"List the resources available in your community for those who suffer mentally and emotionally." This question initiated the training session we recently attended on "mental health first aid." I couldn't answer it. I was stumped because I couldn't identify "my community." I thought:
We recently moved from Jersey City to Bradley Beach, which we love, but I know by name maybe 10 people. Hardly "my community."
Much more do we love our new parish. But again, we know maybe 10 people by name. Our pastor I like and admire very much but he is clearly disinclined to get to know me beyond "have a good day." Also, we attend perhaps three different parishes a week and probably 40 to 50 a year. Parish mass and sacraments have always been a fundamental structure of my lived-cosmos, but we are wildly, passionately promiscuous with regard to parishes.
Obviously, my family is my community. But our children are spread across several states; many we do not see for months; so that leaves my wife and myself. Not big enough to be "my community." My large extended "family of origin" and in-laws are even more dispersed.
My adult life has been, in large part, precisely a search for "my community"...even as I have always enjoyed a strong, close family; a network of friends; and closeness to the Church.
In college I was drawn to: small Christian communities; the "Communidades de Base" inspired by the leftist radical Paolo Freire in Latin America; the extremist, secular Ecumenical Institute in Chicago; the "Saul Alinsky" social justice activism of Monsignor John Egan; and the deep-Catholic anarchism of Cuernavaca's Ivan Illich.
Early in adulthood and married life I moved away from social justice activism but flirted with: Catholic Worker, the sensitivity group "Second Chance Family," the Bruderhoff; Cursillo; and Marriage Encounter.
We were deeply involved in and influenced by our charismatic prayer group, but never joined a Covenant Community and so did not deliver that dimension of our faith to our children.
I walked for a few years with two different Neocatechumenal Communities but left that even though I now support my son and his family who continue "to walk,"
We are friends with Communion and Liberation, through our daughter, and attend their New York Encounter every year, but are not full participants.
I have befriended many Jesuits (with whom I taught), Maryknollers, and Christian Brothers and spent time in Benedictine monasteries, in hermitages and the Franciscan Friary in Newark. I have worked closely in education for many years with religious sisters of the Charities, Dominicans and Felicians.
I consider myself a practitioner of 12-step spirituality and have attended many meetings but do not do so at the present.
I retain affectionate bonds with my college classmates, Maryknoll College, 1969, and see a handful from time to time but look forward to our reunion every 5 years.
I have studied at the graduate level at Seton Hall, Rutgers, Woodstock Jesuit Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, Teacher's College and Jewish Theological Seminary; but have only a masters degree; retain no real bonds with those communities; and am not a certified academic, but remain a mendicant student.
Twenty-five years working at UPS left me with no steady friends, memories of stress and challenge, but gratitude for a good income for my family.
I faithfully read Communio, First Things, Crisis, Catholic Thing, National Catholic Register and so enjoy a distant, intellectual fellowship with them. I also have read, for well over 60 years, the NY Times with which I have an ambivalent relationship.
I consider myself a patriot as well as a Catholic internationalist; with a keen sense of the anti-Catholic animus of the Protestant America of the past; the leftist, secular progressivism of the present; and even right wing libertarianism, individualism, corporativism and crude MAGA-ism.
As a moral conservative and culture warrior I am a registered Republican, with liberal leanings on social justice issues; a never-Trumper who has not voted in recent elections but will be forced to reluctantly pull the lever for Donald against the ever-deepening moral depravity of the DNC. I have hopes for a "New Right" which coherently engages class/culture war against the elites on behalf of the have-nots, economically and morally. This is a niche position of course and arguably a utopian illusion.
We made promises in joining Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist and keep many, but not all of them. We have not been attending meetings because of distance. But those promise still structure our lives.
A third degree Knight of Columbus, I am proud of the organization but do not join in meetings or activities.
Throughout my life I have been drawn to and attracted to myself a wide variety of "weird" friends: random, eccentric, tormented, fascinating, sensitive, offbeat, insightful, entertaining, non-bourgeois, non-normie, spiritually and philosophically profound. These dear, cherished friendships are all one-on-one; precisely NOT community. But Oh So Precious!
Magnificat Home, our residence for women, now almost 15 years old, is for me a "second family." Dear to my heart are the residents, staff, volunteers, Board, and the supportive network of family and friends.
As I write, we are exploring new communities. We signed on to NODA (No One Dies Alone) whereby we are able to sit vigil with hospice patients who have no family or friends available. This drew us further into being volunteer chaplains in our local hospital and part of a marvelous group of people. This led to participation, monthly, in a Faith Council which joins local activists concerned with the homeless, the addicted and the isolated...a tremendous group, mostly leftwing non-Catholic Christians with huge hearts. Last week we were oriented to jail ministry with other volunteers, mostly NA and AA folks, tough, weather-beaten, many ex-cons themselves, with lots of tattoos and humble hearts of pure gold.
To Conclude...
Blessed with an extraordinarily happy marriage and family, my primary community, my soul remains restless. Life continues to be a pressing, almost manically urgent search for more and deeper community; a journey from one group, movement, engagement to another. I relish each encounter; but remain with urgent longings, and so move on.
This journey continues, always within the more foundational community, The Church. And within the Church, there is the point of rest, of peace, of completion: Christ Himself in the Eucharist. This is Goal and Destination, already present here, so small, white, tasteless, quiet, anonymous!
As we consume and are consumed by the Host, we taste already our final home, our TRUE community: the heaven of the Holy Trinity. As I approach my 77th Pentecost, I am reminded that we have in this world no "lasting city"...no final community. No romance, marriage, family or community can satiate our restless souls. Even the Church herself, on earth, the very body and bride of Christ, is so often a sadness, a disappointment, even a betrayal! So we raise our eyes to Graceland, to the heavenly Zion, to the actual Ithika!
At Saturday's funeral for my beloved cousin Rich, his daughter Mary read his favorite poem, the Homeric classic made famous previously at the funeral of Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy: Cavany's "Ithica."
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery...
Keep Ithika in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all
Better it last for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way...
Our eyes are tranquilly fixed upon our Destiny. And so that Destiny animates, motivates, guides and accompanies us. A still point, of rest and peace, in the turmoil of the journey as it moves us from one grace to another, from glory to glory, in every attentive moment, act of gratitude, of generosity given or received, of reception and action, of faith and hope but above all Love.
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