In this final post of this summer series on renewing the domestic church, I want to come full circle to answer the question posed at the outset:
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?
The answer is often–yes. We can easily get Catholic family culture wrong because we get the mission of the domestic church wrong. Domestic churches are meant to link arms with each other within the body of Christ to effectively be the hands and feet of Christ in this world. This is the mission of Christ’s pilgrim Church on earth; as we travel onward to heaven we should be trying to bring as many people along with us as possible.
Yet, often, we don’t see Catholic (or Christian) families living out this mission. In practice, we can act as if the family is a bunker or safe haven from the outside world and maintain a separateness that prevents the members of our families from collectively doing two things (which are really one in the same): serving as the hands and feet of Christ and His Church, and impacting those outside the Church with the Gospel.
Let’s honestly ask ourselves how we think about the Church. Perhaps we take from her rather than give with her and through her. Do we as Catholic families in America live like the Church exists merely to provide the sacraments to us and our children, or do we see ourselves as members of the Church with the responsibility to bring her sacraments to a broken world. Are we only interested in our own salvation from the world and preservation on this pilgrimage, or do we see ourselves as agents in the salvation of the world?
Let’s look at how we may be incorrectly viewing the sacraments and our role in bringing them to a world that desperately needs them:
- Do we approach receiving the Eucharist as merely “a power pill” that gives us a leg up in our spiritual lives? We should be approaching the Blessed Sacrament with a much larger picture of sacrifice and salvation history in mind. After all, what we are doing in each Mass is uniting ourselves with Christ as an offering to the Father; we are participating in the salvation of the world.
- Do we think of the sacrament of marriage as only something that we received from the Church? We should, in fact, be living marriages that transmit the grace particular to that sacrament into the lives of those we touch daily.
- How do we think of our children’s Confirmations, or our own Confirmation for that matter? So many times people incorrectly describe it as “getting the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s power.” We received the Holy Spirit at our Baptism; we didn’t just get a little bit of Him. What many Catholics don’t realize, either in principle or in practice, is that Confirmation is about being “sent out” to fulfill the Church’s mission in the world. Do we live like that? More importantly, are our homes preparing our young people for that mission? Is life after Confirmation a continuation of insulating our child from the world outside our door, or does it involve the celebration of what great things he will do to help Christ’s Church redeem the broken world in which he lives?
What I’m coming to at the end of this series is this: do we accept our mission to bring others with us to heaven, and are we inspiring our children with that same life goal? Do we live and raise our families to serve Christ’s mission, or have we invented all sorts of programs for how His Church can serve our own designs? God help us, but I think there is a lot of the later mixed in. I know first-hand how easy it is to choose to stay in our spiritual comfort zones. We like to be served more than we like to serve; because service costs us something. But the truth is that the alternative costs us more. Christ tells us that “the first shall be last,” and quite frankly, I don’t know of a single saint that made it to heaven on that program. To get to heaven, it seems that we have to want to bring people with us–and not just the people we like or live with.
So let’s set our families on a heavenward path. Let’s start living with more intention to bring others to heaven with us. Let’s give ourselves to the service of Christ and His Church, and let’s give our children back to Christ. Let’s let go of our own designs and celebrate–above all else–the mission that God calls each member of our family to at Confirmation. We can have the kind of domestic churches that raise up generations of Catholics that do as St. Catherine of Siena said: set the world on fire.
Copyright 2019 Jessica Ptomey
Our 7-week-old Stella Maris was baptized on Saturday. It was so beautiful. It was a small gathering of our family and Stella’s godparents in our church’s chapel on the hill that was built in the 1700s.