Episode 13: What does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families?

Episode 13: What does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families?

Christina Gebel: Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 13: What Does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families? Welcome, everyone. We have two very special guests today, both of whom I deeply admire for their work in the field of theology. We have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Julie Rubio and Dr. Jake Kohlhaas. They have done much work in the field of theology as it relates to family. As we know, season two is focusing on the family. It’s called Radical Family, and it’s about families making bold choices to live out their faith. I thought, what a great [00:01:00] time in the season to zoom out a little bit and see what the Catholic Church has to say about families living out their faith. I couldn’t ask for two better people to talk to about this topic. So, with that, Dr. Rubio and Dr. Kohlhaas, would you mind introducing yourselves? Julie Rubio: I am currently a professor at the Jesuit School of Theology, which is part of Santa Clara University, but currently in Berkeley, California. I’ve been here for about eight years, and before that, I was at St. Louis University for about 20 years. Family has been central to my work from the very beginning, even as I define myself as a social ethicist. It was really in planning my own wedding liturgy and my wedding that I first started developing an interest in marriage and family. It was the liturgy that really [00:02:00] opened that up for me, and ever since then, I’ve just been fascinated with this tradition and excited about the possibilities for families in Catholic social ethics. Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, and I’m Jake Kohlhaas. I am a professor of moral theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. I’ve been here for 12 years and have a couple books and edited volumes on family. It’s been what I’ve been doing since my dissertation back at Duquesne University, particularly around parenthood and trying to think about a theology of parenthood. More recently, that’s taken me—yeah—a bit more into social ethics and definitely into history, which is an endless investigation that you can keep going forever if you want. So that’s where I’m at now. Christina Gebel: Yes, thank you. And that’s a great segue to the first question I wanted to talk to you all about today. So, I put two and two together when I cracked open one of the edited [00:03:00] volumes about church teaching on the family [https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Catholic-Family-Teaching-Interpretations/dp/1647124328], and I met Julie when I was a theology student at SLU. I don’t think theology has ever truly left my brain, and I was so thrilled to see that volume, and it definitely scratched a theology itch that I’ve been missing for a really long time. You both contributed. Jake, I believe you were one of the editors of the volume. And what I liked about it was the commentary on different encyclicals or church teaching on the family, but it went quite far back, and it goes pretty far into the present too. So I was just wondering if you could start us off by distilling that volume into kind of where the arc of theology has been in the church. [00:04:00] What has the Church focused on in its messaging, in its theology on the family? Jake Kohlhaas: I can start. So I was co-editor with Mary Doyle Roche on this volume. The idea of Catholic family teaching is something that kind of came up in my book, Beyond Biology [https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Biology-Rethinking-Parenthood-Traditions/dp/1647121124]. It’s in the later chapter of thinking about teaching on marriage and family in the parallel way that we think about Catholic social teaching as a developing body of doctrine that grows and expands over time. The challenge is that the documents around marriage and family, you have to read them against their own protesting that they do not in fact change. But if you read them like social documents, there is quite a bit of movement and development going on through their history. So that’s what I set out to do, and it was just so great to be in a field where we found lots of collaborators who were excited about the project and wanted to do it. The way it’s structured, it starts back in 1880 with Arcanum [Divinae Sapientiae], which was by Leo XIII, and then moves forward [00:05:00] throughout time. And one of the things that’s obvious right at the start is if you start stacking up the documents on marriage and family alongside Catholic social teaching documents, it’s the same popes, roughly the same years writing them. They really fall pretty neatly in order. It gets a little more complicated in more recent history, but I would say just the overall short summary arc is that when you start in the late 19th century, most of the concern is really the papacy attempting to assert itself in the face of new liberal democracies that have spread throughout the world. And so, a lot of the concerns are political. They’re trying to really stake their claim in education, stake their claim around marriage and divorce, and insist that these are the purview of the Catholic Church, and that secular states have other legitimate areas, but not these. And so you get a lot of that in the early documents around the place of [00:06:00] education, marriage, and regulation of divorce. And quite a bit around women’s particular place connected to children and home life. By the 1930s, though, you get more interest in actual love in marriage, and the relationship of marriage, and that’s really the part that grows into the 1960s and Vatican II. You get some really remarkable changes with marriage as no longer a hierarchical relationship, but as a more mutual relationship. You move from a Pope Leo, who says that women’s place within the home is part of divine law, to John XXIII, who says women have discovered their own dignity, and it’s different than what the popes had thought. So, there are some really interesting developments. And then as you move towards the present, one of the things I pick up is I think in the 1960s things really take a sharp turn towards reproductive moral issues with Humanae vitae and artificial contraception and things like that. So, family becomes much more concerned with reproductive ethics than it had been. Then more recently it becomes more about sexuality and gender issues, and then as we know at the present, issues of same-sex relationships and how that affects parenthood and inclusivity in the church. And that’s really up to the present, where these questions of who’s included and how are they included and what counts and why remain pretty significant issues for the church today. Julie Rubio: Yeah, and ... The volume is a great contribution. It’s just wonderful to even have the words “the Catholic family teaching” that we didn’t have before. And there are so many great people writing in the volume. I wrote on Familiaris Consortio, so, Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation from 1981. But I largely agree with the trends. One thing I would start with is that what to me is really unique about Catholic social teaching, Catholic family teaching, is that family is always seen as a part of what is called the social order or society. So it’s never understood as this private, nuclear, romantic, whatever all of that is. That’s just not our teaching. So it’s always seen as one of the many intermediary associations, is the word, in society similar to, or like churches and schools and clubs and nonprofits and that kind of stuff. And it’s prior to government, or the state has its own reality, which means it has its own rights that government has to protect and its own responsibilities. So I think that’s constant, and yet what grows is the sense that not only is it just an important part of the social order, but it has a social mission, and that particularly comes to the fore with John Paul II. It’s not enough just to love and procreate. That’s just the beginning. And he’s really explicit about that, and I find that’s even surprising to people who think they’re JP II Catholics, right? And because they’re used to reading Theology of the Body [https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Human-Divine-Parish-Resources/dp/0819873942]. No, he really underlines that, and then that just carried [00:09:00] forward with Francis and beyond. And the other part Jake already alluded to this, is about love. I think you can always from the beginning see this idea of mutual support and growth and holiness. So I think sometimes people will say, Oh, Catholic teaching on family is only about procreation. That’s never been true either. It’s always had something else there. But love, th- this was actually a debate. - Is love necessary for a legitimate marriage? Before, no it wasn’t. But it becomes essential, and then we have the, that beautiful language of the intimate partnership of life and love, and I feel like we’re still exploring, honestly, what that intimate partnership is and what it means. This to me is something that we say but, beyond the language of self-gift, which I think is both helpful and not helpful what does that look like over a lifetime? I think we’re still figuring that out and we’re figuring out a new way only really since the 1980s have we had married theologians who can speak to this with experience. And then the [00:10:00] other part is the growing egalitarianism, that’s just really clear. Sometimes I hear younger traditionalist Catholics citing Casti Connubii, and it’s yeah, you can’t do that. That is just not our teaching anymore. Male headship is not our teaching. There is a real egalitarianism which is really actually evident in the marriage rite, which I would argue is less gendered than a lot of our social marriage rituals, including engagement rituals and things like that. You have to read that stuff and put it into the liturgy ‘cause it’s not there except for in few little places. But I would also agree that especially since the 1990s and concern over same-sex marriage, and more recently gender identity, there has been an assertion about gender difference. I would say yes and. Yes, there are differences. What those are I think is very vague. Whether you can map trad wives and real Catholic men onto that, I think that’s a big stretch. I often will ask my students where do you see, laundry [00:11:00] or, house cleaning or, yeah, the these role divisions just really aren’t there. We read them in. But there is an insistence that there is a difference and it matters, right? And that’s been doubled down on the more that others are saying, No, there isn’t. No, it doesn’t. Christina Gebel: Wow. We have really started out strong here. My brain is really humming. The fact about JP II and how he really brought about that understanding of the family, I’m going to use that, I think, in a future Facebook debate. I am very grateful for that tidbit. But to go back to that, and you both actually touched on it immediately, which was this interaction with Catholic social teaching, and I’ll be honest with you, having studied both theology about the family and Catholic social teaching, I never really noticed [00:12:00] the bridge. It’s there in my mind as a person because I feel like I can’t separate Catholic social teaching from any part of my identity, but it seems like it’s been there or been concurrent with a lot of this, and that might come as a surprise to some people who are listening, including myself. So, can you say a little bit more about how those two have interacted and possibly where we are now with that interaction? Julie Rubio: I would just say it is unique, perhaps, to our social teaching that you just can’t separate family from it. Family is a crucial part of it. From what Jake was saying earlier about family being along with schools and the church as a way the church asserts its rights, but more broadly, the idea that a good society is one with a robust set of [00:13:00] associations including family, so that families matter to society. And that’s just always been there. I think also the idea that families have rights, and they’re broad-ranging, right? From the right to raise their children the way they want to and educate them and all of that, but also to the things that make their life possible like housing and just wages. Those are a crucial part of the way that Catholicism views society. What you said is exactly right. Like, how can you separate Catholic social teaching from any part of your identity? You live in a family. How could it be irrelevant? It’s that kind of question which really spurred my own desire to think more about family ethics because I always had loved Catholic social teaching, and when I was getting married, I’m like, the bridge wasn’t evident, right? And yet it should be, so how am I supposed to live this? Because it can’t be that only the Dorothy Day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day]s and the Dan Berrigan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Berrigan]s, these [00:14:00] are the heroes in my house. It can’t be that they’re the only ones who live Catholic social teaching. There’s got to be a way for families to do this. So, what would that look like?” And I found both popular literature and role models from ordinary Catholic families who were living this out, but also teaching that was perhaps less emphasized on either side—either from people talking about family or people talking about social justice. I found that there was actually way more interaction than I realized, and a lot to build on. Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, I’d agree. I think one of the issues with framing this idea of Catholic family teaching that’s highlighted in the volume is what is its relationship to Catholic social teaching, because Catholic social teaching very clearly includes families as part of society. They’re fundamental to society. So Catholic social teaching has to cover families. The way it defines society, it’s required to do that. But then there are also these other documents that speak specifically to families, often mostly about marriage, not necessarily about parenthood, which are both dimensions of family life. And so it becomes a question: Is Catholic family teaching simply a subset of Catholic social teaching that gets some unique emphasis, or is it its own thing that runs parallel? Then how do you account for that interaction? So I think it’s very much an excellent and open question right now in the field: trying to figure out what is the relationship between these bodies of literature that claim to be united, and yet there are some distinctions. For example, Catholic social teaching seems to work really well on principles when they’re facing outward towards explaining what a just society ought to be—principles like respect for human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity. But where I think as a church community it can start to stumble is when we turn those principles back inside, either to the church itself, the way things are structured within the church, or to families themselves, because then you start running into these tensions between, and Julie was talking about this earlier, these specific roles that are supposed to be responsible for specific things because of the identity that goes with it. But then you say, “But the principle of subsidiarity,” you say, “The man’s in charge of this.” Solidarity with your wife might mean that maybe it’s time for you to do this. Or subsidiarity, the mom’s in charge of this. But in this instance, the dad’s closer to it because he’s more engaged with the child. So, the issue is an egalitarian marriage based in love is about mutuality, and it’s about negotiating individual events and situations in thoughtful, respectful ways that principles can guide you through. So I think a lot of the language of Catholic social teaching very much applies to family dynamics. The issue there is that though we [00:17:00] have some ideas about roles and places and things like that people feel like they have to be in, that makes it hard to apply the principle because of these other pieces getting in the way. And so I think in terms of the interaction between the two, I think there is some tension there in Catholic social teaching. We’ve known this for decades. This isn’t brand new. But Catholic social teaching, when you turn it back on the structure of the church, raises some interesting questions. And I think when you turn it to families and you say, “Okay, you’re the most fundamental cell of society, so let’s apply social ethics,” it raises some real questions about a lot of traditional norms and expectations that people bring into families and marriages that I think are very good questions. It just means there’s a lot unsettled there. Julie Rubio: But I think also it’s just such a great opportunity to say, if this is an institution in society and part of Catholic social teaching, then these principles should apply, do