UNDERSTANDING THE LITURGY by John J. O'Brien, C.P.

WHAT DOES THE WORD CHURCH MEAN?: on the domestic and local Church

What do we mean by church? Pope John Paul II assigned nine meanings to this word. Here are a few meanings. The church is the people of God on pilgrimage through life. It is the community of the baptized. It is a universal movement and institution. At the same time, the church is local; it is people making up a parish like Saint Malachy. Today I want to focus on the church as local and domestic.

Early Christians were beautiful branches taken from the sturdy vine called Israel and the robust faith called Judaism. While Jews are conscious of belonging to a worldwide movement, Jewish faith is concretely expressed in the local synagogue and in family as domestic community. Here Jewish mother, father and children celebrate Sabbath night and Sabbath day. Here Passover is ritually reenacted. Here learning goes on: all learn to pray, to study the Torah, and to cherish values, to appreciate each person as the image of God, and to feel God delivering ancestors from Egypt to a promised land. Many cradle Jews or converts to Judaism tell me that what they love about their faith is the domestic quality of prayer, observance, and community.

We Christians, the daughter religion, are grateful for the example of Judaism. We most concretely learn and express our faith in what Pope John Paul II calls the domestic church, the house-church, the "first seminary", i.e., the first seed bed that teaches, fosters, and nourishes family members. Whatever we learn about being internationally bonded to one another in Jesus Christ and however we become committed to an ethic of life and forgiveness, justice and peace, is first learned in the home. That is why family based catechesis, i.e., learning and formation, leads to family prayer around the table of the home and the table of parish liturgy on Sunday morning.

The domestic church in Central and South America is called a base community, i.e., a foundational community made up of families in a neighborhood. These families, usually under lay leadership, gather to listen to God's Word, to pray, and to apply that Word into action in the circumstances of their practical lives.

North American families are the domestic church. How do we know this? Ask yourself, does my family allow time or space for people to pray quietly or to listen together to religious music (like we sing in liturgy)? Do we read and study the Bible? Do we pray grace before our meals? Is there a cross or crucifix on the wall of our home, or a statue of Christ or Mary? Has our house, a mini-church, been blessed? Do we ever take things from faith and apply them to issues family members face? Do we bless children with a prayer from the Catholic Book of Blessing? Do we celebrate a child's going away to college or a married child's pregnancy? In short, how the domestic church lives the faith will directly influence the quality of our liturgical prayer. Keep up the good work week by week, brother and sister!