Our pastor just announced that a new tradition will be starting this year: a big Corpus Christi procession beginning at another parish in our town and ending at our own. It’s not a far walk—just over four blocks, about three quarters of a mile. In fact, I can easily walk to at least three parishes from my house.
For someone who grew up in the country, this feels like an embarrassment of riches. So many tabernacles, so close. And all three of those churches have thriving parish schools, with rich traditions and many students whose families have been going there for multiple generations.
Although COVID helped Catholic schools to reverse the trend of decreasing enrollment, this is still a pretty unusual situation. Pre-pandemic, nationwide, about 100 Catholic schools closed or merged per year. In my neighborhood, my sense is that the high enrollment in Catholic schools has something to do with school district lines. We live a block and a half away from the boundary between our school district (which is not very well-regarded) and the neighboring one, which is very well-rated and highly desirable. When we were house-hunting, we realized that we could get a house in this neighborhood for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than a smaller one half a mile away, in the fancier school district. Since we didn’t plan to send our kids to the public school, this was a no-brainer to us. And it seems like many of our neighbors made the same calculation: almost everyone in our neighborhood sends their kids to the parochial schools.
When we decided that my husband would take the job offer he’d received in Philly, I started my neighborhood search based on both commuting distance for him and proximity to a well-regarded independent Catholic classical school in the area. Lots of people I knew through my work were involved there, serving on the board as well as sending their kids there.
As we drove around to get the feel of different neighborhoods, we kept slowing down when we got to this one. “Ooh, which town are we in now?” my husband and I would ask each other. “I like these houses!” The house we eventually bought is a stone Tudor, built in 1930. It’s surrounded by houses built all around the same time, in the same style, mainly designed by the same architect, but each with its own details: turrets, stained glass windows, wooden cross beams, stone of varying sizes and shapes. They make me think of that Biblical description of Jerusalem, “built as a city, with compact unity.”
The lots are small, so the houses are close together. The small yard and lack of privacy has been hard to get used to, since I grew up on a 60+ acre farm, and our last house had a huge backyard with a big, quiet cemetery right behind it. Still, we decided the trade-offs were worth it. Our neighborhood is highly walkable, with sidewalks on both sides of the street and four-way stops at every corner. Lots of our neighbors’ families have lived here for generations, and they all seem to know each other.
When we put in the offer, I thought I’d be driving to the kids to the classical school, which is located in a more expensive suburb about 15 minutes away (or more, if there’s traffic). But once I realized there were three parish schools within a mile or so of the house, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to check them out, too.
Again, I grew up in a very rural area, where Catholic schools (and, to a lesser extent, towns and schools in general) where few and far between. I was homeschooled, and I didn’t really have much of any contact with the Catholic school system, until I went to a vibrantly Catholic college. Somewhere along the way, though, I got the impression that most parish schools weren’t so hot: basically just public schools you had to pay for, with a little nice-sounding watered-down gloss of values “inspired by the Catholic tradition.” (Kind of like a faded, elementary-school Georgetown, without the fancy reputation.) So I didn’t really expect that we’d choose a parochial school. That is, until I walked into ours.
It was really the principal who did it. When my husband and I arrived for our tour, she spent an hour talking with us, listening to us share our hopes and worries about our children’s particular gifts, temperaments, and struggles. Conservatives tend to dunk on “social-emotional learning,” but as a mother of highly sensitive daughters, I was drawn to school’s emphasis on the children’s emotional needs—on teaching them how to listen to their bodies, be aware of their feelings, regulate their emotions, and treat others with kindness. But I also saw and appreciated that this focus on feelings was not an end in and of itself. The principal, who told us sincerely that “Jesus is my boss,” clearly saw the connection between children knowing they are safe and loved by the adults in their lives and children internalizing—in a deep and lasting way—the knowledge that they are loved and cherished by God.
No, the school isn’t perfect. I wish there were fewer worksheets and less tech, and it doesn’t have a classical curriculum or a Montessori-inspired Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program. But, overall, there is just so much good there.