apply. It’s just that we haven’t— ...thought it through yet. One of the chapters in my dissertation was [00:18:00] taking justice and applying that to housework, right? As some feminist theologians have done. But of course it applies, and we don’t have precise guidelines about housework in Catholic family teaching, only the vaguest of suggestions, even though people bring their ideas about that. But if you bring a justice lens, then I think you get some good guidance. Jake Kohlhaas: ... Yeah. I would add so in my research, one of the things I keep an eye on, which is difficult as a male theologian working in this field, I always want to know how dads are included. But, historically, I know dads have had the better end of the deal when it comes to marriage, so it’s hard to work on the side of the privileged group and make sure we’re not left out. But—prior to Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s document—the image of a man as a primary caregiver or capable of nurture, as far as I know, had only come up at one time in one document from the US Catholic [00:19:00] bishops. So Catholic teaching on the family, all the way through past the turn of the millennium, the idea that men can actually nurture their children is just not there. And for me, that was a big part of having kids because I was more or less primary caregiver to one of our daughters when she was very young. And I think that’s a piece of the puzzle there, is just to think about how a lot of these traditional roles and things that are assumed about families certainly work a lot better when you bring the lens of Catholic social teaching to it to say, “This is about the common good.” “This is about negotiating what’s best for our family in this situation.” That, yeah, can get more difficult when you think in very set ways about who does what and why. So, it’s not so much, as Julie was saying, that the church has articulated specific gender roles. But there are some really interesting silences that tell us a lot about what’s not being considered. Christina Gebel: As you’re talking, I’m thinking of my own career path. [00:20:00] After I spent time studying theology, I volunteered, and that kind of put me on a trajectory of working on public health and particularly public policies. Almost my entire career in public health has been policies that help mothers and families. It’s interesting because when I was in public health school, there were a lot of concepts around, “We should write policy as if we’re thinking about the people who could be most affected by it or who are most vulnerable to the changes that we’re proposing.” I had so many flashbacks to Catholic social teaching and thinking about things like the preferential option for the poor, just things like that. And it’s like I’m making so many parallels as you’re talking because it’s like—to have a family, you also have to have [00:21:00] Catholic social teaching. And in public health, we would say to have health, you also have to have good systems and policies, and the two are intertwined. And Julie, I want to go back to what you had looked into, which are some figures, and certainly the Dan Berrigans and the Dorothy Days and all those things. All those exist, and I have friends who have pictures of Dorothy Day in their house, and they teach their kids about Dan Berrigan. To me, that’s very normal in our friend group. But I am interested in this question about how does this all jump off the shelves of theology? If a family really wanted to make Catholic social teaching a focus of living out their faith, where would they go today to get some guidance or some support from the wider world—not even maybe necessarily [00:22:00] the wider Catholic world, but where would they go to find like-minded people or resources or people to look up to, things to read? Is the church kind of meeting that interest? Julie Rubio: Oh, that’s interesting. When I first heard the question, I was thinking about official documents. But I think there is a problem of resources, because if one looked at what’s available for families, one wouldn’t necessarily find much about Catholic social thought. So I think that those traditions remain fairly separate at the level of the parish or the diocese. Organizationally, it’s difficult to find. The Christian Family Movement [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Family_Movement], which was important in the mid-20th century, especially in the Midwest, and it still has some global purchase, was in that See, Judge, Act model as part of the Catholic Action movement. And it was a place where people would come together with like-minded people and think about, “What are we going to do in the world?” First of all, it’s not as popular in the U.S., and I don’t know that that’s the focus today. I think in terms of what you might read, you might read Familiaris Consortio, especially the center of the document on the four tasks of the family, and especially the task about going into society and making an impact in the world. I think you could read Amoris Laetitia, especially the chapter on parenting, which is ignored. Everybody reads the controversial Chapter 8, but the parenting stuff is really quite good. And so, I think there is some guidance. In some ways, the papal stuff hasn’t filtered down organizationally. But then I wish that parents and people with families would be really invited into the social justice groups in the parish, and what that would look like is different than what it looks like now, because maybe those groups meet at 11:00 in the morning or at 8:00 at night, and it just doesn’t work. Models I’ve seen for that, like parishes that would have one topic, and they would offer some food, and then maybe a talk, and then some prayer, all of this in an hour and a half for parents, but then provide not just babysitting, but a parallel program for kids. And so, then when they got home, they could all talk about environmental justice or something like that. But that made it realistic for parents to go to, and it sent the message from the parish that we don’t think that social justice is just for single people without kids and responsibilities. Christina Gebel: Yeah. That reminds me a lot, too, of my career in public policy, because when I started out in the field, I was told families are the hardest group of the population to mobilize. And I don’t know where that came from. I don’t even remember who said it. I don’t know how true it is. I have no idea. But it was interesting for me because I was in a realm of public policy that was family policies, so I actually saw a lot of families mobilize, and I think sometimes there’s an idea out there that families are just too full, too tapped out, and you even see this sometimes in some of the traditionalists’ thinking around family, like you’ve got to take care of your own family first; that’s your calling. And every day you’ve got to wake up and fulfill that. And I’ve had people say, “I just got to focus on that. I can’t think about all these other things.” And also, the privileges that come with being able to go to, like you said, an 11:00 meeting at a parish, is going to draw a certain demographic of people, and so I think about this a lot. I think about, are we creating opportunities? Are we creating resources? Has the beauty of the teaching really trickled down into programming and maybe more accessible resources on some of the encyclicals and things like that? I was very eager to comment on that because it’s so interesting on so many levels. Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah. Families, I think, are hard to mobilize because they are projects in themselves. Part of the calling to be a parent and have a family is to take special responsibility for caring for these people, but on the other hand, if you’re going to parent well, part of it is also raising them to be socially responsible people. And you want to give them those experiences. So, I do think a lot of it is just the challenge of, yeah, if you can get a single retiree out after hours, that’s one thing. If you can mobilize four to six people and get them in the same room at one time, that can be really challenging. So, I think there are just a lot of practical dynamics that are really challenging with this. On the other hand, I think a lot of people who are doing good work for society are doing it in part because they have professional abilities and things like that that they’re sharing with the community. Just because my whole family can’t come with me to some of the boards and things I’m on doesn’t mean I can’t talk to the kids about it when I get home, and so I think there are ways in which, when family members individually participate in certain capacities, you can bring that home. You’re modeling responsibility to your kids even if they’re not there. I did, mistakenly, about a year ago, bring one of my daughters to a commission meeting, and she was bored out of her mind. I feel like she might never volunteer to be a part of that thing again. Maybe it’s better if they don’t come sometimes. Julie Rubio: And I think it can work the other way too, right? Mary Doyle Roche’s work has been so good at pointing this out, that [00:28:00] sometimes it’s the kids that are leading the parents. And she has a good little book, Schools of Solidarity [https://www.amazon.com/Schools-Solidarity-Families-Catholic-Teaching/dp/081464807X], that I think would be helpful. But yeah, sometimes it can be the kids coming home and saying, “This is what we are doing through school,” or through their own activism, and then that evangelizes or expands the family’s horizons. It can also happen like that. I have one model of an ideal model in my head that’s like the family version of Dorothy Day, but there’s a lot more that can happen. Christina Gebel: Yeah, and it’s so relevant to this season because this season is about families making bold choices to live out their faith. And it was interesting when I was recruiting people for this season. I asked a lot of people actually if I just said, “A family making bold choices to live out their faith,” like who would come to mind? And the reactions were so interesting. One was, a lot of people I asked were like, “We don’t really have a faith identity [00:29:00] anymore.” So that was one thing. And then the other thing was, either really, it was in some ways maybe challenging to conjure up somebody. And I don’t know if I had used language that made the bar feel really high. I have no idea. But what was interesting was like seeing people wrestle with that question. What was interesting also was sometimes the people they recommended were like, “No really, you should be talking to the person that recommended me because I see them as fulfilling this.” So yeah, I think it is happening, and maybe we don’t name it as such or think ourselves to be doing it, but it is happening, and some of the stories that have come out in this season are just incredible things that people are doing on a daily basis or decisions they’ve discerned and the like. So, with that, I want to shift a little bit to Jake, and you’ve mentioned [00:30:00] briefly about this kind of theology of parenting. That was a phrase that jumped out at me when I read the edited volume, ‘cause I was like, “Oh, what’s that?” And “Where is this?” So can you say a little bit about how you’ve engaged with that, and where you got to, and where you hope we might be going? Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, so as I said earlier, I’m really interested in parenting as the angle that I want to take in my research. I’m so glad Julie mentioned Mary’s book [https://www.amazon.com/Schools-Solidarity-Families-Catholic-Teaching/dp/081464807X] too, ‘cause that is a good recommendation. It’s very accessible. But through my dissertation and things like that, it just became clear to me that the official Catholic teaching on the family is missing some of the practical dimensions of what’s actually involved in child-rearing and marital life. A lot of emphasis on marriage, the permanence of marriage, the sacrament of marriage, and the value of children, the value of procreation for society, for marriages. [00:31:00] But then when it comes to but what is the day-to-day of actual caregiving and raising children? It doesn’t have a lot to say. It has some visions of where that goes, and it uses the word “education” oftentimes as a placeholder to mean just a universe of realities. I’m trying to remember this. There was a document from way back that I was reading recently. I don’t know, it was the 1920s or something. It was a bishop saying, “Education for the Catholic Church, it means everything.” And I think, “Geez, we’ve known this for 100 years. Maybe we should start actually articulating a little more clearly what we mean by that.” Yeah, there was so much under that idea that parents’ charge is to procreate and educate is clearly the much larger task of parenthood. So, I have been working on that for a while to flesh out what this looks like. For me, I think it gets really complicated because you’re dealing with interpersonal relationships, you’re dealing with relationships that are never the same. No two families are alike. No two [00:32:00] parent-child relationships are alike. No two sibling relationships are alike. So, everything just gets really messy when you try to speak in a way that makes sense for a very massive, complicated reality. But my basic ideas at this point are that parenthood is based in caregiving. Caregiving is a common human ability that most people have the capacity to care for other people. Attending to their needs over time. Parenthood is complex because in some ways it’s given, and in some ways it’s chosen. But out of that, it’s sacramental. It’s an experience of grace in the world. And so really what parents are doing is being there to be present for God in their lives through the life of their children. And so that’s where I’m working now is to figure out, how would I articulate a little bit more practical, a little bit more broader audience way of explaining some of these things? I think Catholic sacramental theology is an excellent place to [00:33:00] start for thinking about what the family is. All the things we represent in the Church are the realities we live in our family lives: the incarnation, grace, and sacramentality coming through in family dynamics. So that’s where I’m headed with that currently. And then the whole other challenge is, what do you do when things don’t go well? When there’s pain in a family, I remember my first book; I was writing arguments about how many parents you need, what gender parents have to be—all that stuff that’s occupied Catholics for a lot of time. When most of the social science research says stability is really the key thing, stable relationships are what people need to grow into maturity—stable, loving relationships, ideally. And then I had a friend of mine, who’s a gay theologian, who said, “You know what? Some families are very stable and very harmful.” And so stability isn’t necessarily a good thing if that stability is negative, if the stable message you’re receiving is that certain people aren’t included and [00:34:00] things like that. So again, you can take something that seems like it should be common. Okay, stable families, that’s great, but then there’s the counterexample. So, it just gets really challenging to speak in a way that’s inclusive of all the different dimensions that family can be and yet has some sort of common thread to it that’s also understandable. Christina Gebel: Yeah. The challenge therein is really vast. And I think, like you said, to speak to the diversity of experiences but still come up with some tenets would be really challenging, but I admire that you have asked—that question, I think, in my ideal world, that would be a question the church really leans into in the next few decades. And speaking of questions the church is leaning into, Pope Francis called for the Synod on the Family [https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/documents/rc_synod_doc_20151026_relazione-finale-xiv-assemblea_en.html], and at this point in the season, we’ve already had a great [00:35:00] discussion with Casey Stanton from Discerning Deacons, who told us all about what a synod is. So we’re up to speed on what a synod is, and a synod on synodality, and all that great stuff. But this question is about the Synod on the Family, and I’d like to hear from each of you, what came out of the Synod on the Family, and do you feel like it was representative of what people in the pews are wrestling with every day? Did the average family kind of get guidance on how to live out their family life? And where do you feel the conversation needs to go after the synod? Julie Rubio: Let’s see. So, I think the synods on the family were really important in the beginning of Francis’ papacy. My own sense is that he knew that family and sexuality are places of pain for a lot of people in the Catholic Church, and that if he wanted to ask a lot of people, he would have to first convince them that they belonged. And that’s really what I think those synods were about: sending out all those surveys and getting people to say what they thought the church taught and what their experience was, what they needed from the church, and then having the bishops talk and argue together. Not a whole lot changed. People were upset that a lot of the hot-button issues, of course, did not change, but there was that dialogue. So, I think their significance is in the desire to include and to listen, and to accompany. That was our first concretization of what this accompaniment is, and to be a church that’s walking together. I think that they were representative in terms of the stuff that went to Rome, if you looked at all the surveys. Not very representative in terms of experts, for instance. I mean, no experts or theologians on the family that I know of were there. So that was disappointing in that sense. This was before women’s participation in synods, so yeah. And no, there wasn’t more guidance for everyday life. I think it was really just about Francis repeating, “You are welcome. Nobody can be excluded forever.” All of that was important. I don’t see families being very involved in the current synod on synodality dialogue. Honestly, most people I’ve seen involved in those kind of dialogues are single people, a lot of older people. So yeah, I think that we probably need to bring back synodal kind of conversations in parishes and among families, getting beyond the “about synodality” piece to “what are our actual problems? What do we need to do?” Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah. I think Francis’ documents, Amoris Laetitia [https://www.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20160319_amoris-laetitia_en.pdf], that came out afterwards, is almost more representative of the state of the church than it really changed anything. One of the things I think is so interesting is in the early chapter it really insists on the importance of gender distinction within marriage and for parenting. And as Julie and I talked about the chapter on parenthood, you could just insert the word “parent” instead of “mother and father.” There’s no gender distinction. So, this one-time insistence that something’s really important, and then when you talk about the application, the inability to connect why it’s important really represents where we’re at. And so, I think Amoris Laetitia is like, it’s just a good representation. But again, its tone was important. Its openness was important. It didn’t really change much. I will say, I think some of the processes of the synod that are now getting more common as Leo has taken on the same trajectory, I think, we might look back and say, “Oh, Francis started that.” For example, when they did the preliminary meetings and the Vatican released the vote counts on some of the paragraphs in the preliminary documents, just the admission that there was disagreement among the bishops about some of these things was something that we had never done publicly before, right? That was always behind closed doors, and you just get the final document which says, “All the bishops agree to this.” It caused some controversy. I think the bishops didn’t love it and it hasn’t happened since. But now we’re more comfortable with the idea that globally the bishops don’t agree on everything. And the German bishops are doing one thing and other bishops and that’s just become our sense of what the dynamics of the church are. So, there’s a lot involved in the process that Francis did that really opened the door for some of the things that we’re experiencing now in the Synod on Synodality [https://www.usccb.org/synod] and the processes of Synodality that I think looking back we’ll say, “Oh, that’s where it started.” So it didn’t lead to a really groundbreaking document, but it did lead to some communal practices that I think are becoming more common and are frankly more healthy for the life of the church. And on some of these issues that for generations we’re basically told these can’t change, they won’t change, they’re too essential to change, now they’re saying development happens and there’s reasons to think about this. And if we’re going to get a real theology of family it has to get to the experience of families. And I think we are gradually opening ourselves to that. Of course, we’ll find it super complicated and really hard to do anything consistent with, but... Christina Gebel: Yeah. It almost makes me think about, while you were talking, if there was an edited compilation of Family Teaching Volume 2 that came out 150 years from now and what would those documents say, and I appreciate the candidness about what the Synod on the Families did and didn’t do. And I think, this is one of my struggles as a Catholic, as a Facebook commentator on Catholicism is that every time there is this kind of flurry of activity around something, I think, the secular world expects there to be a big change at the end. But as Catholics, like you said, just some of the basic things that activity accomplished, while not necessarily breaking news that’s going to show up on your phone, really did start some openness to things that haven’t previously been open. So it is interesting, just like you said, to admit that not all the bishops see this the same way is a big step. So I do appreciate that. We’re coming down to our last couple of questions. One of them I sent earlier for you to muse on, and then the other one’s going to be a total wild card that you’ve never seen before. But let’s start with, again, going back to the theme of the season, families making bold choices to live out their faith. I talk about in the first part of the season that this idea of radical—I think colloquially we think radical extremes, but really I heard it in a homily, and it really talks about getting to the root of something. And I talk about, it’s almost like a little bit of circular logic. When you get to the root of Christianity and what it’s really saying, it actually is quite radical, right? So I wanted to ask you both, when you think of the phrase “radical family,” who are some families that come to mind in your own spheres personally, or any families making bold choices in the faith realm? Jake Kohlhaas: When I looked at this, when I think of what the Gospel asks of us, I think, “Boy, that’s scary,” even thinking of it as an individual. And then when I think about my family, I think, “Oh, no, that’s too much.” I think I do have a bit of a protectionism. I like my life to be a little bit predictable. The families I really admire are the ones who are more open to that, the people who can really bring people into relationships with their families, who are the kind of people that have a lot of chaos in their lives. Something as simple as a good family in town who does a lot of foster parenting. And it’s not just the raising kids, but also where the kids’ parents then become a piece of that puzzle. We try to be a very open family, a place where all the kids come to hang out, which is getting scarier and scarier as there are more teenagers and they stay up really late. But it’s controlled chaos. And I think the people who can really look at other people’s needs and say, “Our family can respond to that. We don’t know where it’s going to go”—those are the kind of people that I really admire, who can, yeah, really have relationships with people whose lives are chaotic and manage that with their own families. I just think there’s so much that, sort of whatever social class you’re in, sticks you in that, and then you can pretty much not have to think about other things because you’re just dealing with people who are like you. And the people who have both the compassion and insight to move beyond that, I think, are the people I admire most. People who put up with helping people in relational ways that I would find really terrifying are the people I admire. Christina Gebel: Yeah, and actually we’ve had a family who fosters on the season, and I immediately thought of that too, actually, Jake, because it certainly isn’t uncommon to foster. And in my kind of Catholic social justice-y group of friends, people talk really openly about, “Oh, we’ve thought about it,” or things like that. But it actually is a very radical opening up of your home, of your family. I deeply admire people who make that choice. So yeah, Julie, who would come to mind when you think of that question? Julie Rubio: I think of it first, okay, so what do I mean by radical? And I think that the most serious ethical choices of an ordinary person’s life are about work, time, and money. Most of us aren’t dealing with choices that have to do with war or things like that. Of course, in other places, yes. But those are the key choices. Why are we working? What are we doing with our work? What about the rest of our time? How are we spending our money? And then for a family, it’s also about how do we use our home? And that’s why, I think I and others in the field have been influenced a lot by David McCarthy’s book on Sex and Love in the Home [https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Love-Home-Theology-Household/dp/0334029465], and the portrait he draws of the open home. And I think my answer in this way parallels Jake’s. How do you open your home and your life? How do you practice the universal destination of material goods and the social aspect of your goods and your property with your home? Really thinking of it that way. It was one of the things that attracted me to St. Louis, actually, in some ways, that there were definitely a group of families and Jim and Kathleen McGinnis [http://www.domcentral.org/library/spir2day/843614mcginnis.html], who wrote Parenting for Peace and Justice [http://www.domcentral.org/library/spir2day/843614mcginnis.html], were originally a part of that, who lived in the city in a place that was somewhat dangerous. And lived simplicity and opened their homes and were deeply involved in social justice work, and they were remarkable. I think about them. I also think about families that I met when I was in Nicaragua and El Salvador who were so much more radical and open than middle-class families who, presumably, had a lot more bandwidth. Great stories in Mev Puleo’s book, The Struggle is One [https://www.amazon.com/Struggle-One-Voices-Visions-Liberation/dp/0791420140]. I think we sometimes think that this is something only privileged families can be super radical, and I actually think that the real role models are often people who have less and somehow find ways to share what they have. But I guess I don’t want it to be the radical. As much as I want to say, yeah, there are these radical role models, we need the saintly families. I also want to think about the smaller choices that people make that are also significant. Families who open their homes and that there’s always a gathering on a Friday night, or they just are that house in the neighborhood where everybody feels safe and everybody feels welcome. Or there are some people who can’t handle that in their house, and so they go out. But they have a regular commitment to the soup kitchen at their parish or something like that. So I just want to lift up all of those choices too. Or the parents who make big sacrifices to send their kids to Catholic school not because they want them to get into the best college, but because they want them to be formed. Yeah. So I think there are a lot of ways that families can do these things once they just start asking those questions. I think about, yeah, work, time, money, and this resource we have in our relationships in our home. Christina Gebel: And something that you both touched on that speaks to me in your answers to that question is just the role of community in that. Again, my Catholic social justice-y group of friends, most of whom have children at this stage, are always talking about, “When do we actually move to the commune or take over a cul-de-sac or something?” And I think it just speaks to this feeling that a lot of times some of those choices are easier when you have other people around you choosing those things, and you have other people to wrestle with when those choices get hard and complicated, and you at least have somebody to go to to ask that question, because I think as a Catholic trying to live out your faith in so many ways, you think about sometimes, “Who’s the friend that I can really go and pick their brain on this?” I feel very lucky personally to have friends that I know I could tap and say, “Can you wrestle with this faith-filled question with me?” And it makes me really want for those spaces in our church, it makes me really want for more places like that in our church to gather, and maybe it’s not even formal or programmatic, but just to know that you have other people out there. Because I think Catholics in my generation, having moved to several different cities, church shop a lot, right? And there are some parishes where you can tell there are other people there who are really interested in questions like these, and there are other parishes that just seem kind of, for lack of a better word, flat. So that’s one of my hopes for the future. I do agree, Julie, that even just the smaller, more intentional choices are so big. I see my friends with kids say, “What are you guys doing about cell phones? What are you guys doing about tablets, and what are you guys doing about screen time?” And modern parents have so much to think about, and my Catholic friends are not only thinking about it from a parenting angle or whatever child development says you should do, but they’re really thinking about it on a faith level. And I will say, if I may answer that question, I actually think of your family, Julie, that I was privileged to witness in my undergrad years and growing up. I came to the inspiration for this season because I wanted people to think about somebody’s home that you go into. And Jake, I haven’t been in your home, but I have a feeling I’d have the same feeling, that you just go in and in little ways, something different is going on, and something really intentional is going on. And it doesn’t have to be the big, huge choices. It’s really a level of intentionality about who we are as a family unit and who we are as a family of faith, or how we think about the harder questions of the world. And I get that vibe too when I go into a lot of friends’ homes that are really thinking about this. There’s something different there that people are really making an earnest effort to discern. So any thoughts on that before we move to our final question? Jake Kohlhaas: For the whole spring semester, I was in Ireland, so I was living in a little apartment, and my family was there for most of the time. But I just got back the other day, and I walked in our house, and you’d think I’d be like, “Oh, it’s so great to be home.” My first thought was, “There is so much dog hair in here.” So yeah, my home’s very inclusive of pets as well. Julie Rubio: I was just thinking about a wedding of a former student, a former JST student I went to a few weeks ago, and it was presided over and preached by two of the student’s classmates here. And people were so moved by it, and I think it’s precisely what you’re talking about, Christina, because there was a clear intentionality here that was evident in all the choices about the readings, which were not [00:52:00] readings anybody typically chooses, and the s- and the songs and everything. And it did have much more of this social justice focus. And it was just clear. And it was clear in the preaching, and it was clear in the way that they welcomed everyone and the priorities that were evident. And people just felt it. And that was new, and that was different, and it was exciting. Yeah. A wedding is a particular kind of power or occasion where a lot can happen because it’s a ritual. But also in your family life, in intentional choices, there’s a lot that can happen. Christina Gebel: Absolutely. Jake Kohlhaas: I don’t know if... I don’t think of it as radical, but I really do admire people who can build intentionality and structure into their... I don’t know. My family dynamic is just not like... We’re a bit too chaotic, and I think my wife and I are much more dreamers than follow-through kind of people. So, we’re more ideas than actual structure. But I do, and I do just know some families who really have intentional practices, and I just think it can be really powerful. I know as [00:53:00] kids grow to have those things to come back to. Christina Gebel: So, onto our last question. I’d like to hear from each of you, how would you answer the question: What is the modern Catholic family called to today? Jake Kohlhaas: Love. The more I get complicated in this, the more I come back to God is love, and that’s what the Catholic tradition is showing us that God’s love permeates reality. And the most important things in our lives are the things that are the most important to God as well, that those loving relationships are where you find the divine. So for me, I think that’s the bottom line. It’s all about love because all of creation is about love. And so if you’re gonna invest your life in something, you better make sure it’s a