Parish Life II

People live their parish life in various ways and in several different dimensions. Like any organization participation is varied. A core group of people find the parish to be central to their living and to their faith. Still others regularly support the parish with their financial giving. A large segment of the parish register, as is the custom, according to parish boundaries. For many others the parish is an intentional community, i.e., they deliberately choose to be members for various reasons.

Often people find that to be married in the Church there is an expectation that they be registered and that they practice their faith regularly within a parochial community. Not infrequently in our area, young people describe themselves as members of a parish in another geographic area of the country. Often young brides- and grooms-to-be hope to ride in on their parents parish coattails.

When people are invited to be godparents at Baptism or sponsors at Confirmation, they discover they need letters from their parish of registration. These are sought as a testimony of their suitability to assist in the religious formation of the recipient of Baptism or Confirmation. For faith to be shared, faith needs to be lived. It is more than a polite social or familial responsibility.

Intentional Communities
Membership in a parish, like faith itself, requires a choice. As adults, people previously baptized and confirmed choose to practice their faith and to share in the rich life which the sacraments and mission of the Church provide. The reasons for choosing to share in a certain parish are varied:

The parish liturgy expresses the faith and spirituality of the person making the choice

The outreach of the parish allows the person to share in the mission of the Church and to assist the local needs of people in God’s Kingdom

The parish provides a context to raise their family and to share family and religious values

A social support is provided with a network of family and friends for an individual

Some choose for sacramental preparation of their children; others choose for educational reasons in a Catholic school

Still other adult Christians choose the Catholic Church as a response to a religious conversion or a renewed faith awareness in their lives

A Call and Response
In describing parish life, there is a need at times to choose one of the above reasons to participate in a parish. Another perspective is to view the Church as a moment of grace or a revelatory experience of God in our lives. Like all graced calls believers experience God in the various needs and levels of their lives. The original meaning of “Church” in the New Testament is “ecclesia” in the Greek. With this word we learn that a primary meaning of Church is as a community “called out” or “called together." For various reasons and in diverse ways, it is God who gathers us. It is this calling and gathering that we come to understand as God’s People or as Pilgrim People.

We are people on the journey. We walk to the Kingdom. We come to recognize our common bond in the death and rising of the Lord. We come for various reasons and we stay in the Church for various reasons, but little by little we grow to see the Church as a community called out from being strangers into the Body of Christ.

We learn that mystery in the Word of God. We experience Christ in the Sacraments, which we celebrate. The Mission of the Church allows us to discover the action of God in the people of our world, especially the poor and needy. At its finest moments, we come to experience the Church as the call of the Father in Christ. It is not so much our choice as response to a graced moment of conversion.

Church as Revelatory
Our experience of parish as Church is similar to the movement of God’s People in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. While we quest for community, we discover that God shows himself to us. Like Yahweh’s Assembly of the Jewish scriptures, and the Assembly of the Christian scriptures, the community of faith is where God shows himself to us and where we respond to that invitation. The parish is more than what we first thought or imagined.

CDH