The Idea of a Parish Community
by Deacon Tracy Jamison, OCDS, PhD
I would like to offer a Catholic mission vision based on Sacred Scripture and a philosophical distinction once made in a lecture given by Professor Richard Dumont, OCDS, PhD (1928-2016) in which he addressed the question, “What is the difference between a community and a corporation?” His answer took the form of an Aristotelian metaphysical explanation of the common good. A community is a specific kind of society, but it is not a field of appropriation, like a corporation, even though it has persons of authority who must be obeyed. It should be less like an army and more like a family. There are some obvious similarities between a community and a corporation, but there are also some essential differences. The individual members of a community, like the members of a family, are never expendable for the success of its enterprises, no matter how disappointing certain members may be with respect to achieving certain goals. A good community, like a good family, is a caring communion of persons where virtues are cultivated and the individual members are valued as ends in themselves.
The individual members of a community, like the members of a family, are never expendable for the success of its enterprises, no matter how disappointing certain members may be with respect to achieving certain goals.
A corporation, by contrast, does not exist specifically for the sake of the common good of its individual members, as a community or family does. A corporation exists specifically for the sake of achieving the temporal goals which the owners and managers set for it. A corporation appropriates persons, while a community unifies and serves persons. Intuitively we understand the difference. A corporation ultimately serves not the common good but the instrumental good of its own enterprises. A corporation values its workers and stakeholders only insofar as their performance benefits its own self-interested goals. Accordingly, the corporation asks of each individual, “What can you do for the success of this enterprise?” This is an expression of corporate self-interest. To work for a corporation always carries certain dangers for the individual, for the workers are not valued and included for their own sake. A corporation defines itself not as a community but as an enterprise or campaign. If a corporation happens to call itself a community, it does so merely for a utilitarian end. It is important to understand the difference.
What then is a parish community? A parish community is one that participates in a supernatural common good. It values the presence and the contribution of each individual member, no matter how weak or feeble, as intrinsically good and worthwhile. A parish community attempts to keep everyone together, in spite of disagreements and hurt feelings, and no individual member is insignificant or expendable. Persons are valued more for the sake of who they are than for the sake of what they can do. Like a family, a parish community exists to meet basic human needs and serve the common good, both the natural common good and the supernatural common good, but primarily the latter. If someone must be temporarily excluded, it is only for the person’s own good, and the hope is that the person will have a change of heart and return to the community. The goods that the parish community possesses in common are virtues—perfections of nature and grace. The common good as such is the ordered set of social conditions that sustain the intellectual, moral, and theological virtues. A true common good, such as science or education or sanctity, cannot be diminished by distribution. The more that each individual common good is distributed, the more that it is enhanced and possessed in common.
A good parish community is therefore a school of virtue, similar to a good family. Intellectual, moral, and theological virtues are acquired and developed by combination of nature, grace, and habituation. Virtues and vices are related to pleasures and pains. A virtuous person is one who spontaneously finds pleasure and delight in activities that are noble and perfective. A person who lacks virtue in a certain area is one who is subjectively unable to take pleasure in a particular activity that is objectively good. For example, a temperate person is one who finds pleasure in abstinence and is thus inclined toward it, and an intemperate person is one who finds pain in abstinence and is thus inclined not to abstain. A brave person is one who faces a necessary danger with pleasure and is thus inclined to meet the challenge, and a cowardly person is one who faces danger with pain and is thus inclined to flee. A musical person is one who finds pleasure in performing and hearing good music. A studious person is one who finds pleasure in learning. An intellectual person is one who finds delight in understanding. And so on, for every virtue and vice.
We all have dispositions toward and away from what is truly good. We all need training through education and direction. We all need formation in virtue. We all need trainers who work for our improvement and our perfection. These are provided in good families and parish communities. Virtues constitute a hierarchy of goods. Higher goods ought to be preferred to lower goods. Like athletes, we ought to prefer exercising to eating. Like philosophers and scientists such as Aristotle, we ought to prefer studying to sleeping. Like St Francis, we ought to prefer giving to receiving. Like Jesus Christ, we ought to prefer sacrificing ourselves for the good of others, even when it entails being rejected and despised. In accord with the human condition, we often encounter persons who habitually excel in one area of virtue but habitually fail in another area of virtue. In the classical tradition, it has often been argued that it is always a terrible mistake to attempt to educate the mind without also educating the heart. If people are not taught to find delight in what is truly good, they will soon put all their knowledge and skill at the service of their disordered passions and appetites.
Now, faith is a kind of virtue, and it is constitutive of the parish community. It is the rational mean between the intellectual vices of credulity and skepticism. Faith is an intellectual assent to a credible testimony on the basis of ordinate love. A person of faith is one who accepts and rejects testimonies rightly. Indeed, a person of faith is one who finds pleasure and delight in believing what is credible. A person who lacks faith is either one who finds pain and difficulty in believing what is credible, or one who finds pleasure and delight in believing what is incredible. There is a natural (human) kind of faith, and there is a supernatural (theological) kind of faith. Supernatural faith is possible only by grace. To believe and love God requires that God reveals his existence and presence to us and enables us to recognize and assent to his testimony. To be well trained in the human virtues is to be humanized. Someone who has not discovered the joy of learning, for example, needs to be humanized. To be well trained in the theological virtues, however, is to be divinized by grace. Someone who has not discovered the joy of faith and prayer needs to be divinized. God calls us, illuminates us, inspires us, justifies us, and sanctifies us. He does this through the parish community—fundamentally through its pastor, and supplementally through its other members.
