Last week, my husband and I drove from our home in New England to Virginia.
We’ve made this drive countless times in the four years since we moved, usually pressing to “get there” and get the drive over with. This time, we meandered, snatching an overnight getaway in Pennsylvania, trying to squeeze a 24-hour “vacation” into a summer full of heavy obligations and hard encounters. On Sunday morning, we checked Mass times to see what our options were in a strange town. And we laughed about the abundance. There were Masses in five different churches within five miles of us whenever we desired. It was a far cry from home. At home, we had one option at 4 p.m. on Saturday and a scarcity of times in the morning on Sunday.
Before we moved four years ago, people warned us that we were heading into a “spiritual wasteland.” We’d spent our entire adult lives in Northern Virginia, in the Diocese of Arlington, renowned for churches bursting at the seams, for building new churches to meet the need, for ordaining large classes of new priests every year. The entire northeast is still struggling from the crisis that began in Boston in 2002. Closer to home, Connecticut — where apostolates of the Legionaries of Christ had been so deeply rooted — also reverberates with the fallout following the crisis that came a few years later.
To make matters worse, we moved in June of 2020. Churches had been closed, and then just cautiously opened. People were not returning. I was a person who had gone to adoration nearly every day. I spent hours poring over websites, trying to find just one church with perpetual adoration. Growing up, I had been told that the sign of a healthy church was multiple confession times and days. Most churches in New England had an hour or less of confession, once a week.
Far from building new churches, the parishes around me were combining with neighboring parishes, a priest shortage stretching two men over what used to be seven different churches. On Christmas morning our first year there, our family sat in a front-row pew, filling it as we usually do. Looking around at 9:50 a.m. before the 10 a.m. Mass, I saw one other family and one single woman. That was all. The church was mostly empty. I thought about the days we struggled in the parking lot with throngs of other people, people coming in for the next Mass to save a pew only to be thwarted by the cars leaving the previous Mass, too many people all the way around at every standing room only Mass. I worried we’d made a terrible mistake.
I shouldn’t have.
The following spring, we found a deeply devoted community devoted to God, to the church, and to each other. On my first day with these people, I struck up a casual conversation with a man who’d lived in Arlington previously. I expressed my dismay at the empty churches. He said, “This is quite a culture shock at first, but now you’re here with us. You’ve found the green wood.”
What I have learned in the more than three years since being welcomed heartily into that community is that when you are the church in a place where the church is struggling, you see every soul who is with you as the gift that they are. You see every opportunity to worship as the vital nourishment it is. You don’t take anything for granted. Instead, you treasure it, you nurture it. You know that every person in your community is irreplaceable and precious, so you take good care of each other. You are vigilant and stalwart, protecting the community where faith can flourish.
I miss the comfort and joy of daily adoration. I miss the ease of confession on whatever day works for me. And I truly do miss beautiful, well-lit, well-maintained churches that have air conditioning on hot days and are free from asbestos and mold. But I will be forever grateful for the way the Lord has revealed to me the goodness of his people and the steadfastness of their faith.
I think maybe I was a little too comfortable previously. Turns out green wood flourishes in a harsh climate.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