loving enterprise. So I think that’s where we’re at. I think we’re at a unique point in history where we’ve decided that egalitarian marriage, a mutual loving relationship in which people aren’t just mutual in the sense that they respect each other, but are mutual in the sense that they really understand [00:54:00] each other as equal persons with equal rights and responsibilities, is not the way most of human history marriage has worked. It’s wonderful that we’re embracing this, and I think from a Christian perspective, it’s the trajectory that is best for us to discover. I think Julie had mentioned this earlier, but I just wonder how much we’re still working out the implications of things that were said 100 years ago around what marriage is because it just raises so many new questions, I think. Egalitarian marriage based on love is a wonderful experiment that has a rich Christian dimension to it, but is also something pretty new in human history. And it’s kind of cool to be a part of exploring where theology goes in this new sphere. Julie Rubio: Yeah, and I would just say that I don’t know that we can answer the question fully without knowing the “where”—that it depends on your context. What’s most important to me about Catholic [00:55:00] family is that it is a vocation. Marriage is a vocation that is a vocation of discipleship. And so just as a person who devotes their life to religious life—a sister or brother or a priest—you’re living out a vocation of discipleship. And so what you are called to depends on what’s going on in your neck of the woods. And the family is going to look different in every context. I love Rick Gaillardetz [https://gaillardetz.com/]‘s language of marriage as a daring adventure. And I worry that we’re losing some of that idea today. Some people, I think, are cynical about marriage. Others are scared of it. I just hope that we can embrace it as a daring adventure that I think Jake is right. It’s a new kind of adventure right now—this loving, egalitarian partnership, intimacy, all of that, is huge. And then also in Catholic teaching with this deeper sense of [00:56:00] social mission. But in your context, right? But it is a lot. It is a lot. And I guess what I hope for is that people see that it’s adventurous and worth committing to. Christina Gebel: I think that’s a great gem to leave our conversation on. And I do want to say you both have mentioned really good, interesting reads and resources, and I will try my best to compile those in the show notes, but this has been a really enriching time together. I can’t say enough how highly I think of both of you, not only as theologians, but as ones that are coming to these questions at this unique time and place in history. And my hope with each episode in the season is that it stirs something in people listening, and maybe it’s not this [00:57:00] earth-shattering conclusion, but maybe it’s a whisper or a flame of something that was said here that gets people to crack open one of those resources, or think more about an open home, or think more deeply about our call to love and discipleship. And I really just want to thank you both for leading us on this journey of discussion, and hopefully the adventure that awaits. So thank you. Julie Rubio: Thank you. And for me, you are my favorite Facebook theologian, Christina, and I’m grateful for what you do. Oh, I really am grateful. Christina Gebel: Oh, man. I’m going to add that to my CV. Thank you. It’s a rough, it’s a rough time out there. Julie Rubio: I know. I know. But you hang in there. Christina Gebel: Yeah, I’m trying to hang in. Julie Rubio: Great talking to you both. Christina Gebel: Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com [https://christinagebel.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 12: International Faith-Based Service as a Family

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 12 in our second season of Radical Family: International Service as a Family. So welcome, everyone, back to season two. I am thrilled to be here today with two very good friends who have made bold choices in living out their faith as a family. Both are medical doctors, Dr. Anne Berry and Dr. George Stablein. And while that is their professional title, I affectionately know them as Anne and George, and we have a lot of really cool overlaps in our life. But I’m going to let them introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about who you are in the here and now, who your kids are, how old are [00:01:00] they, and then we’ll jump into this amazing choice that you made as a family. Anne Berry: Thanks, Christina. It’s very exciting to be here with you, too. I’m Anne. I am a family doctor and also have a second specialty in preventive medicine. Our kids are Susanna and Louisa. Susanna is 15 and a freshman in high school, and Louisa is 12 and she is in sixth grade. George Stablein: And I am George Stablein. I am a community pediatrician in the area, and that’s my only specialty. Christina Gebel: It’s good. It’s a good specialty. So, George Stablein: thank you. Christina Gebel: Having it is great. So we have had some interesting overlaps, and I officially met Anne and George at the commissioning ceremony for [00:02:00] Maryknoll Lay Missioners. And could one of you start us off by just telling us a 10,000-foot view? What is Maryknoll? Anne Berry: Maryknoll is a hill in New York in Westchester County, named after Mary on the Knoll. And that is where the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters both have their headquarters. Those are orders of Catholic priests and sisters that they’re kind of focus is service in different countries. And then Maryknoll Lay Missioners grew out of both the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters. It started off that they invited lay people to come in service alongside them in different countries where they were serving. And then over time, that grew into a formal lay service program. And then that, over time, grew into its own separate organization, which is [00:03:00] still very closely affiliated with, always partnering together with both the Maryknoll priests and the Maryknoll sisters in New York and all over the world. But it is its own separate organization where lay Catholics like us can serve in different countries. Christina Gebel: Awesome. Yeah, I actually didn’t know the fact about the hill, so that is something I learned today. I didn’t know that it was actually a knoll, so that’s good. Mary on the Knoll. Okay. Anne Berry: Yeah. Christina Gebel: I love that. So we met at this commissioning ceremony in Ossining, New York, and I didn’t officially know you before that, despite the fact that Anne did the same residency program as my husband, although prior to his being there. Tell me a little bit about your lives before you officially got to Maryknoll Missioners. Like, what was happening in your life? What were some things that led you to that path? Anne Berry: [00:04:00] It really started before I even met George when I was a volunteer with Jesuit Volunteers International at the time, JVI, in Managua, Nicaragua. And I did that after I graduated from college, before I went to medical school. And while I was there, it was when I first learned about Maryknoll. There was a community of Maryknoll sisters. My Jesuit volunteer community made a retreat one time at the Maryknoll sisters’ community. And they were wonderful and lovely. And while I was there during the two years, I was in Managua through the Ben Linder community of like international volunteers and like faith-based volunteers and people working in faith-based organizations. I met a married couple who had young children and they had also previously been with Maryknoll. They weren’t at the time when I met them, but that’s how I first learned about that. And I also met another family that was not with Maryknoll, but I think they were with the Mennonite Central Committee, but they were also from the US and they also had [00:05:00] young children and were living in Nicaragua and living there with their young children. So, it was really those two families, especially, that I always really admired them. I just thought, “Wow, that’s such a great thing that they’re here.” Not just like me, “Oh, I’m just here for two years.” I’m before I then go back to my regular life kind of thing.” But they were doing this as like their regular life and their kids were there and they were living there and growing up there. So that kind of planted that idea in my mind. And from that time, I always had a dream to one day be a Maryknoll lay missioner. And especially I thought if I ever do end up having a family and having kids, I would definitely want to do that. George Stablein: And Anne and I met in medical school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Penn State. When we were early on in dating, we had a conversation one night and Anne said, “If you are interested in us being a long-term couple, just know that I’m going to be living internationally again someday.” And so, consider yourself [00:06:00] forewarned. I was going to be the small-town pediatrician, going back to my home area where I grew up. Just what I had always envisioned for myself. And so, yeah, there was a part of me that was, “Oh, maybe she’ll forget about that.” And then there was a part of me that was just that kind of could be interesting. But I don’t know, I couldn’t see myself doing that. I don’t know. And, fast forward quite a while, we did get married. It was about 10 years after we had gotten married, and she reminded me of that warning that she had given me. And that’s how it unfolded. I honestly do give her a lot of credit for me being a part of that experience, for me having that experience, because it wasn’t something that I had really ever envisioned for myself. But I can say on this side, and even while I was there, I was very glad that I did do it and that we did do it as a family. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s bringing up for me not only some things I laid on the table very early on when I met my husband, which is maybe a topic for another episode, but also just we have an overlap with Nicaragua [00:07:00], too, and I have spent time in both Managua and León. And León is such a beautiful city. So that’s really cool. And so, as you’re telling this, I’m drawing up vivid images of when I was there and was also there in the capacity of Catholicism and faith. So y’all made this first big commitment, what was it about that particular point that made you say, Okay, now’s the time, now’s the right time to pursue this in earnest. Anne Berry: I had been waiting a long time, and so I really wanted to do it as soon as possible. One of the things I wanted to do most was bring our kids and have this be an experience as a family with our kids, so we had to have kids first. So, we had them. That took a couple years, because then we had one, we had to wait a couple years. So basically that was it. It was like, okay. Now after our second child was born, we decided to wait until she was a little bit older, I guess for different reasons. But one of the biggest [00:08:00] reasons for me was I knew, Maryknoll’s a three-and-a-half-year commitment, and I knew that that may be as long as we would do it. I wanted both of our kids to be old enough to literally remember it. I didn’t want it just to be like something that Louisa kind of thought, yeah, that happened when I was a baby. I don’t really remember any. So when we arrived in Tanzania, she was three. Christina Gebel: Anne, you really had these examples that you had encountered earlier on in your life of families that had done this with kids. I’m curious for George. Obviously, you said yes in a very big way to what had been brewing in Anne for quite some years, but who did you really look to or draw from as you approached that period? George Stablein: That’s a great question. Honestly, that was a bit of a challenging time for me. I didn’t really have any other examples of this in my own life other than Anne. And I knew Anne had done it. I saw how clearly it affected her and how [00:09:00] deeply moving for her the experience was in Nicaragua. And so that was inspiring to me, but it was quite different for me, such a radical change in my plans. I was baptized Catholic, but didn’t really attend church at all except for weddings and funerals and baptisms, essentially, until I was in college. And so, when Anne and I were planning on getting married, I decided to go through the RCIA, or I guess OCIA now, program. It was important to me to be able to take Communion at my own wedding, so I do feel like, as a younger adult and kind of through our early marriage and time together, I would say I was inspired by my church community as well. We went to a small kind of mission parish in central West Virginia. That’s where we were living when we decided to go to Maryknoll. And there were some families that were very devoted Catholics; their children were very much involved in the church. And when we told them about our consideration for [00:10:00] Maryknoll, they were very supportive. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s great. Even if this was like writ on your hearts, and as part of your mission as a family, I imagine that it was a little bit daunting during that time period, too, because something that you were saying Anne earlier about your youngest, Louisa, being able to remember it, so some people say, I’m going to delay going to the national parks till my kids remember it, but this was a, this was a bigger journey, so to speak. How did you approach this with the kids and your own families and your own professions also that you had worked so hard to get to? What were the logistics of telling people and preparing to go as both faithful persons but also professional people and parents? Anne Berry: I think for me, because I not only did I live in Nicaragua as a [00:11:00] young adult by myself, but also I grew up living internationally with my own family, with my own parents, not in a volunteer service capacity. So, in that way, it was very different. But I did remember that. And so, I think for me that was easier. I was like, “Yeah, of course, people move to other countries.” In fact, even my dad grew up living internationally with his parents. So, I actually remember talking to my grandmother, who had moved to Libya with my dad and his two younger siblings by herself, because my grandfather was already over there doing his work a long time ago before there was any internet or even international phone calls and all kinds of things. And when they first moved there, I don’t know, they didn’t have electricity. So, I remember talking to my grandma on the phone; it was great because it was like she knew what that was like. And I was telling her we could only bring two suitcases, which was very different, because when I moved as a child, my dad was working for a big international company so we could bring a whole shipping container full of stuff. And I remember my grandma saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s how it was when we moved to Libya, too. I remember trying to pack all that stuff in.” And so that was nice for me. And just the logistics of, yeah, the two suitcases and trying to fit everything in. I remember going through all the kids’ things and the toys and things and like finding all the smallest little toys to have different options and going through their books. Our kids have always loved books. I love books. So, I went through all the books and found all the smaller paperbacks, picture books, so we could fit as many as possible. Yeah, so that was like a challenge, but a fun challenge to pack all that stuff up. It was just exciting for me. And professionally, it did end up being a challenge for me once we were there, actually. But preparing again, I always wanted to do international service. When I decided to go to medical school, it was to become a doctor so I could go work in places where doctors were really needed all over the world. Preparing for it honestly was just so exciting for me. So many of my dreams were coming true. For George, it was much harder in many ways, but that was the part that was hard for me—that it was hard for George. George Stablein: Yeah. Again, as I mentioned earlier, my plan that my family was very well aware of was that I was going to be coming back to my home area or somewhere close to that. And where we were in West Virginia was only a few hours from there. That was actually the closest we’ve lived since we’ve been together. And the idea of us moving to a different country was quite challenging for me to figure out how to approach talking about with my parents. And it was a bit of a stressful time. It was just not understood why I would be doing something like this. And there were some family health struggles that were going on at that same time. And having that conversation during that time was definitely difficult. Over time, it gradually got better. When we first had the conversation, we didn’t know what country we were going to. We had actually ranked two different countries in Central or South