Heralds at home: proclaiming good news

Heralds at Home

The Domestic-Majestic Life

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before This was going to be a big year for my son and for me. you were born I consecrated you. JEREMIAH 1:5 He was to start preschool at St. Stephen’s this fall and Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood— every Sunday, starting soon. I kept telling myself the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight… that, any day now, we were going to get serious about RICHARD ROHR religion. We were going to begin. Then, the world changed, the preschool closed, and church as we knew By Allison Seay it is gone for a time. Now what? I can hardly get my child Motherhood is my deepest, purest joy. To say I fully to eat a square meal much less tune in to worship online. appreciate or understand what is at stake in loving my child (He’s two-and-a-half; we do what we can.) And that business well is, I think, to dishonor what is at stake. After all, it is a about being a herald of faith and his primary minister? It has holy charge, as overwhelming as it is inspiring: parents have never felt more important and it has never seemed more difficult. the distinct privilege of being the first heralds of faith for their What, anyway, is a herald to do at a time like this, when life and children, first witnesses of the Gospel, first ministers to these the news as she knew it feels forever changed? It is a beginning, mysterious, marvelous, God-formed human beings. Like other indeed, but not one I feel equipped to navigate well. honorable responsibilities perhaps, the magnitude of this one, if I am being honest, is daunting even while I remind myself that One thing that has anchored me during this pandemic seaI am not giving my son anything that is not already his and instorm is to return to my study of the child himself, return to dwelling, nor am I tasked with anything I am not already deepthe work that has been most formative in my own spiritual life. down equipped to offer. I recalled with interest that when scholars Sofia Cavelletti and Another way I think about it: I am not responsible for introducing Rome, founded the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd—a rich, my child to God so much as I am for re-initiating and nurturing contemplative religious formation for children—they came to the relationship that already exists. The challenge for me is in consider the present and future of the child in terms of the child’s finding ways to nurture it by means worthy of both God and my past. That is, their conclusions articulate beautifully the ways in son alike; the challenge for me is in learning to proclaim without which the romance and sanctity of the mother’s womb can guide shouting, to instruct without speaking, to observe without presently and insightfully the way parents and ministers and surveilling, to shepherd without hovering, to guide without ego, teachers imagine and prepare a learning environment after birth and to get out of the way on time and with love, relinquishing and into childhood. each to the other in faith. wanting this child I have made to love his life and love this world, I was committed to bringing him with me to church Gianna Gobbi, after apprenticing with Maria Montessori in I can paraphrase it like this: The womb is that sacred place— Ministry to my own child—to all children, really—is at the root place that Christ himself once knew—where the unborn first of what I believe is my most essential work on this earth. And, I knows safety and warmth; first encounters light and darkness, think it is important to note, one need not be a parent in order sound and music, taste and aroma; is the place of perfect union to be a herald: while the Bible teaches that all of us are ministers of self, environment, and the human being that sustains him. by virtue of our Baptism, it feels truer to me to believe we are all Remembering this can guide us, the Catechesis teaches us, in heralds of faith by virtue of our humanity. preparing an environment that honors the already-consecrated The deep desire I hold for my son is as simple and as profound as such a prepared environment for children the “atrium.” child’s dignity, sanctity, and religious capacity. Montessori called not simply because it was I who gave it to him, but because his My son would have entered an atrium at St. Stephen’s this year, existence, the existence of any child, is evidence of the world’s every Sunday morning. And there he would find sacred objects abundance. I want a child to love and believe in mystery and (a chalice and paten, a Bible), beautiful materials (wood and miracle, to know that he has within himself the very pearl of God. silver and glass and gold), natural things (pinecones and flowers and shells and rocks), and a trained catechist who would witness Of course, I also want my child to be happy and safe and well, and him, listen to him, live alongside him a common religious I want him to grow up kind and loving and good-spirited and experience. And he would hear, as all children of the atrium do, compassionate. And with common sense and a moral compass, and that everything he did in that space would be his own perfect, some decent table manners, too. One must start somewhere. private prayer. He would find work to inspire his awakening senses, would begin to penetrate mysteries of time, of life and +++ death, and he would be offered ways to satisfy his capacity for

new language. He would sing and move and celebrate and in the care of a catechist he would find his response to what Montessori believed was the silent plea of all children: “Help me draw closer to God by myself.”

