I’m gonna be really honest with you.
I miss you.
I know the last two, three, years have been hard on all of us. But I miss you.
It hasn’t been the same. We used to be able to communicate more clearly. We used to laugh. We used to love each other.
Growing up, the church was my second home. My grandmother ran the resource center for religious education at our church. Teachers picked up bulks of construction paper and prayer cards and pencils for the kids, while their sweet words washed over me and my sisters. Walking over to the kitchen, I’d find my great aunts cutting fresh fruit for coffee hour, their hands sticky with the juice of melons and pineapples as they told stories of their families and their God.
Now, I feel tension. I sense we still view each other as the enemy. The one who could have gotten us sick. The one who doesn’t believe the same political points. The one who didn’t follow protocols as I would have liked.
I watch as we partition ourselves into factions. Segregating ourselves more and more, until we push out those different than us. And then I watch, as they stop trying to be part of the community. They stop trying to be part of the Body of Christ.
And if I am really honest with you, I feel this way every week. I feel like I am fighting to be a part of this Church. To sense Jesus close through your love and conversation, through our time together and our laughter.
And I know I am not alone.
People have taken to social media, to town halls, to synods to lament the breaking down of our communities and institutions. Some blame our time in isolation. That it broke us. Maybe that’s where it started but it’s our insatiable need to control each other that broke our communities.
Control is not hospitable. Community thrives on hospitality.
And our Gospel, our good news, is one of freedom.
And this is what we have lost.
Jesus said they will know you by your love. In many ways, we are good at loving that person on the street or in that foreign land, or combatting the unseen enemy outside the Church, but we have forgotten how to simply be with each other. To know the person in the pew next to us. To spend time with each other that doesn’t have a political agenda tied to it.
You know, like Jesus did. I want my children to look back at their childhood in the Church like I do — feeling connected and loved and part of something bigger.
Northwest Catholic — October/November 2022