A Soft Place to Land

For years, when we heard the phrase “domestic church,” we pictured children. We saw family prayer and bedtime blessings. We crafted Advent wreaths and saint-day celebrations and Stations of the Cross fashioned for small hands. We cooked and baked for feast days–and often, there were cupcakes because, when the people you are catechizing are five years old, cupcakes are remarkably effective.

And then, as the seasons we so loved came and went and time moved forward, the five-year-olds became twenty-five-year-olds. They moved away and made homes of their own. They made choices of their own, too, and some of those choices surprised us. Some disappointed us. Some bewildered us.

Still, though, we are mothers. We are mothers in a domestic church as our nests are emptying. What does it all mean? I have been thinking about that question as I prepare to give a talk on the domestic church next week in Virginia.

But I have also been thinking about that question while reading an early copy of Noelle Mering’s new book No Contact. The book considers our growing culture of family estrangement: the increasing conviction that differences of belief, politics, values, or worldview can make family relationships themselves impossible.

One thing that is interesting to me is that that cultural assumption has consequences even before anyone actually becomes estranged. I think that people have begun to expect rejection. Hang in there with me. I promise this has something to do with the domestic church. And it all has to do with today’s group coaching session, where several people brought some stories that all related to one another.

An adult child whose beliefs or way of life differs dramatically from those of her Catholic extended family may approach the home of that family already braced for impact. She has absorbed a caricature of people who believe what we believe. She may assume that she knows what devout Catholics think of someone like her, and she may be afraid that disagreement necessarily means rejection.

Today, during group coaching, we challenged ourselves to ponder this idea: What if she walks through the door and discovers something else?

We’re not considering compromising values or short-circuiting truth. Nor do we want to propose a family carefully concealing and editing what it believes so that no one will be uncomfortable. Instead, we are women who believe that we can be authentically Catholic and wholeheartedly welcoming. Catholic conviction itself is not inhospitable.

Together, we considered something interesting. What if the call in this circumstance is for this young woman to encounter a mother? During our group coaching conversation, someone recalled St. John Paul II’s description of femininity in Mulieris Dignitatum in terms of maternity, sensitivity, generosity, and receptivity. I asked her to repeat the words so that I could be sure to note them. I think the words reframe the question. Instead of asking, How do I “handle” someone whose beliefs are radically different from mine?, perhaps I can ask: How can I be a spiritual mother to this person?

That does not answer every difficult moral question. But it changes the posture from which we approach them, particularly in light of Mulieris Dignitatum.

A mother receives. She prepares a place; she makes room. Mothers notice. They listen and they’re tuned in to details. A mother remembers what someone told her the last time they sat at her table. She is sensitive enough to recognize where another person’s wounds are tender. She is generous enough to make space for a person who arrives carrying a story she does not understand. Mothers feed people; they nourish. A crowded table is her love language in so many ways.

And none of this requires the mother to stop knowing–and wholeheartedly believing–what is true. This is where I think we sometimes create a false choice. We imagine that fidelity to the Church requires us to broadcast everything we know at the earliest possible opportunity, or that hospitality requires us to pretend we don’t know it.

Neither approach is particularly maternal.

Mothers understand timing. A mother certainly teaches and corrects her children. But she doesn’t meet her newborn for the first time and immediately begin issuing corrections. Love comes first. Before any admonishment even enters her mind, she cares for that child all day, every day—and all night, too. So much sacrifice on the part of the mother comes first! Relationship comes first. She knows the child before she begins the long work of forming the child.

Spiritual motherhood might ask something similar of us.

There are people coming into our homes and our families now who were not formed as we formed our own children. Some were barely formed in faith at all. Some were catechized primarily by social media and secular universities and a culture that has told them what Catholics believe long before any Catholic has had the opportunity to show them.

They may arrive expecting the hammer of truth. Perhaps our particular vocation is, as it has always been, to offer them the soft place to land instead.