The Family Church

In the 1960s, a radical idea was introduced to Christianity - the home is a church. But it was hardly a new idea. For Christianity's first three hundred years the only churches you could find were in homes. The commandment to honour mother and father can be regarded this way - from Mount Sinai came the word that God trusted family to be the instrument by which wisdom and honour were maintained in the world.

St. Paul tells us even that by marrying, we save each other. ("For the unbelieving husband is consecrated husband through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband." 1 Corinthians 7:14) That was certainly the case with me.

Although I was nominally Christian, I had no great faith when I married. And you know, neither did my wife. We had a United Church minister preside at our wedding, but I think we did this largely out of fear - my grandmother, her mother would not have approved of anything secular.

When the time came for my eldest daughter to go through her first communion and confirmation classes, my wife found herself drawn back to the faith of her childhood. The peculiar ideas about God that she had developed, born in teenage rebellion, were slowly whisked away by a nun friend, who was nothing like the stereotype. Soon everyone was wandering around my house, cheerily singing hymns. And grinch that I was, all this did for me was annoy me. :)

But curiously enough, my journey back to the God who had made me had already begun. When my wife had become pregnant with our youngest, I had just lost my job. One night, I just stayed awake staring at her. I asked myself, "How are we ever going to get through this?" And then I heard this voice - deep, musical, golden, like trumpets but less shrill and far calmer. And it said only this, "Everything will be alright." Just that, and nothing more. Two weeks before she was born, I had a dream about happy days to come, and three years later, the dream happened. Amazingly enough, I was still plagued by doubt and cynicism.

But I eventually came around, moved by music, moved by the way my mother in law was laid to rest. I went into the RCIA, and grew with a group of strangers who became friends. My wife was on the RCIA team, and was seeing all her patience with me come to fruition. I was coming full circle. And the day of my confirmation, during a retreat, I saw it clearly - all the times Jesus had been with me during my life, and I had never seen it. When I was fourteen, and just learning to water ski, a powerboat cut across the tow-roap. He had pushed me off the line. When I was fifteen, and foolishly decided to pass my brother on the right when we were both riding ATVs, I ran up his tire and the ATV and I flipped into the air. I should have been killed, and most people in such an accident are killed. The ATV landed on me, bounced off and flew eight feet into the woods, and I emerged with nothing but a bloody nose. Now I knew why.

That night, when I was anointed with chrism, and the priest said, "Peace be with you," I replied "Et cum spiritu tuo" (and with thy spirit.) I had joined a community stretching across thousands of years, back to those dusty days in the desert when Jesus had first said, "Shalom" to his apostles.

My wife led me to this place, and leads me still. And I have come to realize recently in new ways that I still take her for granted. Two weeks ago, I asked myself when the last time I prayed for her, and I could not find an answer. I must constantly renew my membership in this church of the home. We are each of us, in our own families, on a pilgrimmage to Heaven. We are all traveling at different speeds. Some of us are stalled, the blind leading the blind. But by the grace of God, who even made family the home of Jesus so long ago in Bethlehem, where we were once blind, now we see.