America higher than Tanzania. In part, for me, I wanted to be able to have more Spanish exposure and improve my Spanish, since Anne’s already fluent. And I wanted our children to have that exposure as well. We subsequently learned that Tanzania was the only place that we had ranked that we would be able to get reciprocal medical licensure through and be able to practice medicine there. But I would say professionally for me, it was also a bit challenging at first. I really enjoy my work with my patients. I really enjoy doing what I get to do every day that I work. And I had really bonded with my patients over the span of the five years that we were there. And so having that conversation with my coworkers and my patients—I remember there was a child one day I had been seeing her for five years and I told her that I was going to be leaving. I was going to be doing work in a different country. And she said, “But Dr. George, they have diseases there. Are you going to be safe?” I said, “They have diseases here, too. That’s why you’re here to see me today. And I’m safe here, it’s okay.” But yeah, it was a challenge, but fast forwarding, it was definitely worth the challenges. Christina Gebel: That’s incredible. And what were your own kids saying? What was coming up from your kids as you were starting to talk about this in earnest? Anne Berry: I think that probably is one of the good things about them still being pretty young because Louisa didn’t really—she was so young, she didn’t really have—much to say that I remember, I guess Susanna was, and she was a little bit sad. Like she was in school, she was in kindergarten, and she was sad to leave her friends and stuff. But like I was saying before, I was so happy. I was so excited. That it was such a wonderful thing for me that I think she was excited, too, and doing this service as part of Maryknoll Missioners. That, that was why we chose Maryknoll Missioners, because they’ve always welcomed families and they have a very strong formation program. And so, before we went to Tanzania, we went to the Knoll in New York. We were there for the whole orientation. Our family actually went a little bit early so our kids could start school there. They went to a lovely Catholic Montessori, like preschool and kindergarten, called Holy Name of Mary Montessori in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. They were so nice and so welcoming. That was a great experience for the kids. They loved it. They went to that school together and there was another family in our orientation class who also had two girls who were a little younger than ours. But, that was really nice. They played together, and I think it was a really positive experience for our kids getting ready. And then when we got to Tanzania, too, our Maryknoll community there, that was very welcoming. The things that were stressful for us too were probably stressful for them, like saying goodbye to our families. And even my parents, they weren’t exactly, they weren’t happy about it. They obviously were sad that we were going very far, so that part was hard for all of us. George Stablein: Yeah. Taking away the grandkids. Anne Berry: Yeah. George Stablein: Yes. Although we brought them back. And we visited several times. Yes. I do remember the day that we found out that we were going to Mwanza to Tanzania. Susanna had a very kind of intense initial reaction. I think maybe because we had talked about going to a Spanish-speaking country. I’m not sure. It was also the same day that we had a massive flood in our town, and there was a bunch of people up in our driveway as we lived up on a hill. And we had no power or water, and we were all standing out in the driveway talking when we got the phone call that we were being sent to East Africa, to Tanzania. And so it was a surreal experience, seeing the river running in front of our house where we didn’t have waterfront property before. And seeing all of our neighbors, all the stuff going on in our town, the uncertainties of a big flood and then learning such a big, life-changing thing at that same time. It was an emotional day for sure. But that was like the only day I think that there was like the, huh, experience. And then it was, yeah. Then we knew where we were going and that took the uncertainty out of it. Then the question for me, anyway, became more, how am I gonna practice medicine in Swahili? Christina Gebel: I am interested to get to that. So, you went through the kind of formation process before you left and had all the hard goodbyes, and had the excitement of going, and then you finally land in Tanzania. There’s probably so much you could say about those first weeks, but what has stayed with you in terms of the challenging and the surprising or the positive, what has stayed with you about those first weeks of transition? Anne Berry: I remember very clearly when we arrived in Mwanza airport after like several different flights and layovers and like a very long time of [00:19:00] travel with our two quite young children. I remember this image so clearly of we had the whole pile of our suitcases, ‘cause we had eight suitcases for the four of us. And we had the car booster seat for Louisa and we were all just exhausted. And then we were like standing in this kind of like small kind of room that we had walked in from the tarmac, and it was hot. George and I were sitting there trying to figure out like how to get like our entry visa and there was just, it was just like very small airport, very, like a little window. People were speaking Swahili and I just looked at the big pile of bags and our two kids that were just both like slumped over, tired, like sleeping on top of the bags, and I do remember having a sense like, oh no, what have we gotten ourselves into? But then after that, that was the hardest part because we had to do that part on our own. But then once we got through and we could go out the airport, then our Maryknoll community was there to welcome us. And from that [00:20:00] on then they were always there to support and help us. But it was just that moment, it was like, oh my gosh, what do we do? George Stablein: We do have a couple pictures that periodically pop up on my phone, one of the airports, we were on a layover and the girls were sitting on each side of me. And by that point we had already been traveling, I don’t know, something like 15, 18 hours and we all had these like very tired looks on our faces. I share that that kind of initial sentiment that Anne just painted very nicely. There was this feeling of wow. This is an airport surrounded by dirt, and I don’t understand what people are saying to me. And one of the kids was like sitting on the booster seat, like half awake. And we were like pulling them along. But once we got out, we had some conversations with some of our fellow Tanzania, Lay Missioners. We knew them a little bit, so getting to actually see them and having them grab our bags, load things up into the pickup truck, and drive us to where we were going to be staying. We stayed with another family who had two young children, actually very close to our children’s ages, at their home for I guess, about a week or 10 days. They showed us the ins and outs of what life is like and what you do. The kids actually took it really in stride. I remember we were there a total of, I think, two, maybe three days. The young woman who helped care for this family’s children was helping us with our kids a bit as we were trying to figure things out. Louisa, in her little three-year-old self, just toddled over to the woman and reached up for her to pick her up and hugged her right away. I was like, “Oh, okay. Maybe this is going to be okay.” It was just something that stuck with me. It was a really sweet moment. Christina Gebel: Louisa, the little diplomat. I love it. Yeah. So, you had what sounds like people who acted as a bridge and really welcomed you with open arms and received you and just let you be for a little bit. How was living on your own? I can’t recall if you started your work right away or what daily life was like with kids and schools and all that good stuff? Anne Berry: One of the things that I just value so much about Maryknoll Lay Missioners is, like I was saying, the formation beforehand and also the language training. All Maryknoll Lay Missioners spend the first three to four months in the country in full-time language training. So that was our full-time work at that time. George and I did four months of full-time Swahili studies. There was a Swahili language school in another community where some other lay missioners lived that usually people went to for language school. But so our kids could be in school, and the only international school was in Mwanza. There wasn’t an international school in that other place. The community, before we came, arranged for a teacher who was retired from that language school to come and teach us, just me and George together. So that was really fun. She came to our house, actually, and we sat out on the porch and had a table and had our books and our things we were studying. And she came and taught us every day. And that was great. She was wonderful, and that was one of the highlights for me of the beginning of our time there, because I love languages. I was so excited. I was so excited to get to learn a totally new language and Swahili, It’s such a different language. It was so much fun for me to learn it, and our teacher was just lovely. The language school where she had previously taught had been run, I think maybe by Maryknoll in the past. Anyway, it was like a Catholic language school, and so she herself was a devout Catholic. And so that was fun too because she taught us from the book, the curriculum from the school, but actually even that had some different Catholic things in it. She’d bring her missal in Swahili and things to us and teach us how to say things. And she even used examples. I remember she would say, for example, in the parable where Jesus says this and this. So it was fun. I’d never learned language through the Catholic prism before. So that was really fun. She was just a lovely teacher. So that was certainly a highlight for me, and that was our everyday life for the first four months for me and George. George Stablein: Yeah. Magdalena, our teacher, is really a special person. She was also very, very sweet with our kids whenever they would come home from school or whatever. “Bebe” is grandmother in Swahili, and she was Bebe Magdalena. “Come greet Bebe,” she would say to them, and we had lunch with her every day that she was with us. The language training was really that, the training with her and then also the lived training when you’re going out to the market. That ended up being one of my tasks, was often going to the market and learning. So I got really good very early on with market Swahili, but the rest of it took a lot more time. We fell into a little bit of the other expat community too. Once we were there, we learned about a significant number of other families who were in missions of various sorts that had their kids there as well. And we got to know a lot of families. That was a nice experience as well. I think that was good for us with our kids as well. The story about how long it took to start practicing was a bit more protracted. We had a bunch of rather significant difficulty with getting our medical licensure and our documents. The internet infrastructure is sometimes good and sometimes less, and there were definitely times where, you know, like we actually had to go and meet with people in various places to follow up on things that theoretically would’ve been done electronically. The culmination of that was me taking a 10-hour bus ride to another section of the country to where the medical offices were. In the meantime, I unfortunately had my phone stolen and some other things happened, leading me to hire somebody to drive me to where they thought my phone was. It was a bit of a fiasco. I survived. I got my phone back in the end. But I left that day with the documents, and then we were able to start practicing. It wasn’t for lack of trying that it took about nine months for us to get all of our documentation so we could practice. Christina Gebel: That’s like a journey inside of a journey. Wow, that’s incredible. What was practicing like in Tanzania? Can you talk a little bit about what your project goals were or things that you found interesting in terms of the differences, obviously a different-resourced environment? What were some of the things that have stayed with you about your medical practice while you were there? Anne Berry: For me, that was probably the most difficult thing about being there because I didn’t have a really clear role in my job. A lot of the time, I didn’t feel useful at all. George and I both worked for our main jobs three days a week. We traveled together; we drove about an hour outside of the city of Mwanza, where we lived, to a small Catholic hospital of the Archdiocese of Mwanza in a small fishing village right on the shore of Lake Victoria. George was asked to run the children’s ward. So he was pretty busy running the children’s ward. I was asked to be the doctor for the reproductive and child health center, which was like an outpatient clinic that was part of the hospital for pregnancy care, prenatal checkups, and checkups for children under five. The routine prenatal checkups and the routine children’s checkups, vaccines, and weight checks were all done by the nurse midwives. So, they didn’t need me to do any of that routine care, which was fine. They had a system for that. But the medical director of the hospital told me that by national standard or the requirements for the reproductive and child health center standards, they were supposed to have a doctor or a clinical officer there on-site to do consults for any of the patients who had any problems if they were sick when they came in, or a child wasn’t gaining weight right. Or if a pregnant mother had high blood pressure or anything like that, that was abnormal. So that was supposed to be my job, and I did that. Part of the challenge was the funding, the way care was funded, because this is a private hospital, owned by the Catholic diocese, so it wasn’t part of the Tanzanian National Health System. So for most services, patients had to pay fees, but some of the services were funded through the government and Ministry of Health. So, the prenatal checkups and prenatal vitamins and things like that, the routine medicines and things were paid for by government funding. And also the vaccines and the weight checkups for children under five. All of that was paid for so patients could get that for free. So, everybody could come for those. And people did come; they were pretty busy. But then if a pregnant person had high blood pressure, for example, they could see me and they wouldn’t be charged a doctor visit fee, but for medicine or lab tests they would have to pay for those. Or if a child came in for their weight checkup, but they were also having a fever, then they could see me. I could do the appointment and examine them, but then if I ordered a malaria test, they’d have to pay for that. And then if they had malaria, they’d have to pay for the medicine. So that side of things was much less busy because a lot of the people in that community were either fishermen or subsistence farmers. As far as I could tell, most of the people who lived in that town called Bukumbi, the majority were subsistence farmers. So they didn’t have any money. So they couldn’t pay even a small amount. So some days I would see very few or no patients, and maybe not because there weren’t people who needed a consult, but there was nobody who could pay for the medicine and the tests. And people don’t really want to come if they can’t get the medicine and the tests. So then I felt very frustrated because I knew there were people who needed care, but I couldn’t give it to them because I was in this system where they couldn’t afford it. So that was, yeah, that was very hard. But I think part of my spiritual growth during that time was to feel like I wasn’t able to be useful. And people that I met, too, that were so patient. So many people in Tanzania just seemed to wait so patiently. And George and I were so frustrated waiting for so long for our license, but then we were seeing people coming for their appointment with their sick child, maybe waiting hours to be seen or something, and not seeming to be impatient about it at all. So yeah, I think it was definitely [00:31:00] part of my spiritual growth. It was a big challenge for me. Christina Gebel: Yeah. And before we go to George and how his practice was going, one question I had come up: With tests and medications they couldn’t afford, was there any financial relief there through the Catholic system? Anne Berry: Yes, they did do some donated care, but it was limited because what was explained to me was that the hospital’s funding was limited—a funding shortfall for some reason that I’m not sure what it was. And for a couple of months, like the hospital staff didn’t get paid, which was horrible. It was a real strain