Hi everyone! I'm Joe and I'm a failed Catholic.
Hi Joe!
Lately I've found myself reflecting a lot on faith and spirituality and fellowship and all of that. My daughter is being exposed to all sorts of different cultures and faiths and she's naturally asking questions about what exactly we are. My unease with organized religion likely precludes any sort of return to a faith community for me but I'm certainly not trying to keep the notion of religion and spirituality from my daughter.
Indeed, I'm a big proponent of a lot of what religion can offer. My wife and I both appreciate spirituality (albeit in different ways) and I don't think one needs to align with any sort of church before one can accept that there is indeed something out there - be it a God, something supernatural, or just an appreciation of serendipity, coincidence and happenstance.
Losing Religion: Raising Kids Without a Church
And looking back on my life as a church-goer, I am starting to see that any moments of great spiritual reflection could just have easily been mere correlation with my organized faith as opposed to there being any sense of causality. I am just as likely to feel a sense of spiritual calm or reflection when standing in a massive west coast forest or breathing in salty air on a coast somewhere as I am to feel it while standing in a church or amidst a group of believers.
I do feel one thing missing in my life, however:
Fellowship.
Frankly, the more I think about it, the more confused I find myself. Growing up, despite moving around the country a bit, my family always knew we'd find a community of support in the church. And it was always something more than we would find other places. Oh sure, we made friends at school; my parents met people at work or in the community; we spent hours at the rink so we'd naturally find friendships through minor hockey.
But our church community was always... different. There was something more. Fellowship meant more than shared interests, it meant working towards a common goal. We supported each other and we supported the broader community too. We never went so far as to mission work around the world or anything but we did do charitable projects in our own communities. There was an inherent recognition of our blessings and a shared sense of obligation and opportunity to give back.
Raising Kids in an Inter-Faith Family
And I wonder where that same sense of fellowship might exist in secular society. Are service clubs the answer? My father was a Rotarian for most of my adolescence and there certainly are parallels but I look around my peer group now and I can't think of anyone who belongs to such a club. They seem like something for "older" people somehow. There are professional groups and associations but they aren't quite what I'm seeking either.
Where does a young family go to be part of something bigger that doesn't require adopting a whack of tenets it may not support?
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