John Michael Botean
I REMEMBER when the biggest event of the week was going to church on Sunday. This was followed by the second-biggest event of the week, Sunday dinner, which sometimes was at Grandma’s or at another relative’s home, but usually was at home. They seemed to go together—church and a special dinner—and there was seldom one event without the other. In fact, the topic of conversation at dinner was almost always whatever it was that happened at church: news or gossip, parish events, arguments between people, something Father Ilie [Crihalmean] said or did—you get the idea. From getting up and putting on our itchy Sunday clothes to taking a snooze in the afternoon after a big, special meal, the rituals of Sunday all wafted together, one into the other, like the smells of incense and Sunday chicken blending into one pungent aroma, that one mixture of God and family that we called Church. Ah, the sweet, sweet memories of childhood!
We looked forward to going to church, if for no other reason than that we would be able to see grandparents and family, and even sit and play with our cousins in the choir loft if we could be quiet about it. Never would it have occurred to me as a child that Sundays would be for anything else, certainly not school or sports or work (though eventually Dad did have to work some Sundays when he got the job at the steel mill) or even a normal play day. Normal television was not even part of the day until the evening: “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” or Ed Sullivan or the Sunday Night Movie—the only program I can remember on Sunday afternoon was a local gem called Polka Varieties that emanated from Cleveland. Sundays were meant for focusing on each other and not on some flickering facsimile of life on a black-and-white screen. And God was always in the background, watching.
My home parish, the parish of my baptism on August 7, 1955, St. George in Canton, Ohio, is now our eparchy’s cathedral parish. It is quite extraordinary that, 64 years later, I am still in the parish where I received all of the rest of my sacraments, up to and including ordination to the episcopate. I suppose that is why in this column I am waxing nostalgic rather than writing on some more abstract or academic theme having to do with the parish as the basic unit of Christian life.
It is not without reason. While much is rightly made of the family as the basic unit of society, it is in the context of its participation in the sacramental life of the Church through the parish that the family itself can become what we refer to as “the domestic Church.”
While every family can and should have its own Bible, its icons, its places and times for gathering in prayer, it is in virtue of the family members’ baptism that Christ can truly take up his abode in our domestic hearth. Our participation in the parish family and its God-provided meal is what makes our natural family Christian. For that we must leave our private homes and gather in the domus ecclesiae, the Church’s home: our parish church.
But this has a special meaning for us as Romanian Greek-Catholics, not least because of the ethnic, linguistic, historic and cultural homogeneity that is at the root of our Church’s life, even here in North America. To refer to our parishes as “families” is not to employ a marketing slogan. It is to name a reality that is one of our greatest treasures. It is to describe that flow of life and love from the Holy Table of the Eucharistic meal to the table of our family meal, and back again, that makes us who we are, regardless of our ethnic origin, or the circumstances of birth or, personal choice that brought us to the parish of our belonging in the first place. The parish is the place where we all know each other and where we share in the communion of the Holy Spirit who gathers us.
Our belonging does not, therefore, end with our family of origin, but opens us up to belonging in other dimensions: to our parish, in the first place, and from there to our diocese (eparchy), then to our Romanian Greek-Catholic Church, and then to the Universal (or “catholic”) Church, in which we belong, in the end to Christ himself.
And because Christ belongs to the world which God so loved (John 3:16), and that he redeemed by his own blood, the blood we share in the chalice offered for our Communion in our parish’s liturgy, we, too, belong to the world. Welcome home.