for all of the other hospital staff. Almost all of them were Tanzanian: the Tanzanian nurses, nurses’ aides, and like the cleaners, and they weren’t getting a paycheck. Our coworkers were really in a difficult situation there. Yeah, so the hospital really depended on a lot of the money to run the [00:32:00] hospital and to pay—it’s mainly to pay their salaries, which is the biggest cost—on patient fees. So, they limited the kind of donated care to like very extreme situations. People who were really living in like desperate poverty and had a desperate need for the care, they would give free care in those kind of situations. But like I said, so many of the people living there were subsistence farmers. So there were a lot of people who, yeah, didn’t really have much cash on hand. And I think the hospital couldn’t necessarily afford to give out free care to all the people. It was very—it was a hard situation. Christina Gebel: Yeah. George, turning direction to you, it sounds like you were quite busy. Is that because a lot of the care you provided was covered by that government safety net? George Stablein: There was some government funding. It was still quite challenging. One of the things that I struggled with, I think the most, working in that [00:33:00] hospital was not being able to care for the patients the way that I wanted to. Sometimes before they could leave the hospital, they had to pay their bill. And if they couldn’t pay one day, they would then have to stay another night and have to pay another night’s hospital bed. And so what we found was people were very nervous about being admitted and were very keen to leave early, if possible, so that they could afford to leave before their bill got too high. And because of the small amount of resources that our hospital had, I guess is one way to put it, we didn’t have any sort of intensive care coverage. And so we would send kids or send patients to the city, the city of Mwanza, about an hour away from us for stepping up the care. But that was very frequently cost-prohibitive for the families. And so I definitely saw several children die because they couldn’t make the trip. They couldn’t afford the trip. Or by the time they got the funding to make the trip, it was too late. So that was a very difficult thing for me to swallow, a different way of experiencing what Anne said, like not feeling as useful. I’m like, I’m here, I’m trying to do this, and it still feels like I’m not able to do what I came to do or what I wanted to do. So that was challenging. One thing that was a lifeline for us. There was an Italian woman who worked at the hospital, running the HIV care and treatment center, who existed primarily on donations. She had a huge support system back in Italy, or at least it seemed that way. And so when we were stuck and it’s okay, the family cannot afford this, or the hospital is out of this medication and we really need this for the kid, do you have it? She had a huge heart and was very willing to be supportive and help us out and help the kids out. I felt like she was a bit of a lifeline for us, for me at least, in care of the kids when things got really tough sometimes. We talk about the hospital being a resource in a resource poor setting. Being able to get testing depended on if the machines were working that day and if the lab reagents were in date, or did the power fail and they got too warm? And they’re no good anymore because we frequently had minimal power. Some days we didn’t have water in the hospital. The water system would fail. Over time you take it in stride. You’re doing this for a prolonged period of time, but it was still just so humbling to me to watch the hospital staff and the patients just kind of, okay, yeah, that’s what’s going on today. Yeah. We don’t have water today. This is what we do. And they just rolled with it. And in the US, if the water failed in a system where I was working, they closed the building for the day and that just wasn’t an option where we were. It just kept going. Yeah. So that was intense. Christina Gebel: I appreciated everything you’ve said about the medical system because my public health brain is geeking out hard on these challenges. But my spiritual brain is also latching onto a theme that I feel like comes up a lot when you commit yourself to service and solidarity. And for me, I did two years of postgraduate service in teaching, and while it wasn’t the same contextual, limited-resourced environment that you’re talking about, those feelings of, “Am I really being helpful? Am I really being useful?” is something that I think reverberates a lot through people that make bold decisions. At least for me, and I can only speak for myself, when you make a bold decision, you oftentimes imagine yourself having this commensurate, bold impact. Or you have this idea in your head of what all this effort, all this effort to get there, to have some idea in my head of the change that I had hoped to make. And you used that word “humbling,” George, and you both talked about just watching families have patience and watching staff have resourcefulness, and how powerful that was for you. What do you think that speaks to spiritually? Or do you remember anything spiritually that helped you? Do you ever feel like you really ever fully turned the corner on that? Or where were the moments of wisdom? Anne Berry: Yes, that’s a good point, Christina. I had never really thought about it like that, that it’s a huge undertaking to go somewhere and prepare to be able to do the service, and then maybe that makes one think, “I must do something huge when I’m there.” And certainly people talk about that. I’d ask, “Is it really worth it?” That’s a lot of resources. It goes into you and your family getting there. And did I ever really turn the corner on that? I don’t think I still have because even though I work in a hospital now with lots of resources, I’m still powerless to help a lot of my patients with a lot of their struggles as you with your public health expertise well know in the US as well. A couple of things for me that were helpful. One, I think, was my formation as a Jesuit volunteer because a lot of the Jesuit spirituality when I did my Jesuit volunteer formation was about that accompaniment is powerful, the spirituality of accompaniment. I think I’ve seen that in my own experience and heard from other people, too, that a lot of times what touches people or is meaningful to people, it’s not necessarily just what specific thing I can do for them or that any of us can do, but the fact that we cared enough to just go be there. I’ve learned about that kind of intellectually and then I’ve really seen it. I’ve heard people say, “Wow, you came all the way here.” That is meaningful. And I guess it makes sense, it’s like when someone comes to your birthday party, it’s meaningful that they came for you, not that they’re bringing you a nice present. I guess we all really know that just another human showing up for us, being there or coming, making the effort to come, is really meaningful. So that kind of spirituality of accompaniment for people like us from a very wealthy, privileged country and our own wealthy, privileged background as doctors, having all the resources and comforts—we still had plenty of resources and comforts in Mwanza, but not all the same ones. I think choosing to go, like the wonderful Pope Francis called us to go to the margins, right? And in our own small way, we were trying to do that. And the other thing that really helped me also during that whole time. I always felt so lucky to be part of a faith-based community like Maryknoll. As George said, we knew other foreigners who were there in different capacities, and friends I knew there or knew from other places who were doing international global work or service or development work and sometimes found it really depressing. So hard to see the point sometimes and felt like, “What’s the point of what we’re doing? We’re not really helping anyone. Sometimes we might be making things worse. This is horrible!” So I just felt so lucky because I had always had this, and still have this, kind of connection to something deeper. The ultimate thing that’s important is not what we’re doing, but there’s a deeper meaning and a deeper thing that ties us all together as parts of God’s creation. All humans, even the people in Tanzania that I never understood, they never understood me. I felt like there was this chasm between me and people I was meeting there so many times, but on a different level, I still knew that we had that connection, and when I forgot that, our Maryknoll community would also bring us back to that in different ways. I think that’s just invaluable to have that deeper level of meaning and reason for being there. It’s like it didn’t have to have a logical explanation for being there because I had a different kind of explanation for being there. George Stablein: I think for me it was that moment of the time where I felt honestly the most useless or paralyzed by a system, trying to do what I wanted to do and not being able to do it, and having this feeling like we moved here and I can’t even practice medicine because I can’t get my license. And I just remember having these conversations with Anne. And Anne was a tremendous support for me at that time, encouraging me to allow myself to be open to the accompaniment part of it, and while she talks about that being a challenge for her as well. I honestly feel like she didn’t show it nearly as much as I did. She was very supportive of me and getting me through that. For me, there were a few things: While we were learning our language and learning Swahili and waiting for the documentation to come through for us to practice, I had been placed in a group that was started by a Maryknoll-affiliated organization. One of the priests from Maryknoll started the parent group, but it was a group for kids with families of children with special needs. And so it was children with cerebral palsy and spina bifida and hydrocephalus, and some of them were very neurologically impaired. But this organization [00:43:00] brought them together to do a support group for the parents and do some therapy for the children—physical therapy in particular. And they brought me on initially to learn healthcare-based Swahili, but then they also had me be a part of the group. So I would just sit there and listen in the support group and just hear the parents talk about the challenges they were facing and the things that they were doing and the stigma that they faced having a special needs child and the difficulties in a terrain that was definitely not easily navigable by foot, let alone by wheelchair. And how they just welcomed me in, and I had tea and treats with them every day that I went. And I was another part of the group. And then another group that I was a part of was a group for kids with spina bifida and cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus specifically. When I showed up at the house where they were staying for any kind of care and any kind of support for them, they were [00:44:00] always so grateful and so kind and so sweet. I would leave there thinking, did I really change anything? Did I really provide any medical care? But it was just the accompaniment piece, really. And a lot of the time I felt like they were being listened to and somebody really cared that they were struggling and needed help. When I really was struggling at times, I feel incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to go on retreat there a few different times. There was a priest and a Maryknoll lay missioner who started something called the Lake House of Prayer that was built around silent meditation and bringing quiet to your day-to-day life and contemplative retreat. And they established the Lake House of Prayer for all-comers. And so they would have workers in the community who needed to get away, just for a day. Their idea was to provide retreat for anybody. And so we had several times as lay missioners that we went there as a group for a weekend [00:45:00] retreat. And for me, that was one of the most kind of recharging, amazing things that just really brought me back to the realization that it didn’t really matter why I was there, but more that I was there. And I am really grateful for that. Anne Berry: And also we got to do spiritual direction. George Stablein: Yeah. Anne Berry: At the Lake House of Prayer too. George and I were able to start doing that like once a month. That was also a really good support, I think, for both of us. We were able to set up where we would go up together and then that was really helpful, too. Christina Gebel: Really hearing you both talk about this, again, it’s bringing me back to my own examples of service. And when I was in Nicaragua, I was in a home with kids with special needs. And a lot of them were in wheelchairs, and I remember they gave me a rag and just told me to swat flies when they landed on the kids. And I remember thinking like, oh man, do you wanna ask me to do anything else? But they were like, [00:46:00] no, this is what we need you to do. Or I think of Jim O’Connell, who did the medical care with homeless folks in Boston. And he showed up very well-versed in medicine and so many things, and they gave him a bowl and said, start washing people’s feet. Like foot care among the homeless is where it all starts. And here’s your bowl and here’s your rag. And he talks about that moment for him, and I love that you tie that into what you had available to you on a faith level. Because as someone who’s also very concerned about social justice, without my faith, I think for me it would be a lot harder to get to those places of realization and wisdom about our common humanity and why we are there and all those things. I wanna switch gears a little bit ‘cause I know our time is not limitless, which I regret. Two other questions I wanted to ask you were, what were the kids doing during this time, what were [00:47:00] they doing and what was it like to go to church and what was your faith like as a family? Anne Berry: Oh yeah, going to church. That was fun because at first I thought I wanna go to Mass in Swahili. That will help me learn Swahili because I know what the Mass is. Occasionally we did go to some Masses in Swahili, but we found out that masses in Tanzania, the Swahili Masses are really long and I guess the homily is like super, super long. And I thought our kids already don’t necessarily love going to Mass, so now I’m going to tell them they have to come to the two-and-a-half-hour Mass and sit through the homily, which will be like an hour, and they won’t understand it at all. They may leave the Catholic church and never come back. So, we then found out there was a Mass in English. It was a Jesuit parish in the city of Mwanza and a pretty good-sized Jesuit community, meaning I think there were like six or eight Jesuits. And most of them were African Jesuits from different African countries. But one was this wonderful Jesuit from Boston who had lived many years in Indonesia and also in the Middle East. And he’s an amazing guy. And then he was teaching at the Jesuit University outside of Mwanza. And he lived in that community, and he celebrated Mass in English every Sunday. So, we started going to his Mass, and I mean there were some other people from the U.S. and other countries that went, but most of the people who went were Tanzanians. We got to know him very well because then we’d be like, “Hey!” And he was very friendly. He was very friendly to everyone. He was such a nice guy. And I’m still in touch with him. He’s wonderful. So that was great. Even that Mass was different than other Masses, but it was in English. Our kids understood it. It was also cool because Susanna got to make her First Communion when we were there. And there was another family that joined Maryknoll while we were there. And they had three kids, and their younger child was Susanna’s age, so they were both going to celebrate their First Communion. And Father Jim, the Jesuit, we asked him about it, like if he would, could they do a first communion in English and preparation in English. And I said, “I’ll help out if you need help or whatever.” So, he put this thing together and he basically taught most of the prep. He was enthusiastic about it. And I think it was like maybe six or eight kids. And they had their First Communion. They planned the whole thing. And it was great. It was like a very special and unique experience. I think for Susanna and our family, a very different way to celebrate her First Communion than if we had just stayed in West Virginia for sure. George Stablein: I too enjoyed the Mass at Nyakahoja, the church that we went to. And Father Jim is a very entertaining guy. He was a good friend. So your other question about what the kids were doing. They went to a school called the Isamilo International School. It was an international school on the Cambridge curriculum. While we were there, it was virtual learning because of COVID. But most of the time when we were there, we would drive them there in the morning. And one of the other families would carpool