Stepping Up When You’re Hungry to be Fed
How should you participate in parish life when you’re longing to receive?
Part I in the Working Church Series
Marcel over at Catholic Missionary Disciples has a challenging take on “real” Christian community. As he often does, poking the bear of comfortable Catholicism, he raises the bar on what community can be at its best.
5 Steps to Real Catholic Community starts with his own story of relocation and community-finding. Spoiler alert: what he found was not the tidy, perfect, inviting-over-for-dinner community that you might think of.
Instead, he found broken people trying to find their place in life and in the Church. In so doing, he realized that he and his wife were called to be part of a restoration rather than simply receive the benefits of good community living.
I can certainly relate. Parish life has been one of the greatest sources of disappointment in my adult Catholic life. It’s not that homiletics are bland (as if often the case) or that worship in the Ordinary Form is overly casual (check that as well). What I’ve found to be most upsetting is the lack of a call to mission. We’ve become khaki pants when the world is hungry for something much more daring.
I can also empathize with those who are really hungry to be fed by their parish. They want to be blessed, to receive, to breathe without being tapped on the shoulder. For many of us, we are exhausted by the week’s work. On Sunday, we want nourishment and battery-recharging. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Back to Marcel’s post.
He lists five “steps” which are excellent. What I’m most interested in is his first action, “Initiate”. Instead of just sitting back as a passive member of a parish, we are called to step up, to find spaces of need, and to respond to God’s promptings.
For those of us in professional ministry, this is particularly difficult. We spend all week giving (or so it would seem) that we long to receive. We want for our parish communities to feed us and to minister to us, like an oasis for thirsty folk.
There’s a blind spot to this. Sometimes, myself included, we can use our week’s work as an excuse not to serve within our parish. “I’m giving all the time; when my parish asks for help, that’s someone else’s job to do!” Let’s be careful if this is our first response to things.
For those desiring to be blessed by their community, and for those in ministry, how do you initiate? How can we give when we feel that our giving cup is already empty? How can we step up when all we want to do is sit down?
Acknowledge that, no matter your state of life, you’re called to give. This isn’t so much about your cash (although that’s not excluded) but about your heart. When your pastor asks for help, is your heart soft enough to at least consider a response? We don’t want to be so professional that we can’t activate a spontaneous ‘yes’.
The parish isn’t off the hook. Initiating is for each of us. It’s baked into our baptismal call. Each of us can do more. But, that doesn’t take the parish community off the hook. It’s still called to be fruitful in mission, to worship with reverence, and to serve boldly. Lay people have a duty to challenge priests, in love, to live out their call with daring faith. Pope Francis has been clear to parish priests that their comfort should not take precedent over their call to build up the laity.
Your morning prayer, in private, is more important than ever. In order to participate in the renewal of your parish, you’ll need a rock-solid time of prayer. This makes us less judgy and more in love with Jesus. Imagine an entire parish where the laity is praying each morning, turning the pages of their Bible and begging the Lord for mercy and compassion? That’s a parish I’d like to join.
So to you professional ministry people (I’m looking at you), initiate within your parish. Ask the Lord where he wants you to be. If there is a system that feels decades old and stuffy, find another place where you can make a difference.
Stepping up doesn’t mean it’s all up to you. It just means that your parish is blessed by you being there. And, as you participate, you’ll likely be a blessing to someone else who feels just like you do.