A lot of that has to do with the community. During our first year, I found the calendar dizzying: there’s not just the turkey trot and pancakes with Santa and the Easter bonnet parade and monthly first Friday mass, there’s also the troop tango and the bike rodeo and the little luau and lots of dress-down days for all kinds of charities and special events. Everybody else seemed to already know what all of these things were, and the notes that came home often told me what parents had to do for the event (say, send in cans or soup or dress up your kids or give them two dollars) and not what the event actually was. But, gradually, I’ve gotten to know more of the traditions and more of the people. I’m getting a better sense of the rhythms that structure the common life of the parish and school community.
I’m rereading two books right now: A Time to Build, by Yuval Levin, and Connected, by Nicholas Christakis. Both of them have to do with the ways that human beings come together. Christakis focuses on the concept of social networks, tracing the ways in which we are unknowingly influenced by the people who are connected to the people with whom we are connected. Levin focuses on institutions. By this, he doesn’t just mean formal organizations, but rather “the durable forms of our common life… the frameworks and structures of what we do together.” He emphasizes that institutions “form our habits, our expectations, and ultimately our character. By giving shape to our experience of life in society, institutions give shape to our place in the world and to our understanding of its contours. They are at once constraining and enabling.”
Constraining and enabling. Doesn’t that describe the human relationship with external order so well? I’m reminded of both my literary studies of fixed forms in poetry, as well as the revelation I experienced when my first baby was young about the power of routines. I had thought that I’d be one of those laidback attachment parenting types, breastfeeding on demand and eschewing schedules. But I soon realized that my particular baby—and my particular self, I suppose—had a deep need for order and predictability, even if I struggle mightily to create and maintain it on my own. Without at least a vague sense of where we were in the cycle of “Eat, Wake, Sleep,” I found myself with a despondent baby, feeling helpless to know what she needed and constantly overwhelmed by a sense of my own inadequacy. Yes, some of that was surely due to postpartum hormones. Yet I think the implications are broader.
When I have some sort of order in my life, I then feel free to choose to depart from it. My baby has a nap schedule, but it’s there to serve us, not the other way around. If other members of the family need to be out of the house during naptime, I can figure out other ways to get everyone’s needs met on a given day, precisely because I have a sense of our baseline needs. Similarly, in poetry, embracing a fixed form as a starting place not only demands discipline and skill; it also makes a departure from that form all the more powerful and resonant. Think, for example, of “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop. (“Write it!”)
On the individual scale, I see lots of people who have intuitively discovered the power of routine, the beauty of submitting one’s unruly desires to some kind of external order. But I think, by and large, we’ve lost an appreciation for the need for rituals that order our communal lives—for institutions that form and connect us.
I consider myself deeply blessed to live in a neighborhood that retains so many shared traditions rooted in the Catholic faith. As a newcomer, I try to start from a place of humility in observing the formal and informal social institutions that exist here, trying to understand the current ecosystem rather than immediately rushing in to try to improve things. But I also try to consciously create new forms of community—organizing weekly mass/park playdates on a weekday morning, hosting meatless suppers on Lenten Fridays. I love making connections between people who might not otherwise have known each other, creating an ever-more complex web of relationships and, I think, enriching all of our lives along the way.
Even if you live in a place that’s not littered with churches, where the physical architecture doesn’t point so obviously to the transcendent and the communal, I have a feeling that these two steps could help you tap into and build community, too. Especially if you’re relatively new to your area, start by observing the networks and traditions that already exist, the ways that people come together. They may or may not be in languages that come naturally to you. (Philly sports, for example, are a powerful culture liturgy whose rituals I haven’t yet come to understand, though I respect them.) Look for ways to try to integrate yourself into them, to become a part of the institutions that already exist. Look, too, for new and creative ways to connect with others, thinking through routines that will give you opportunities to encounter each other regularly. As Derek Thompson recently put it at The Atlantic, “the best definition of community is ‘where people keep showing up.’”
These things aren’t revolutionary, but they are a start—a step toward a richer and more meaningful common life.