with us in addition to their classes. They also would tell stories about the monkeys stealing their sandwiches or their lunches, and they thought it was great that they had to have monkey-proof trash cans on the school campus. And Susanna got into the choir. They briefly had a choir teacher there, and Susanna got excited about that and joined that. Anne Berry: And they got to swim. George Stablein: And they, yeah. And that actually is, that’s nice. One of the things that Anne Berry: Really well, George Stablein: they learned to swim very well because where we were in Tanzania, it was nearly 75 to 85 degrees year-round. And there were a few different coaches. And one of the people who directed it was an expat from the U.S. It was called the Mwanza Swim Club. And our kids got very good, and that was their big extracurricular activity. And they got quite fit, quite good in the water and actually continued that a fair amount after we got back to the U.S. for a while. Anne Berry: And that was at their school. That was one of the advantages because their school had this swimming pool, which was an outdoor, it’s pretty basic, the swimming pool is not fancy, so even like Louisa, when she started preschool there, even the preschool kids went one day a week. They would go and like in the shallow end they would teach ‘em swimming. It was great. I’ve always felt really happy. That was an extra perk. Yeah. Our kids got to be really good swimmers because then I never had to worry about them if we were at the beach or something. I was really happy for them to get to go to an international school because I got to go to an international school when I was growing up, and I always thought that was such a wonderful experience, and I wish more kids could have that, to get to go to school with other kids from all over the world. And teachers from all over the world, too. Our kids had teachers from lots of different places, both in Africa and Europe and the U.S. I think that’s really special. It reminded me in some ways of my childhood, although this school was very different from the school I went to, but some things were the same, like kids in different places. And like the school lunch option at the school canteen, the lunch lady who ran the canteen was Indian because there was an Indian community in Mwanza, Indian Tanzanians who had been there for generations. She was a really good cook, so it was delicious Indian food. Susanna really loved it, especially since she’d always get the school lunch, and she was like, “Oh, I love Miss Darcy’s lentil dahl. It’s so great!” Much better than the cafeteria food in Durham. George Stablein: What did you have for lunch today? Oh, I had biryani. Anne Berry: We’re jealous Christina Gebel: I love that. Oh my gosh. Yeah, way better than I think what commonly gets served here. I know we’re closing our conversation, and the talk about swimming actually reminds me of what I hope we can end on, which is, besides swimming prowess and high expectations for school lunch, what did you as a family unit really leave with that you think has contributed to your ongoing faith formation? Anne Berry: One of the things that I value so much about our time as Maryknoll Lay Missioners is that we as a family were part, and actually are still part, of this incredible group of people who all share a commitment to service based on faith and are living that out in all different ways and are from all different backgrounds and of all different ages in particular. I really loved that, and I think that is something really unique that our family otherwise didn’t have a chance to be part of, definitely the fact that we’re still part of that community. Last year, we got to go and be part of the Jubilee celebration of Maryknoll Lay Missioners and meet with people that we knew from our time in mission and other people that we hadn’t met before who had done mission service in different times and places and with our kids as well. I feel so, so happy that we were able to give our kids that experience to see people of different ages, different professions, but choosing to live their life in service, in faith-based service. I think our kids will be able to carry that with them for their lives. George Stablein: Two things, and this is largely around the kids, but I think it was eye-opening for me as well. One was, we were cautioned to be careful not to give out money and things like that. Because the needs were endless, and we were there to help meet needs but in other ways. So, one day, we were leaving church, and somebody asked us for money. And I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.” And we left, and one of the children said, “But Daddy, we can help them. We can afford it.” And so there were these little, small, I guess, equivalent of a 10-cent bag of little roasted peanuts that you could get at the market. They were along the sides of the road everywhere; people were selling them. And so, we would stock up our peanut bags in the glove box of our car, and when we would leave every [00:55:00] Sunday from Mass, the kids would roll down the windows and hand out the bags of peanuts to all the people who were waiting. And they really wanted to do something. They saw a need and wanted to do it in their own little way. And I loved that. And I still see that kind of in them now, like how they want to help other people who are in need. Again, that kind of desire for service and that kind of drive to do it. And I also see my kids, and I see myself this way as well. Now, I’m so grateful that my children got to be raised for three years in a completely different culture. Something completely different than their own. They were the outsiders coming in, and while it wasn’t always perfect, feeling the acceptance of being an outsider coming in, I see them now so much more just willing to accept people for who they are, and for many of us, there’s the human tendency to judge whether we should or not. They’re so much more willing and so much more able [00:56:00] to, I feel like, meet people where they are or see people for who they are and accept them. And I’m really grateful that they got that lesson early on. Christina Gebel: Wow. That is powerful. And what a beautiful note to conclude with. And my hope in doing this series is that not everybody will move abroad and do service as a family, but you talking about how these experiences were formative, and I think families can seek experiences like that even in their own neighborhood. And it will continue to form them as this has formed you, and what a gift your example of doing this will be to, I think, many who are listening and who will say, “Maybe I can do something like that. Maybe we can be outsiders somewhere and learn some of the humility and love and acceptance of community,” [00:57:00] so I really want to thank you all, and if you have any final words, please do share. Anne Berry: This is my final word: there are some things I really love about being Catholic, and one of the things is that special place in our faith, I think, that we have for mystery because the spirituality of accompaniment and just going and being with people, that is enough and that is worth it. But then on the other hand, like you were talking about, Christina, there’s social justice and public health, and so many of our patients and the people that we met there are suffering injustices. It doesn’t have to be that way, and we want to change them. And I’m saying one thing, but then how can those things both be true? I’m just there to accompany people, but these things are wrong and they have to change. People are suffering. And then I think it’s okay because those are both true. And so I’m like, oh, I’m so glad I’m Catholic, because we can just be like, maybe it’s a mystery. I don’t understand how [00:58:00] they can both be true, and that’s okay. Christina Gebel: And what a better thing to learn, especially early on and in the family, than to be able to sit with that and to learn how to navigate it in the context of faith. Anne and George, thank you so much for sharing so intimately the details of your journey and how it affected your family and your faith. And I know that many people will appreciate these moments and these bits of wisdom for many days to come. George Stablein: Thank you, Christina. Anne Berry: Thank you very much. This is a public episode. 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Episode 11: Attending the Synod as a Family

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 11: Journeying to the Synod as a family. So, I am really excited for this episode today. I have a good friend here, Casey Stanton, who wears many incredible hats, but I will let her talk about all the incredible things that she does, and she was so kind to come on the podcast today to talk about not only just the work she does, but how it relates specifically to her family life. So, with that, Casey, welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself? Casey Stanton: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited. I’m Casey Stanton, Co-director and Co-founder of Discerning Deacons, which is an [00:01:00] organization seeking to serve the discernment in the Church about women in the diaconate. So, we’re trying to grow the imagination and serve this question, which has been alive and studied in the church for the last 50 plus years. Christina Gebel: Amazing, and we could have a whole episode series archive of audio, just discussing the tremendous efforts that are going on with Discerning Deacons right now, which if you haven’t gotten in touch with them, you absolutely should. But we’re actually here today to talk about that work in light of a decision that you made, and it directly relates to the Synods that were happening globally. And so maybe you could just start us off, first of all, what is a Synod? And then in true Church language awesomeness, what is a Synod on Synodality? [00:02:00] And tell me how you came to be involved. Casey Stanton: Great question. So, this was very much at the heart of Pope Francis’ vision for how the Church was being called to live its mission in the world today, to try to invite the Holy Spirit to be heard through every corner of Church life and out in the world, and to ask the question afresh: What does it mean for the church to journey with you in your life wherever you are, whoever you are, whether you’re in the Church or not, if you’re outside of it? So, it was a process and a path to try to open up a space for renewal in the Spirit. The first Synod is in the Acts of the Apostles. It’s really constitutive of the church. It’s saying, okay, once Jesus left, how do we continue to discern together what is the will of the Spirit for the community of those seeking to follow the way of [00:03:00] Jesus? And so, a Synod is a path of gathering, discerning together, and trying to find the way forward. So, in the Council of Jerusalem, there’s this debate about will new members have to be circumcised. And it’s really a crisis of identity for the community. And the miracle of it is, they come to this kind of middle way, they’re negotiating their life together. What are we gonna do? And what’s funny is that in the next chapter, they do something very different. It just shows that Church politics has always been messy. Doing life together has always been messy. But the beautiful part about doing life together, inspired by and grounded in the witness of Jesus and the Gospels, is that we do trust that we’re not doing it alone, and that it’s not a purely human endeavor. And so, I think what was pretty bold and faith-filled was when Pope Francis called for a global Synod on this theme of Synodality. It was really rolling the dice on the Holy Spirit and the people of God and saying a Church structure that has a lot of distance between bishops and those who make decisions and the people of God in their daily lives and their struggles isn’t a Church that’s walking together. And so, it was really a journey that, you know, in the wake of abuse scandals, in the wake of so many challenges facing our world and humanity, was an invitation for bishops, especially, to turn their attention towards an intentional exercise of listening to ground their own leadership. And as Pope Francis would often talk about, he wanted bishops to smell like their sheep. And so, as Pope Francis has since passed, I think one of the miraculous things about the election of Pope Leo the 14th is that Pope Leo in his previous role as the head of the Dicastery of Bishops, was deeply involved in the Synod. He participated in all the sessions, and there was a sense that Cardinals had elected someone who was going to continue on this path of Synodality. Pope Francis is onto something. This is the way the Church is called to move in the world, that it can’t just be bishops in diocesan offices making decisions that then people follow, but that actually, there’s this more complex dynamic of how we are discerning how we are living the mission today. So that was the Synod and Synodality, and Pope Francis called for it in 2021. It kicked it off, but he had been on a steady path of this, transforming this entity of the Synod. It had been a Synod of bishops, and he was encouraging it to be more participatory all the way up to the Synod on Synodality, where he was really saying we need to reflect on this as the way we move in the world so that we can hold difficult topics. We could learn to have conversations without canceling each other or resorting to enemy camps. I think it’s an invitation for the Church to be a model for humanity, for [00:06:00] how to live with conflict and how to move as a global community in all its complexity. I think the Synod I could talk about all day, which is part of what we’re talking about today, but I could just see the imagination of that, like what Pope Francis was doing throughout his papacy as I was following it. And it felt like a thing worth trying to trust in. And we’re at a time where it’s hard to trust in institutions. It’s definitely hard to trust in people that have power and in our leaders. And part of what was remarkable as the Synod began was that it was truly an invitation to everyone. Everyone was invited to try to find a way to participate, to initiate participation, and to participate. That, to me, rings of the Gospel: this radical welcome and invitation to meet everybody where they are and hear where they are and figure out how we’re connected. And that’s a good use of our time to try to do that. And I [00:07:00] think in the US, there’s skepticism. I think some people felt that this was going to lead to changes that we want. And other people were afraid, oh, this is just some Trojan horse kind of process that’s going to make the Church wildly more progressive and change all these rules and stuff. And it was neither of those things. Instead, it really is an invitation to try to become the people of God and try to learn in this generation what that means. So, I was deeply compelled by the vision and just went all in. As we were just getting started with Discerning Deacons, we went to the opening mass of the Synod around October ‘21. And we were journeying with women who had participated in the Synod on the Amazon, and that really was like them starting to carve the new path of deeply participatory processes that surface what are the needs and hungers of the people of God that need to be [00:08:00] addressed and prioritized for us to move forward. And so, meeting these women who’d led the process across the Amazon and who’d participated in the Amazon Synod as observers—non-voting members, but part of this experience—I just really felt, “Oh, this feels like a way to let the Spirit in.” And it invites us to think of ourselves more as a people on the way, as a pilgrim people as opposed to a people that have all the answers or as just part of an all-knowing church that already knows where we need to go and what we need to do. Christina Gebel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s huge. And thank you for laying the groundwork for explaining that because as somebody who wasn’t as closely involved or even, I think I was aware that it was going on, but the Synod on Synodality piece, I could see my Catholic nun elementary school teacher being like, “You can’t define a word with using the word!” I was stuck on this, what does it mean. I love the part when you brought up that Pope Leo was in attendance. I remember Father Jim Martin saying, Oh, Pope Leo was at my table at the Synod. At the time, he was a Cardinal. Wow, what a great person to have at your table, because he then became Pope! Great seating arrangements. So, Casey Stanton: Yes. [laughs] Christina Gebel: So you, Casey, were just really onboard with what the vision was, but then you made a decision to be a part of it in a really tangible way. And that also involved your family, which is what this series is about. Many families just sat in the pews and said, Okay, what do we need to do? Sure. Great. Maybe they had an opinion, but your family is special. And that’s what I would love to hear about from you in your own words. Casey Stanton: Yeah. So, in