Copyright 2019 Jessica Ptomey. All rights reserved.[/caption]
In the first post for this series on renewing the domestic church, I posed the following question regarding Catholic family culture:
Do we perhaps elevate the life of the family above the mission of the Church, making the Church subservient to the family rather than placing the domestic church at the service of Christ's mission for his Church?
I want to ultimately get to answering this question, but I think before we examine whether our family culture is best serving the Church's mission, we must first ask whether our family culture and rhythms are forming us into the kind of people who are equipped to successfully carry out that mission. And I think when we look here we see glaring problems staring back at us: the absence of deep friendships and the lack of intentional family rhythms, as I mentioned in the first post.
Now, let me say at the outset: these are not Catholic problems; these are wide-spread trends in American family culture today. But, if our Catholic families are going to be successful at pointing society to Christ and his Church, then we have to live differently and address the ways that we have moved with the tide of culture. We will get to intentional family rhythms later in this series, but I want to focus on the lack of deep friendships in this post.
I could cite so much research demonstrating that American culture norms, even within Christian communities, are resulting in friendship deficits for adults. But I don't think I have to; I think if you and I look around -- either in our own lives or the lives of people we know -- we see that friendships are not being nurtured in an optimal way. While I think most people do have "friends," the quality of these relationships and the level of intimacy present is problematic. Barna reports, "The majority of adults have anywhere between two and five close friends (62%), but one in five regularly or often feels lonely."
Loneliness. Isolation. I hear these words often from women describing how they feel in their life and family experiences, and I can only imagine that men express the same (especially if statistics regarding male friendships are accurate). This should sound an alarm for us that something is wrong with the status quo. Clearly there is not a wide-spread cultivation of deep friendships, and I think we can identify why that is the case. What we have come to designate as "friendship," even within our Catholic communities, falls below the richness that Christ would desire for us in our relationships. Let me briefly sketch out what seems to be passing today as friendship:
Copyright 2019 Jessica Ptomey
- We see each other at church
- We chat at our kids' mutual recreational/extracurricular events
- We text each other
- We work together
- We run into each other once in a while at large group events
- We visit during playdates for our children
- Face-to-face conversations (regular, not intermittent)
- Intentional time scheduled together without distractions
- Exhorting each other in spiritual truth
- Having the relational space and security to be vulnerable and honest
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Copyright 2019 Jessica Ptomey
About the Author
Jessica Ptomey
Jessica Ptomey is a Catholic convert, author, speaker, Communications scholar, home educator, and Director of Religious Education at Sacred Heart Church in Bowie, MD. She blogs at JessicaPtomey.com. She is the author of Home in the Church: Living an Embodied Catholic Faith, and her research in inter-faith dialogue has been published in the Journal of Communication and Religion (JCR). She is also the co-host with her husband Mike of The Catholic Reading Challenge podcast.
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