S3E7 The Great Catholic Bake Off: Parishes

Man and Dan return again to the basics. This time it is the parish, less like a system and more like a crowded yum cha table.You arrive and the dishes are already in motion. Someone is insisting you try the chicken feet, and the lazy Susan turns whether you’re ready or not. You take what comes, and yet somehow it becomes yours.So too, the parish. It unsettles our neat, menu-like idea of faith as clearly defined and properly ordered. Instead, faith begins not as propositions but as people in awkward space. Somewhat inconveniently, the Body of Christ involves actual bodies, bodies that crowd, linger, misread social cues, and yet still belong. And yet it is precisely within this complication that the comfort of faith emerges, because orthodoxy here is not merely a matter of alignment with truth, but of commitment, and not only your own commitment, but the commitment of others to you.You do not simply choose the Church; rather, you find yourself, often quietly and somewhat irreversibly, included within it, drawn into a shared life that precedes your full understanding of it.The table continues to turn, the dishes continue to come, and you discover, almost in a Wong Kar-wai kind of way, that you are expected not only to remain, but to belong. ResourcesLumen Gentium: On the People of God