What Will We Lose When We Close a Parish?
4th Sunday of Easter
There is a strange experience in life that happens every now and then, the experience of realizing that people who used to know you really well don’t know you well at all anymore. The first time I had the experience, I was in my early 30s and found myself disoriented and stressed and with questions that needed answers: What happened? Did I do something wrong? Who really knows who I am now? Anyone? How do I get these people who used to know me really well to know me well again? Or should I even try? Is that how life works, people know you really well for some amount of time and then one day they don’t, and you all just need to move on?
The experience of realizing that people who used to know you really well might not know you at all anymore, so far as I can tell, can hit you at any time in life, and leaves you with hard questions to answer about friends or even family. Maybe you have experienced something like this for yourself.
I want to talk today about how that happens, and why, because our readings today focus on the reality of being known by someone else. What does it mean to be known by another person? How does it happen? And how do we reach a point at which we no longer really know people we used to know well, and they now longer know us?
There are answers to these questions given to us by language. The books of the New Testament were all written in Greek, originally, and in Greek there are two main words that are translated as ‘knowledge’ in English.
The first word, oida, is used to describe knowledge of facts. I know that 2+2=4. I know that London is a city in England. I know that the Orioles play baseball at Camden Yards and that Jackson Holliday is underperforming so far and that run production is looking pretty good this year but that the Orioles really need more stable pitching if we want to avoid a season ending early like last year. These are all facts that I know.
The second word, ginosko, is used to describe knowledge by way of experience. When I spend a lot of time with someone, I get to know them. We share common experiences. We have good conversations. I get to know a person because we share a common life, a real relationship. The kind of knowledge we gain about another person through shared experience and relationship is different from fact-knowledge; it is intimate, personal, deep, about more than knowing facts.
In the Gospel and the First Letter of John that we hear today, experience-knowledge (intimate, deep, personal knowledge) is found in the following relationships: the Father knows the Son, the Son knows the Father, the Good Shepherd knows his sheep, the sheep know the Good Shepherd, Christians who live in a community know one another, and people who do not live within the Christian community do not know Christians. The same Greek word, ginosko, is used to describe each of these relationships.
The language of the New Testament gives us a powerful image of what a human relationship might become. The kind of intimate, personal, deep knowledge that the Father and Son possess of one another is used to describe how well Christ knows each of us, how well we know Christ, and how well we might come to know one another through Christ in a community. And as a negative consequence, people who do not know Christ will never really know us. The image given to us in the New Testament teaches us that only by knowing each other in and through Christ are we diving into the deep cuts of who we are as persons created by God. Without knowing another person through Christ, you cannot really know them; not completely, not fully; there will always be a limit to your knowledge.
The image of relationship given to us in the New Testament also depends on the reality of community. “The reason the world does not know us,” says Saint John, is because it did not know Christ. What is his meaning? He means that context matters; human beings are situational creatures. We belong to a place, to a community, and the place where we find ourselves and the community in which we are embedded gives shape to who we are, gives shape to the relationships we form in Christ. What that means is that the experience-knowledge that you possess of another person, and that they possess of you, depends on a shared communal life. Remove a person from one situation in life and place them in another, and you will find relationships changing. Why? Because the reality of a shared common life creates experiences that are knowledge-forming.
Maybe, at this point, you can see what I think explains those strange experiences of people no longer knowing us who used to know us really well. The experience comes from two different sources.
First, there are people in life who do not know Christ, and the more we get to know Christ, the less will these people who used to know us well be able to know us at all. These kinds of changes usually happen as we get older, start to take ownership of our faith, and get invested in the Christian life. The New Testament is filled with images that describe our transformation in terms of time: the old self and the new self, old cloth and new cloth, old wine and new wine. The simple fact is that in Christ we are transformed, and that means that people who do not know Christ cannot really know us.
The second source of our no longer knowing a person, or them no longer knowing us, is a change in life-situation, or relationship context. What I mean is that real-time community matters. Move a person from one community to another, and it does not matter how rooted that person used to be in their former community, or how good that former community is, the move itself will cause people to lose knowledge of one another. Experience-knowledge (intimate, personal, deep knowledge of another person) is experience-dependent, and that means that without shared common experiences your knowledge of another person will become shallower over time. There is the tragedy of getting older: you move from one community to another, and you discover that now you only have facts in common with people who used to share a common life with you. And you can hold onto those facts as long as you want, but facts are not the same as shared experiences.
What I want to do now is say something about the Seek the City initiative of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and the proposed parish closures in Baltimore City that were announced last week. I have seen lots of posts on social media the last several days, and have heard lots of commentary, and I don’t really want to use a homily to step into the controversy or give you my #hottake about what is good or bad about the proposal.
What I do want to do is give you a reminder about what a parish is, at a time when we are talking about closing some parishes and leaving others open. We need to remember that a parish is a community, a shared life-situation, in which and through which people come to know Christ, and through which people come to know each other through Christ. That definition of a parish means that a parish that is not Christ-focused is not a real community; no one will come to know Christ, which means that no one will come to know one another through Christ. That definition of a parish also means that a parish that is not relationship-focused is not a real community; a parish is more than a church building where you show up to receive sacraments and talk to God.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the reality of parish identity gets lost in the modern world. We make other communities more important to us than our parish, and we shouldn’t. We make parishes into places where cultural heritage or ethnic identity matter more than the real-time experience of Christ, and we shouldn’t. We make parishes into advocacy organizations for social justice or community-formation that is not Christ-focused, and we shouldn’t. We reduce parishes to church buildings with pretty windows and music, places for prayer and sacraments, but absent relationship-forming experiences, and we shouldn’t. Or we do the opposite and make parishes into places for relationship formation but lose our focus on Christ and prayer and sacraments, and we shouldn’t.
Whatever the reason or cause, the simple fact is that without strong parishes we cannot have a strong Church, and that without strong parishes, we cannot really enjoy the grace of being known completely by another person. The words of St. John are haunting: because of Christ, those who belong to our community are those who really know us, and those who do not know Christ will never know us. Christ and a common life grounded in Christ are the middle terms that make it possible for us to know one another. Is that how we live? Is it the case that the world does not know you because it does not know Christ? Is it the case that those who belong to your community are those who know you best because they do know Christ?
The word parish, in English, comes from another Greek word used a lot in the New Testament: paroikia. The original Greek word is better translated as ‘sojourning’ or ‘traveling,’ and in its most literal meaning describes the reality of people living alongside of one another. A parish is a community of fellow-travelers, people who are Christ-focused and moving with one another through life toward eternity, coming to know one another in and through Christ, sharing common experiences because of a shared common destiny.
We need those kinds of parishes in Baltimore City.
Homily preached on Sunday, April 21st at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.