Community in the Midst of Chaos

The nightly routine of putting my daughter to sleep usually consists of the same stuff. After we say evening prayer, she insists I sit on the floor near her crib, holding her hand as she drifts off. It is usually during this time that I sit and scroll through the day’s news and social media headlines and to no one’s surprise, I never feel particularly at peace or rested following my digital binge. Finally, the other night I couldn’t stand it any longer and clicked my phone off to sit in the darkness. I thought about what I will tell my daughter when she asks about this time that, God willing, she never remembers. She will have the photos of us in masks and the stories of the social, political, and cultural events of 2020 in her history books, but what will my own account be like? 

I believe something I will highlight to my daughter is the immense toll this year has taken on my Catholic faith. It is no small vulnerability to admit that I have never felt more dissatisfied with my spiritual life. My identity as a Catholic, normally the identity to which I feel most proud and connected, has never seemed quieter in my life. I am willing to guess I am not alone in feeling this way and I have some thoughts as to how this happened and why it matters. 

Let me begin by saying, I firmly believe in Jesus Christ and his choice to appoint the Catholic Church as the earthly home to His followers. In that, I believe the Church has been divinely inspired with wisdom that transcends every generation and because of it’s synergistic relationship as both a living, breathing home for sinners while being rooted in this infallible tradition, it can respond to any crises of any era. I also believe that Satan despises the Church and never tires in his pursuit of its demise, exploiting human weakness to tarnish it’s reputation and influence. I would stake my life on these truths.

If you agree with me that Satan exists (something our world is increasingly denying) and that he hates Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, perhaps you will also admit the events of this year have given him quite the opportunity to promote chaos among the faithful. This is because to the faithful Christian, who knows that our God is a God of unity and peace, community is not just a nice suggestion, but a necessary component of a healthy spiritual life. Satan naturally hates community and is a big fan of fear and division - two strong elements in a global pandemic.

Let’s stay with this powerful idea of community for a minute. Because it never ceases to amaze me when I meditate on the generosity of God and how he created us for communion with Him and each other. God designed the Christian family to be the first place that a human begins to understand something about divine love. He could have made us all asexual, but he chose to gift us with marriage, a sacrament of communion between man and woman that mimics trinitarian love to bring about new life and reveal his love to the world through the complementarity of spouses. He gave us the Mass, which is literally a community prayer and invites us into physical communion with Him through the gift of the Eucharist. And don’t forget about the communion of saints, our holy friends rallying for us as we journey toward heaven. In our larger faith communities within the Church he gives us the opportunity to exercise our human senses on the virtues so we might understand and desire a deeper, more honest relationship with Him. 

I am no scholarly theologian and I bet I have only scratched the surface on the true depth and wisdom of community in the Christian life, but I believe authentic Christian community is one of the greatest evangelistic tools we have against the growing threat of secularism. I have witnessed people who would call themselves outright enemies of the Church be transformed by their encounter with a community of Christians who are actually living out the faith they profess. It’s because that outside person, as a creation of God, cannot resist their attraction to  the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and that’s exactly what they find when they encounter Christ through human relationships that are rightly ordered. To the human being far from God, encountering authentic community is like finding a glass of water in the dessert.

As a Physical Therapist, I have treated enough patients recovering from the Coronavirus to know it is serious and has far reaching consequences beyond the physical. I am not saying that the separation we are currently experiencing isn’t necessary, especially when discerned with prudence and charity for our neighbor. I also think that Satan is overjoyed at the reality of the world being consumed with isolation and fear. In C.S. Lewis’ acclaimed book The Screwtape Letters, the senior demon writes to his nephew demon in training, “Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind.” Lewis could never have known that his words would explain so poetically two opposing and polarizing human expressions regarding the 2020 pandemic and yet he highlights the sinful nature in both. 