Like faith, prayer is a kind of virtue, but it resides in our conscious thoughts and desires. The virtue of prayer presupposes the virtue of faith. Prayer is the recollection of the mind, memory, and heart toward God in faith, hope, and love. It comes in degrees. It may be vocal, mental, or contemplative. It brings divine faith, hope, and love to perfection. It tends towards looking and listening, over speaking and petitioning. It facilitates a supernatural transformation of our thoughts and desires, so that we become preoccupied with the highest goods. Above all, through prayer we become preoccupied with the presence of God, especially his substantial presence in the Blessed Sacrament. This activity of paying attention to God is the highest human perfection. And it is the proper activity of the parish community. A parish is a supernatural society objectively based on the Sacraments and above all on the Eucharist. A prayerful person is one who subjectively finds delight in conversing with God and is thus inclined to pray. A person who lacks the virtue of prayer is one who subjectively finds prayer boring and difficult and is thus inclined to avoid it. The more we pray, the more delightful it becomes. Discovering the joy of praying is like discovering the joy of learning. It takes effort, but gradually it becomes easy and even delightful. God helps us to persevere in prayer. When a person or community draws close to God in prayer and purgation, God draws close to that person or community in illumination and union. If we put him first in our daily lives, he also gives us consolations in our desolations.
Faith tells us that objectively there is in fact nothing more delightful than prayer. Like Jesus Christ and all the Saints, we ought to prefer praying and fasting to sleeping and eating. Yet subjectively we often find prayer boring and distasteful. The problem is either in us or in the spiritual direction we are receiving. Most of the time the problem is in us. We are habitually attached to lower kinds of pleasures. We often lack knowledge and generosity. We are sluggish and reluctant to make sacrifices. Christ invites us to follow him, but we are reluctant to give up our sensory attachments. A good parish community, like a good family, helps us to become detached from what is lower and to find delight in what is higher. Like most other virtues, prayer is an acquired taste. Most of us were not taught from childhood to engage in it and to like it. Our education may have been deficient. But all is not lost. God’s grace will make up for what is lacking and help each of us according to our needs. The taste for prayer is acquired both actively and passively. We must cultivate this taste, but God also responds to our endeavors and intervenes to captivate our minds and hearts. God enables generous persons to reach the heights of contemplation. When we make a consistent effort, he infuses graces in our souls. Even in this life, God offers everyone through Christ a participation in his own divine knowledge and love. It begins with the Sacraments. It is nurtured and fostered through the parish community.
A good parish community, like a good family, offers several different levels of formation and education, in accord with the different levels of maturity of its members. As St Thomas Aquinas emphasizes, “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” But God is able and willing to transform the mode of the receiver. Everyone can participate in family or parish life in accord with some level of development. Like new wineskins, people should not be forced to advance before they are ready and by the grace of God are seeking something higher. Ultimately it is God who directs our spiritual advancement and turns us toward contemplative union with himself. Spiritual maturity is acquired gradually in the context of a good spiritual community. The more mature must accompany, educate, assist, encourage, and guide the less mature. A community cannot form its members in virtues that it does not already possess.
The perennial principles of intellectual, moral, and spiritual formation and education are the same in every generation. Relativism and the other vices which characterize the modern and postmodern mind and heart have been around since the Fall of Humanity. Such vices are prevalent in every age and culture that fails to educate its young people in virtue. It is simply a question of degree. There are variations in the institutions and technologies of ages and cultures, but the vices that they promote and sustain are essentially the same. The only way to overcome bad intellectual, moral, and spiritual habits is to cultivate good intellectual, moral, and spiritual habits. The only way to remedy the effects of a bad education is to carry out the long, slow, painful process of providing a good education to those who are docile. The only solution to the relativism produced by a modern education based on the philosophies of Hume, Hegel, and Marx is to provide a classical education based on the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Relativism and vice are contagious, but so are truth and goodness. We ought never to despair regarding the noble aspirations of the human heart. Bringing people into parish life is like bringing adopted children into family life. We get them involved in the community and facilitate their spiritual growth through personal accompaniment in order to move them gradually toward greater maturity and higher virtue. The only way for people to lose interest in what is lower is to acquire interest in what is higher. The educational keys to personal transformation are communal participation and habituation in the common goods of faith and reason. In the present postmodern age, an effective parish community is one that offers the consolation of philosophy along with the consolation of theology, one that cultivates the human virtues along with the theological virtues, for they all stand or fall together.
About Deacon Tracy Jamison, OCDS, PhD
Deacon Tracy Jamison was raised in a Christian family as the son of a Scotch-Irish evangelical minister in the Campbellite tradition. As an undergraduate he majored in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Cincinnati Christian University, where his parents had been educated. At this institution he met Joyce, who was completing a degree in Church Music, and after graduation they entered the covenant of Christian marriage in 1988. Through the study of philosophy and the writings of the Early Church Fathers, Tracy was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church in 1992. Under the influence of the theological writings of St. John Paul II he began to study the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross and entered formation as a Secular Carmelite of the Teresian Reform. In 1999 he completed the doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, and in 2002 he made his definitive profession as a Secular Carmelite. In 2010 he was ordained as a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Currently he is an associate professor of philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary of the West.
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