We are being called on to find new and better ways to build community.
In asking for prayers this month for evangelisation in the city, Pope Leo touches on issues that concern the Church and our society. He also acknowledges that we do not have all the answers.
In Australia as in the rest of the world, people have moved in increasing numbers from rural areas into large cities. Small neighbouring towns have then become satellites to the city. In many large cities people are divided by their places of living. Some live in suburbs of great wealth. Others live in areas of great poverty, marked by high unemployment, criminal behaviour, poor housing, water supply, heating and access to services. Even people who are employed and well housed live isolated lives in suburbs, travelling far to work in the morning and back to home at night, shopping in large impersonal supermarkets, communicating with friends by mobile, and watching sport and movies on the TV phone. Many elderly people live in nursing homes and small children are in child-care during the day.
COUNTERING LONELINESS
In such a society that revolves around wealth and employment, people can easily feel lonely. There are few local groups where they can gather with others. The Churches may also be small and elderly and have little connection to the surrounding society. Shopping centres are dominated by large corporations. The anonymity of the shopping centres can weaken people’s vision of the nation as a community. It encourages polarisation and competition. Churches are seen as a flight from the city and not as part of it.
Although Pope Leo’s intention is directed to Catholics, it refers also to most modern societies. It invites us Catholics to think of ways in which people will see our lives as attractive and full of life, bringing people together in a way that they will experience as Good News. To live that way implies that we do not have all the answers, but we shall still reach out to people who like us are searching as we explore new ways of living as followers of Jesus.
SOCIETAL RESPONSE
Our way of living and sharing the Gospel must respond to the society and world in which we live and to people’s longings for a generous way of living.
It is always tempting to look back to the Church of an earlier age and its ways of dressing, praying and teaching that once seemed so effective. It is also tempting to look at the techniques of megachurches and their ways of gathering and holding people together. Their attention to people and accompaniment of them are certainly helpful and necessary. But the following of Jesus often invites us to go beyond organisation and beyond a preoccupation with size and techniques. These things often end in disillusion and the cult of preachers rather than in drawing us to the following of Jesus.
JOY OF GOD’S LOVE
Jesus’ way of building community was to speak with joy of the God who loves us so much and of his promise of life. He called together as his followers an apparently very unpromising group of people and reached out to the people on the edges of society. New ways of building community today must also echo Jesus’ way.
Image: depositphotos.com
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ is an editorial consultant at Jesuit Communications