I’m afraid that Satan has used the inevitable separation caused by the pandemic to rage an all out assault on Christian community and the response I have seen from many Catholics online is that we are allowing it. Because despite being warned for years about the dangers of excessive social media consumption and the inauthentic personal connections it builds, we have sought refuge in our phones - and who can really blame us? But at a time when charitable, nuanced dialogue is critical to digesting the problems we face, we get the opposite. It has often felt to me as if we as Catholics have long abandoned the offensive mission of evangelization, and have begun playing defense. Defense against the world that is perverting and persecuting our values and defense against each other. During the interruption of in-person Masses, I saw many faithful Catholics online appear to become individual moral islands that while well-intentioned often appeared to sow greater confusion and division than understanding. I have seen friends, parishioners, and neighbors attack each other, allowing their often righteous anger to disregard the humanity of the person on the other end of the screen. I can only imagine how Jesus weeps for His children as Satan laughs, happy to invite the chaos. Because if he can keep us anxious, distracted, angry, and divided the real work can never begin. The real work being, of course, that there are people in our communities who are dying without ever knowing just how much they are loved by the Creator of the Universe. That’s on us. Christ did not put us each at this time in existence by accident and he has entrusted his faithful to the saving of the souls of this era, including each other.

This year has brought to the forefront many realities of human suffering that we are simply unable to ignore. Yet even here is an opportunity for evangelization because as Catholics, we are supposed to be leaders in not just embracing suffering but finding joy in the midst of it. While the world is consumed with “2020 Dumpster Fire” memes, the Christian who has their feet firmly on earth but their heart in heaven is not duped by human failing. We are the Church. With our individual flaws and shortcomings and vices as well as virtues. We need to take responsibility for our church by starting with ourselves. The Church and its members cannot become “the other,” subject to our self-righteous activism without us first counting ourselves among the wounded.

We as the young Church have to take back the narrative that it is anyone else’s job to respond to the suffering of our generation. We cannot give up seats at that table to the godless and dead-ended pursuit of compassionate secularism. We have to fight back against the often misguided portrayal of Catholic values by popular culture with intelligence and compassion. Our world doesn’t understand that the pursuit of humanistic tolerance has left it largely without its moral compass, left floundering for any basis to ground existential questions or approach novel problems. The Church and moral theology have largely been disregarded by the culture as delusional optimism at best and misguided, bigoted rhetoric at worst. We need to do better than this. Because when the masks come off and the parties resume, we have to be ready to respond to a world that has always needed authentic community.

How do we begin to respond to all of this? God only knows. No seriously, only He knows and we need to be praying fiercely for wisdom and understanding. For peaceful and merciful hearts. To help us actually love our neighbors instead of just tolerating them. I believe we will never outsmart an enemy to which we remain ignorant. Calling Satan out is the first step in rendering him powerless and finding creative ways to stop him from isolating our hearts and using loneliness to tell us lies about our true identities. Satan literally cannot create, he can only pervert what has already been created. It is us as humans who have been given the gift of creativity by the ultimate Creator and the Holy Spirit is waiting to help us use our gifts to bring about a renewal of our communities. 

Unfollow that account that is constantly causing you to fall into the sin of anger and hatred of your neighbor. Use the additional time spent at home to find a new prayer or devotion and grow in disciplined prayer. Impose healthy screen time limits and be present to the few people in your life you actually get to love in person. Ask your local priest for virtual spiritual direction. Reach out to seek and offer each other forgiveness. Join a virtual bible study. Seek out the sacraments. There is not a single greater gift on this earth to us than the reception of Holy Communion and we have rockstar theologians in this Archdiocese committed to ensuring we can receive Jesus in a way that keeps us safe. Check your parish bulletin for needs of the elderly or new moms in your communities, two groups of people that already deal with an immense amount of isolation. See if there are ways your church is responding to the needs of the poor, such as a giving tree. If you don’t see anything, call them up and get to organizing. Quietly, by being faithful in the present moment, we can ensure Satan does not have the final say.

As we approach Advent, the weary world could sure use some rejoicing in its Savior. This season is a time of perfecting our patience for our Savior and to proclaim the expectant hope we share as Christians. Not just for a better year ahead, but for our shared mission of bringing the Gospel message to a world that is hurting. I see MSP Catholic as one such response. A resource to a generation of Catholics trying to live the Gospel authentically and seek wisdom and teaching from the right sources. To find unity rooted in truth, first virtually, and one day in person so we can get to the hard work of building something beautiful for God. Let us not forget that during the times of greatest suffering, the Church has produced some of the greatest saints. I know that in my re-telling of 2020 events to my daughter, the story will not end with the sufferings, but in the ways in which our local Church answered the call and rose up with courage and conviction, sowing seeds of community and evangelization that she can recognize and benefit from years in the future.