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| Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) but that doesn't mean we don't enjoy our local attachments, too. |
If you were sent with your family to live in a foreign country, what would you do as mother and father, heads of the household, to maintain the fabric and culture of your family?
I lived in Italy for long periods over nine years, so even though I was in a community of US citizens large (the seminary) or small (Cardinal Baum’s household), I know how it can go to pick up some local practices while carefully nurturing habits from home. At the NAC we were well-known among the Romans for our Giorno di Ringraziamento (Thanksgiving) feast and our Quattro Luglio (Fourth of July) cookout. When we came home to the US, the other guys made fun of us for our Italian affectations - yet they readily ate our pasta dishes.
So what of the local culture would you pick up, and what of your own culture would you nurture and maintain? A lot would depend on just how foreign the culture is.
I thought of this on New Year’s Morning as I sat at my desk and saw cars filling the lot for the 11:00 Mass for the Holy Day. Mary the Mother of God is a day that puts the Mass-goer at odds with the local culture, as New Year festivities before, during, and after the revelry consume most people’s day. It was especially obvious that morning, when almost no other cars were on the road, nobody out and about even as midday approached, except the faithful assembling for Mass. And the faithful did come, in numbers that surprised me. All three of the Masses had good crowds, though predictably the 8:30’s was not large.
As is often the case when there is a big gap between what we are doing here at the parish and what most people around us are doing, it was a delightful time for everybody to be together. People were cheerful and happy to be together, participating in the prayers and music, mixing and visiting afterward with the ease and comfort of familiarity and trust. Meanwhile, 99.9 percent of the local population had no idea of what we were doing, or why.
Moments like that highlight how much like living in a foreign country are our lives as Catholics right here in twenty-first century Silver Spring Maryland USA. One of my favorite early Christian texts is the Letter to Diognetus from around the year 200 AD, which makes the similarity clear:
And yet there is something extraordinary about their (Christians’) lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
Isn’t it funny that the author’s first choices to illustrate the difference (in 200 AD!) are marriage, sex, and not exterminating children? Some things never change! But that’s hardly the only thing that distinguishes us. His whole thrust is that Catholics choose what of their own culture they cling to, and what of the local culture they accept and engage in.
It is not unhealthy for mothers and fathers to take stock of the local culture and make a similar evaluation. How much of it should our family take part in, and what that is common here and now (“everybody else is doing it!”) should our family exclude? And like every healthy migrant family, we should take particular care and make every effort to nurture and maintain the practices that strengthen and keep our family’s precious heritage, faith and eternal life in Christ.
In such circumstances, it does not have to be a day when the bulk of the populace is either binge-watching or binge-drinking to make it a good day to take the family to Mass together, then share a meal with others who do the same thing – whether we knew them before, or only met them today. The domestic church, the family, is the smallest unit of Christ’s Body the Church, so to identify the family’s home and to choose the family’s activities to be places where Christ is the foundation of the event is how best to maintain the fabric and culture of your family while we are passing through this foreign land.
Monsignor Smith
