A Real Community of Faith

The one thing people usually say about St. Mary Star of the Sea in Beverly is how beautiful the church is.  There's no denying that.  It really is a magnificent house of worship to behold but one of the biggest complaints I had about the place was how impersonal it felt to me.  “Mass is like a roomful of strangers,” I jotted down in my journal back when I was in my mid-twenties.

This wasn't to say the church lacked a faith community.  Rather, the faith community that existed at St. Mary's seemed very cliquey.  For a time, the parish published a newsletter with a section that profiled certain parishioners but my takeaway was only people who were part of the pastor's circle of friends would ever be featured.
 
I now attend a smaller church with my mother that's mostly made up of elderly parishioners.  Each week we see “the regulars” meaning certain people who almost always go to the same Mass and sit in the same pews.  At first, these worshipers were just faces in a crowd, but after a while, my mother and I would wave hello, smile or nod.  Eventually, we'd actually start talking to them.  Sometimes we'd even exchange personal details about our lives including our hardships and struggles to the point where they were no longer strangers.  For one group of regulars, getting to know them was as simple as me asking, “I see you here at Mass all the time.  What are your names?”     

A few of these regulars learned about my struggles as a single and vowed to keep me in their prayers.  When I started dating a woman from Catholic Match this year, she insisted our third date include a visit to my parish for Mass.  I cautioned her that the sight of me with a female who isn't my mother might actually give some parishioners heart attacks...or at the very least, they'd faint.  Indeed, our third date did raise a few eyebrows among the regulars.  Even my priests wanted to know who this woman was and they hoped to see her again at many more Masses.

Everyone in my life was extremely happy for me and they noticed a certain spring in my step.  Gone was the hopelessness that had plagued my life for such a long time.  Even though she wasn't my girlfriend yet, I could actually start to see myself build a future with her.

For our fourth date, I traveled over a hundred miles to visit her church and the same thing happened with her parish's regulars.  Almost immediately, we got singled out to bring the gifts up to the altar and that made this already shy woman a bit flustered.  Others wanted to know who I was and if I'd be coming back to Mass in the upcoming weeks.

 

Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be and after our fifth date, she no longer wanted to see me.  When the regulars at my church asked for their weekly update about my relationship, I had to break the bad news to them.  Two regulars who my mother and I knew for a long while now handed me a card after the following week's Mass.  Per their wishes, I opened it later on.  The card featured a cartoon lion holding an umbrella that had rain pouring out of it.  The caption read, “When life just doesn't seem to make sense...”  Inside the card the caption continued, “...trust God to carry you through the storm.”  At the bottom was a passage from Hebrews 11:1.  They signed the card with their names and added, “Your church buddies.”
 
I was greatly moved by this thoughtful gesture because it showed me that someone out there cared.  This is what a real community of faith looks like.  Simple acts like that don't contain a solution to a problem but they don't have to.  The fact that someone went out of their way to acknowledge my troubles gave me a sense of comfort.  In that moment, I definitely felt less alone and more connected to the parish.

Let this be a lesson to us all.  A church shouldn't be so big that some parishioners get lost in the crowd.  Perhaps there are people at Mass that you see all the time but you don't even know their names.  Make 2023 the year you say hi and introduce yourself...even if it's just to finally find out what their names are.  Such gestures could sow the seeds of a real community of faith.