One of the biggest dreams I had as a married man was that my spouse and I could serve in a ministry together. Didn’t really matter what the ministry was, so long as we could do it together. Of course we all know the story that soon after marriage, the wifey had already conceived within 3 months and 9 months later, less than a year into our marriage (short of 25 days to be precise) we were blessed with a healthy baby boy.
While I had my spiritual doses from the Work, I felt something in me was missing. It was more apparent after the birth of my child, and while we tried to join communities soon after my marriage, everything either fizzled our or we felt we couldnt connect. I was still receiving my formation from the Work and while it was (and it is still great), it was definitely amiss in my life. Through different avenues, we found different communities here and there, us with the family CG group consisting of young families and me finding a group of catholic brothers to journey with.
For a while, these were good ; they were adequate to keep me spiritually going, to bond with likeminded men and families, but over time, again there was amiss. I must stress the point that this has nothing to do with the quality of the community or members, but rather something internal, something deeper and more intimate in my soul. I just felt I wanted to go deeper in my journey of holiness ; to be spiritually stronger and to grow closer to God.
These emotions, thoughts and feelings haunted me for a while, especially during the COVID period. While everyone was adapting to zoom, being someone in the tech consulting and often peddling messages of digital transformation and hybrid ways of working, I found myself lost and upset on being on zoom. Even my religious life has been confined to a screen.
Its bad enough to have to attend mass on zoom, now I would need to attend my community group meetings also on zoom ; and while this was just a way for people to still be connected, I kept feeling something was amiss. Thankfully my parish was small enough with a dynamic priest to drive and provide plenty of masses for the faithful. As such, we never needed to succumb to online masses.
And attending mass daily gave the family some sense of spiritual connection and routine. We felt nourished by the sacarments and grateful we could attend mass on a weekly basis (sometimes we could even do daily masses!) . It was also around this time the parish started promoting more announcements to get more people to join ministry groups. Every week, the wifey and I would hear announcements on this ministry or that ministry needing people and the priest exhorting the congregation to sign up “if you haven’t joined any ministry yet”. Wifey and I would look at each other, nod and then just look away. Nothing clicked at the end of the day. Ministries come and go, people come and go, and we just stay the same. If you are capable, you can be “successful” in ministry and if you were not, well you were not.
It was also around this time we heard about another announcement – to join a community called Neocathechumal Way. In all my years of being in the faith, I had never once heard of this movement and we were not sure if we should join. A community? a community which we hadn’t heard of?
Little did we know what was in store for us…
