I was hyped. I was finally going to give my first public talk since COVID. Twenty-four hours before the event, I handed in my outline to the young adult minister for review. I was serving on the young adult leadership team at a Catholic retreat center, and it was my turn to give the talk. I had spent hours preparing my presentation on “identity.”
“Sorry, Joe,” she said. “We need to postpone your talk. Another member of our ministry team is going to give a talk on community instead.”
“Community,” I mumbled, as the smile slipped off my face. My spirit deflated.
“Joe, just be fluid about it,” the minister added – salt in an already open wound.
“Community,” I grumbled to myself. At the time, it felt like the lamest talk topic imaginable.
I didn’t realize then how deeply that moment would stick with me. A few years later, during a different ministry stint, community came up as a possible theme for a youth night. I joked that it was a trigger word for me, only to find out months later that my supervisor had taken me seriously and recorded it in my work evaluation.
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Perhaps, during both those times, I didn’t fully understand community because I had never truly experienced it. Being an adopted person of color in a predominantly white, small-town Catholic environment added a layer of complexity to my experience that was hard to voice. In many parish and Catholic ministry settings, it feels like “community” is often synonymous with “sameness.” If you look like everyone else and share the same background, community is given. But for someone like me, the community being preached about often felt like a gated neighborhood. I saw this firsthand one day while waiting in line for confession. A man bypassed everyone else in the line to lecture me about a protest that was taking place outside the church, targeting me as the only person of color present.
I spent years sitting in the back pews, not just because I was introverted, but because I was waiting for someone to notice that my presence changed the room. I was present for the Eucharist, but absent from the community. I thought being on mission teams, working on parish staff, and at retreat centers would break me into community, but rather, those circles were hotbeds for cliques. I’d hear about weddings and milestones on social media feeds instead of in phone calls or texts, reminders that I wasn’t fully part of that world. Yet the ministries presented community as something easily found and readily accessible.
Up to that point, because of my adoption and my experiences on the margins, I had been hardened by loneliness. I had watched the natural course of life in which people came in and out of my circle with frustrating frequency. Despite my whole-hearted efforts to stay in contact, those ministry circles offered me little lasting community. It made me realize the Church often muddles proximity with community. We can sit in the same rows and recite the same creed, but we don’t always accompany each other. What I desperately wished for was that the Church wouldn’t promise community because it seemed like it couldn’t provide it in an intentional, long-lasting way.
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Yet this isolation did not foil the community I was meant to find. I first encountered true community at a small Catholic parish I stumbled into in my late 20s. I was searching for a church home, and that can be difficult when you are single and introverted. I was welcomed there more warmly than at any parish I had ever experienced. A parishioner gave me a hug and said, “You belong here.” I’m typically not a hug person, but that gesture remains one of the most meaningful acts of welcome I have ever received. Unlike other moments of community in my life, this one is ongoing. It does not end with Mass on Sundays because it developed into friendships, conversations, and daily life. It extends beyond the parish walls, and that is the difference between a place you attend and a place you belong. The exclusion I found in my youth made me appreciate the community I found in a deeper way.
A community is defined by what it loves, and true community found me in my marriage — most visibly on my wedding day. My marriage was one of the first times that I experienced a community that was more than myself and the Trinity.
My wife is someone I love dearly, and she loves me with her whole strength. At our wedding banquet, I looked around at the many communities gathered around us — people united not by convenience, but by love. There were members of our Church, her family, my family, coworkers from present and past jobs, high school friends, and lifelong friends.
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All were present because they loved us, and that love, whether they knew it or not, was fueled by God’s love. That is community: something you don’t find but finds you. The glue of authentic community is relationships rooted in God’s love. We cannot manufacture that love; It must be infused by God and then cultivated.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be difficulties in the community. There are plenty, but in a good community people and ourselves rally to overcome the obstacles. God does call us outside of our communities — our safety zone. I saw this when our pastor had to take a medical retirement, and our parish suddenly had to change Mass times. It disrupted routines many parishioners had grown accustomed to for years, yet people adapted and supported one another through the transition. Too many people stay in their safety net because it is what they believe is a paradise.
Earthly community is a foreshadowing of the heavenly community yet to come. Because of this, we must be wary of any community that asks us to choose it over God. Community, in itself, is not an absolute good. God is!
Today, I no longer grumble at the word community. I embrace the community that has found me, while longing for the day we will dwell forever in the perfect communion of the Most Holy Trinity. Let’s reach out to those in the pews beside us, and meet the souls that are outside of the Church and beckon them in.
Reflection Questions:
- The writer mentions at the beginning that he initially felt the word “community” was synonymous with “sameness.” Have there been moments in your life where community meant this? Have you felt excluded in such cases?
- The writer suggests that the Church muddles community with proximity. “We can sit in the same rows and recite the same creed, but we don’t always accompany each other.” How can you ensure this does not happen in your community?
- Think of someone who may not feel included in your parish community. How might you welcome them this Sunday? This may look like striking a conversation after Mass, giving them a warm smile, or inviting them to the coffee hour.