In the womb, with his mother’s oneness, a child is unaware of the possibility of separateness, is unaware that one’s own body and being ends and another’s begins. Outside the womb, we can take great care in nurturing Oneness of a different but no less holy order.

What this teaches us about the importance of environment for children after birth is inextricable from the ways we think about the religious capacities of children as they grow. They are born with a particular knowledge, a holy vocation—as a sunflower seed knows to become a sunflower—and it is our privilege to witness their becoming. Our work, especially now, especially in the home, is to provide the fertile environment where the gifts and blooms of their spirit will be honored and celebrated. After all, the seed cannot become what it is without the right environment, without soil and sun. Our work includes adapting the way we speak with children, the work we offer them, the affirmation we give them, the respect we show them.

The work of the herald, I remind myself, is not to make the news good; the work of the herald is to deliver the news that already is. The fertile environment is the work of the adult. The becoming is the work of the child. All this to say that the loving environment we offer to children— whether in the atrium or at home—particularly as it concerns nurturing and respecting their spiritual lives, is nearly as important as the good news we are here to herald. When the “shelter-in-place” directives appeared last spring, they became for me intense spiritual instruction, a discipline which asked me to think anew: What is this place in which we shelter? How will we shelter here? What is it that we think we need? Ours is a small house. The dishes are chipped. A lightbulb is out. The animals are shedding. And which of us tracked this mud inside? What is this home we have made and continue to make?

One lesson I learned quickly from sheltering in place is that it is often easier to think abstractly and wistfully of the Sacred Home—what some call Domestic Church—than it is to practice what I preach. Like other noble pursuits, it is much easier to contemplate the idea rather than live the reality. There are plenty of days I can hardly communicate with my own spouse in the kitchen much less shelter in place with reverence. And all the while the current world news on television, even while muted, screams catastrophe in every direction. As if anyone could forget, this is not the womb any longer.

The good news, of course, is that we have what we need. We do. The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd reminds us that our domestic church is already church, even if we have not yet assigned it that way. There is nothing we need to do to make the home a sacred home; the difference is in our knowing that it is already so, and always was.

For my part, one important adjustment I am making is in thinking that the gap between idea and reality is unbridgeable. I have spent months, I fear, fighting my own ego, figuring out how to make my home more sacred, how to make this a place of religious instruction that might hold us over until our “real church” reopens. Then, I kept telling myself, we’d really begin. We’d get serious about religion.

It is six months later and I am waking up. This is home. This is church. This is what we have. What is it we think we need? The work before now came at some emotional cost and I am sure I am still paying. But, a shift in me happened when I realized that rather than preparing a home for religious instruction, I might

instead prepare a home for religious life. There is nothing to do to make our home sacred; there is instead the work of claiming what already is and living here in ways that celebrate the truth.

When the first century Christians used the term “domestic church” they understood that the home was holy and fertile ground, the primary place of gathering, prayer, safety, and Presence. They understood that parents were the first heralds of faith. And here we are. Everything ancient made new. How wonderfully strange to realize an invitation backwards, to something that has already been, our present and our future understood through an alreadyconsecrated past.

As for me and mine who shelter here, it is a domestic-majestic life we are learning. Nothing here is without the holy. And nothing here is without the dust of us, the dust of our daily living. It is true for you and yours. May you believe it is so. ✤ Allison Seay, associate for religion and the arts, writes “Wellspring,” our weekly poetry guide, edits the Weekly Bible Study, and coordinates Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, Holy Baptism, and helps oversee youth Confirmation preparation and Emmaus Groups.