duration, chosen or imposed. I wrote in my last blog entry that communities give our lives meaning and a sense of belonging. I think they also provide a support network for us as we deal with life’s ups and downs.

While we choose some communities because of things we have in common with others, there are many times that we end up in a community because of circumstances in which we find ourselves. Once we are in that community, we will most likely find that we have shared interests with some members of that community and may form a smaller community with those individuals.

For example, I attended Catholic school from kindergarten through 8th Grade. Although my parents chose where we would live, they did not choose my school. I attended the closest Catholic school. We moved to Somerville (NJ) when I was 10 and from 5th to 8th grade I attended a Catholic school where there was one class in each grade. We had a different teacher each year but I was with the same students for all four years. I was good friends with some of them, played with others at recess and kept in touch with some after we graduated from 8th grade. I felt a connection with all my classmates but had stronger ties to some than to others.

After graduating from 8th grade, i went to a Catholic minor seminary near Baltimore for high school and 2 years of college, assigned there by my bishop.  In my freshman year of high school, there were over 100 students in my class. Plus there were five other grades. We lived at the seminary for the school year in a very regimented situation. Bells rang throughout the day to direct us to the next activity. We all ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in a common dining hall at our assigned tables with 7 other students. All of us in the seminary (students and faculty) belonged to a fairly large community. But there were also smaller communities within the larger one. Each grade formed a community, to some extent. Again, we had no choice there. As in any school, smaller groups formed, based on interests. Think about jocks, nerds, band kids, etc., in any high school. We had the additional circumstance of living together through the school year. We may have had assigned seats in the dining hall, but after dinner we were hanging out with the friends who belonged to our smaller community.

After six years in the minor seminary, I was assigned by the bishop of our diocese to attend a major seminary on the campus of St. Bonaventure University. Again, a larger community not of my choosing. We seminarians lived at the seminary but during our junior year of college we took classes three mornings a week at the University, with other college students.This seminary was a little more open than the minor seminary, especially with our attending classes with the University students. Given the opportunity to interact with these non-seminary students, we established friendships with some of them. So, I was essentially living in two communities - one very structured (the seminary), the other more open (the University).

Just before Thanksgiving of my first year at this new seminary, I realized that I did not want to continue with my seminary studies. I remained in the seminary for the rest of the school year, but applied to the University for admission for my senior year. I had left the very structured setting of the minor seminary community for the structured but more open major seminary community. Now I was about to move into a very unstructured University community. Fortunately, some friends I made at the University during my junior year became my support network as I dealt with this transition. I ate most meals with them in the large University dining hall and spent a lot of time with them when I was not studying. They were a smaller community of people with shared interests who supported me (and hopefully I supported them as well). A few of them I remain in contact with to this day.

One of the things that strikes me about the communities I’ve described here is that we frequently end up in communities that are not of our choosing. But, within those communities, we seek out smaller communities of people with whom we share common interests and who provide us with a support network. i did not choose my elementary school, minor seminary, major seminary or university communities. In each of these situations, I was part of a larger community but also, within that community, was able to join smaller communities of people with whom I shared similar interests. Both the larger and smaller communities provided me with a sense of belonging and a support network, but in different ways. Can you think of larger and smaller communities you’ve been a part of in your life?

Connecting With Old Friends During The Pandemic

It's been quite a while since I've posted on this blog space. But the spirit has moved me. So, here goes.

 For almost the last two and a half years I have been Zooming with a number of men that I went to school with for high school and two years of college (in a Catholic minor seminary). Not all of us were there for the full six years. Some came to this particular seminary after high school. Others left before the full six years.

The group was started by one of our classmates, near the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. My recollection is that he reached out to his classmates because he was feeling the need to connect with others after spending some time at the start of the pandemic isolating at home. He reached out to some whose emails he had and solicited the emails of other classmates from them.

The group started out as a social gathering, with people sharing information about what they had been doing over the past 50 some years (careers, families, grandchildren, etc.). After a while, someone in the group asked if any other participants would be interested in doing a book club on Zoom. A number of people were interested and our book club began. Having all been in the seminary and many of us having continued our interest in religion, we started reading books with a religious/spiritual orientation. (Some of the books we have read have not been religion-oriented but most have.) After another period of time, someone asked whether anyone would be interested in having a non-religious focused discussion group. Again, a number of people were interested. So a second off-shoot group began. We decided that each week one of us would pick a topic and lead the discussion. Usually the person leading the discussion will send out material ahead of time. This usually consists of articles and videos that can be accessed on the internet. The “secular” discussion group starts at 4:30 most Wednesdays, with the book club following at 5:30. Most of the 10-12 men involved participate in both groups, although some have other commitments that allow them to participate in only one. Also, on any given week, there will be some who are not able to attend because of other commitments. A social group Zoom get-together continues to be held on Thursday evenings.

As expected, this group of men who attended a minor seminary near Baltimore, MD, have spread out over the years to many parts of the country. Our leader, who started the group, lives in North Carolina. The others who regularly participate in the discussion group and book club live in disparate locations, including Maryland, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas, Oklahoma, California, Alaska and Guam. Also, as expected, the participants have had diverse careers. Of the individuals who have participated in all three groups, there are a number of priests (most are retired); there are some who were ordained and have left active ministry to pursue other careers. Of those who left active ministry or were not ordained, the careers involved working in the fields of law, psychology, counseling, education, civil service, (state and federal), mental health, hospice care, hospital administration and marine biology.

When we first started our Zoom get-togethers, what we shared was our common minor seminary experience. That was a starting point. Towards the beginning, after the group gained some momentum, there were a larger number of participants than we now have in our discussion group and book club. Some participated early on and then stopped. Some join the social get-together periodically. The current participants in the discussion group and book club have mostly been attending consistently for the last two and a half years. i think it’s that on-going getting together almost every week for an extended period of time that has brought us closer together. People in those two groups have frequently commented about how important these get-togethers have become for them and how grateful they are for the relationships that have developed through these sessions.

I’ve been thinking about why this group developed and what keeps people coming back week after week. Although we all shared the common experience of the minor seminary, we’ve had different careers and experiences since then. We seem to share a similar progressive philosophy toward political and spiritual matters. (Some might dispute my labeling their philosophy as progressive.) But there are a lot of differing opinions within that general framework. A number of people have expressed that the group offers them the opportunity to talk about serious topics with others. They do not have situations within their regular everyday lives to do that. My experience is that, despite the differences of opinion people in the group may have, we treat each other with dignity and respect and are willing to listen to opinions we may not agree with.

After thinking about this a lot, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to describe this group and it’s reason for existing and continuing is “community”. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “community” as a unified body of individuals; such as: the people with common interests living in a particular area; a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society; a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society; a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political concerns. As I thought about community, I thought about the various communities I have been a part of during my lifetime. A community can be a group of people living in a specific geographical area. But, I think a more significant meaning of the word involves a group of people who share common interests and who support each other in their lives and their endeavors. Sometimes these communities last for many years. Sometimes they are more short-term. But, whether they are long-term or short-term, they help give our lives meaning and a sense of belonging. That is the sense that I have about the larger group that shares things through emails and the groups that get together weekly on Zoom. We have shared our life-experiences, our thoughts about spirituality and politics, our condolences for losses members have experienced, our concerns and support about illnesses or surgeries, our congratulations for good things happening in others’ lives, etc. Thankfully, because of technology such as Zoom and email, we don’t have to be physically in the same location to do this. Here’s to “community”!

PS - In my next blog entry, I’ll talk more about communities I’ve been involved with during my lifetime.