terms of our family in this season, my kids were eight and 10. So my husband and I had often dreamt of could we do a missionary season in our family life? We both want to root our own family life deeply in the heart of the Church, and we want our kids to see that the Church is bigger than our local parish, as much as we love and are anchored in our local parish. I think we both were deeply shaped by immersive experiences abroad. My husband spent some time in El Salvador when he was pretty young. And it really deeply shaped his whole worldview and his understanding of the urgency of the Gospel around people’s material needs. And the work of peacebuilding is not abstract. So, it was a dream in the heart of our marriage, and we just weren’t ever sure when the time would be and when to disrupt your life. You’re raising your kids, you’re doing your jobs, you’re trying to do right. And, actually, I was on a retreat with a group of women—it’s a dangerous time—just with some dear, close, old friends. And at the same time, one of my oldest friends from childhood was towards the end of a losing battle with cancer. Walking with a friend as they die, you have to ask yourself, like, what am I doing with my life? And if I weren’t afraid and took risks, what would it look like? And so, in this time of retreat and in this season of accompanying a friend in this sort of tragic and beautiful, untimely end of her life. I just had this sense of call to go: what if you went all in? What would it mean to try to trust and lean into the fullness of what you think the Church really is and what it [00:12:00] means to be following in the Spirit that’s actually the one holding it all together? And so, I came home and proposed this to Phillipe, my husband, and I had just dreamed this sort of whirlwind of a world tour. I don’t know what it would be, but there are these points that had called to us in the world in Chiapas, which is one of the southernmost states in Mexico. There’s this remote community. It’s a Jesuit mission. And I had heard for years about the deacons there, and how there are hundreds of deacons, and how deacons’ wives are integral to the ministry that they carry out, and how the deacon ordination liturgies are these gorgeous celebrations where both a husband and wife are kneeling together in this sort of sacred circle, and the ordination looks like it is [00:13:00] bestowing a blessing on both of them. And I just had this image and this curiosity and knew some folks who had done some work there. And it also happened that my husband works with the Economy of Francesco, which is this community of faith-driven, Catholic-driven entrepreneurs and folks who are trying to figure out what it means to really do social and ecological good through the private sector. And so, he is very interested in cooperatives, worker-owned cooperatives. So, it just so happens that in this remote community, in Chiapas, there’s this super rad coffee-growing cooperative. It’s all these deacons who are coffee growers, but it was this ministry that started by the Jesuits: an indigenous-led community cooperative that owns every part of the means of production. So, it’s not just fair trade where they’re selling it at a fair market, but they actually own it. And you buy Capeltic [https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/03/29/whats-your-cup-coffee-capeltic-chiapas-based-cooperative-serving/] coffee in a coffee shop in Mexico City, and anything [00:14:00] in that profit train is going back into the community. So, this was a dream that Phillipe and I had of what it would be to journey to this place that feels like this Venn diagram of our lives and our marriage, and so that was some of the dream. And then I could just keep thinking of other places, and we decided to lead Discerning Deacons members. Instead of having a conference together at the end of this sort of first phase of the Synod, we thought, What if we went on a pilgrimage to Mexico City to Our Lady of Guadalupe? And we worked with the women from the Amazon to plan this really remarkable pilgrimage together to really be offering up the work that we’re doing and seeking Our Lady of Guadalupe’s intercession and her prayer for the Americas, and to ask for her wisdom and her blessing on this journey that we were finding ourselves on, this beginning of a Synodal journey. So I think it was a time to enter into a pilgrimage and a spirit of pilgrimage. And I wasn’t going to do that away from my family. I was going to do it with them. So we proposed this to our children [00:15:00] eight and ten (years old). And one of the ways, when we were proposing it, was that we guaranteed that in every place we went, we would make sure that we tried the local frozen novelty. So, whatever it was, whether it was gelato in Italy or what kinds of frozen treats we could find anywhere on the streets of Mexico. And that became a bit of sweetening the deal for them as we told them we were going to leave our home for six to 12 months. And yeah, Christina Gebel: That was going to be one of my questions. What sweetened the deal for the kiddos? Casey Stanton: Yes. Christina Gebel: Eight and ten. Putting myself back in that timeframe as much as I can remember. Your routine is everything: your school friends, your activities. So, were they just, Hey, if we get gelato, we’re in? Casey Stanton: Yeah. I think they were normal kids about it. I think we felt that we were at a time in their life where they [00:16:00] weren’t so entirely peer-driven that they weren’t open to it. And so, I think it did feel like this opportunity to go on a family adventure. I remember being in the backseat of the taxi when we had landed at the airport in Chiapas and we were taking the road to San Cristóbal, which is a fairly long drive. And there weren’t seat belts in the back. And my son, the 8-year-old, turned to me and he was like, “The pilgrimage is really starting now, Mom!” It was just because it hadn’t gotten real to him. And we were bobbing and weaving around these trucks on these tiny two-lane roads up in the mountains, and they realized, Okay, yeah. We are somewhere else. We got to go to Palenque, which is, The side of an ancient civilization, and the fruits of it we’re seeing now a couple of years later, as they are more confident in their Spanish class. They’re better Spanish speakers than I am at this point, and their interest in ancient civilizations and their openness to the world. At the [00:17:00] time, I think like any kid, there was a discomfort and wrestling and little bits of complaining. And they would roll their eyes because we were talking church stuff all the time a little bit. But I think they did get to take it in. Because we received so much hospitality on the journey, and I think that’s what the final document of the Synod talks about. The church is relationships and pathways, and that’s what it felt like. Really, the living Church on earth is a set of relationships. And so we would be with one woman in Mexico City, and then she was telling us, Okay, if you’re going to Europe, are you thinking of going to Paris? Because I have people I could connect you with there. And we’re like, “We weren’t really thinking of that, but if you’re going to connect us with people who want to receive us, like, sure, why not?” So it was just being open to where the journey was going to go. It was marvelous. So we spent the first leg in Mexico, and then the second leg was in Europe. And we were in Rome for a good long time. So it was a beautiful opportunity to connect with people who are part of [00:18:00] the Synod process. It really is where all the roads lead to in the church. Yeah. Leaders of religious orders who are based there and folks doing all kinds of work in the church. But then we did go to France, and I am a product of the Sacred Heart Schools, so the Society of the Sacred Heart, which was founded by St. Madeleine Sophie Barat. And so, the only thing I knew I would want to do in Paris...I’m not someone who studies a lot about French life and Parisian culture or anything like that. I knew her remains were at a church in Paris. And so we were hosted in this amazing apartment, and just this incredible hospitality and generosity when people heard what we were trying to do. And we go to this church that just happens to be the church next door, and we go there. It’s a rainy Saturday evening vigil mass. And we’re walking around this gorgeous, huge cathedral at the end, and Philippe says, “You’re not going to believe this.” “What?” He says, “Get over here.” And there’s St. Madeleine Sophie Barat! Of all the churches in France and all the apartments we could [00:19:00] stay in. So, I was like, okay, here we go. This was the point. We were following the threads. And along the way, we were connecting with people who were involved in the Synod. So, we were just trying to ask religious orders: What does this mean for you? What does it mean in your context? What is Synodality here and in Mexico Especially in Chiapas, it was just the way of doing church. This was what had been deeply rooted in terms of “See. Judge. Act.” and responding to the needs. And so, seeing the way this was already lived in a way that felt different from the way I had experienced church growing up as a kid in Boston or in my adult years, it was really encouraging. I thought, oh, this is not new. This is not some newfangled thing. This is a deeply Vatican II methodology that is trying to be reinvigorated. And then similarly, there was a Jesuit parish in Madrid, and they really had gone all in on Synodality and the process. And so I was just sitting with the pastor reflecting on it, asking what came up? And part of it is that, at its surface, there are conflicts; you have to be willing to stomach some conflicts. And it calls forth a certain maturation of the faith because we have to acknowledge what we are resistant to about changing because it’s the way it was when we were kids and we like it that way, versus how we are really having an active faith with God now. What does that mean? And at that point, I mean, they were shifting around the way they did the homily. It was becoming more dialogical. And I mean, they were really taking to heart this invitation to think about how to become a more participatory church. What does that mean, liturgically? What does that mean in terms of the ministries we do? What does that mean at all these levels? So, I was holding the questions of the Synod everywhere I went. And then we were just following where relationships pointed us along the way. Christina Gebel: Wow. That’s incredible. What Spirit and also what courage! Actually, as you were painting the picture of y’all in the taxi, I got this [00:21:00] flashback to Miss Frizzle in the Magic School bus. This is like the magic Synod Taxi. It’s like, “Kids, we’re not just gonna read about this, we’re gonna get in and we are gonna go.” Casey Stanton: Exactly. That’s a great image. Yes. Christina Gebel: Yeah. Casey Stanton: Yeah. I was probably more like Ms. Frazzle on a lot of it. Christina Gebel: Yeah. I want to ask you about that. Making any trip as a family, whether by plane, train, bus, or automobile, can involve a lot of trepidation and worries. People might get sick, or kids might not be feeling it, or whatever. And one thing that I’ve always just admired about you and the fact that you made this decision is you really went for it. Were there any times that it landed, “Oh, this is tough”? And what did you do with that? Casey Stanton: Yeah. So I think, like any pilgrimage—and I think this is true about the Synod, too—when you set forth to [00:22:00] make a journey, you might have an idea about what it’s going to be about, but all the inner work ends up being often the real work and what it really is about. Me and my family going on a Synod pilgrimage didn’t change the Synod, but it changed us. There was a book that someone had recommended that I started reading on this journey that was really about intimacy and relationships and family. And as we were on it, I just found myself wanting to read it. Because in some ways, we were taken away from all the distractions and all the busyness, so we didn’t have all the activities and social commitments and all this other stuff. It was like we were figuring out what we were going to do together, and we were just spending more time together than ever. It was really an opportunity, I think, for me to see how I was being the mom that my actual human children needed me to be, and what were [00:23:00] the stories and scripts inside my own head that I needed to acknowledge were active, and I needed to set aside so that I could really be present to my kids. There was a day in Rome, I think my husband and I will never forget. It was like my daughter just really fell apart, she was done. She had fallen apart. She was maxed all the way out. She’s 11 at this point, I think, on the journey. And she just wouldn’t move; she was just having a full scene in the street. It was just a full scene; it was like she was not to be moved. She was so upset. She just had a torrent of emotion coming out of her. And I think I just had some old scripts in me that were like she needs to act this way, or she’s not going to make it in the world; you need to correct her about this—all this stuff. The impact of the stories in my head were just leading her to feel judged by me and not [00:24:00] loved infinitely. She just, I think, felt judged and not really seen and not really heard and not really understood. So, I think her falling apart and me realizing I want to be a different parent, I want to have a different relationship with my kids—that is honest and real, where they can trust me, where they actually know I’m on their side. I don’t just say that and they’re empty words. So I think there was some healing to do in our own family system, in what had kept me from feeling like I could be as intimate and present as I wanted to be. Yeah. And so, I think the journey was as much about that, too; it was about our own family deepening and me having space to acknowledge the places where I was still in need of conversion. Christina Gebel: Wow. That’s powerful on so many [00:25:00] levels, both as a mom and as a pilgrim and as a person of faith. When I think of family trips, I think this could go one of two ways: we could all come out closer or we could all come out a little spicier, right? While you were describing that, when I was on the Camino—and granted it was just me, myself, and I—But the way that a pilgrimage strips away everything and forces you to confront those scripts is so powerful. For me, it was like, I’m going to go on the Camino. I’m going to be Reese Witherspoon on Wild. And I’m going to have this triumphant journey. It was at a really rough point in my life, and I struggled so hard. Like, I spun the Camino Wheel of Challenges and I hit every one. Oh no. And that’s what I [00:26:00] realized while I was convalescing for a week I don’t even know what. Yeah. I was like, wow. I really had an idea of how I thought this was going to go and what the lesson was going to be. But actually, God was like, I need you to focus right now on what is real, and you need to confront these parts of yourself. What’s amazing is that you all did that as a family. Like, what a powerful opportunity to be on pilgrimage together! Do you see the fruits of that? Even now, how has that shaped your family identity since you’ve returned? Casey Stanton: In so many ways. In so many ways. My best friend died in May that year, and then we set off in July, and it was a real shattering for my family of origin. Our families are very intertwined, and you know how at these threshold [00:27:00] moments, if you’re a person who follows family systems or anything like that, everything gets renegotiated on those thresholds. And it was a pretty rough renegotiation. And so, I think both my own family of origin was in a time of real breakage and then I was on this journey to try to reckon with that. And try to figure out how I wanted to be a more loving mother and life partner. And the gift of the pilgrimage was it was this space to, like you said, be stripped down and confronted with that. We did discern that we weren’t sure if we were going to go for a whole year. And then the Synod itself extended by a year, the process. Pope Francis extended the process, and after about six months, as we were hitting December, I thought our kids needed to go home. I think it’s time. I think that the graces of this have been real and received, and that the kids should [00:28:00] go back to school. So, we had done some homeschooling over here on the road, but we discerned that it felt like this is at its end. And there was a little sense of loss or failure, like if we were supposed to keep going? But again, there was no script for this. We were discerning it as we went. And so I think as we returned, it was not an uncomplicated reentry back into life. But I do think that over the next one to two years, I think one of the biggest pieces I saw, especially with my relationship with my eldest daughter, was her really believing I was on her team. We had weathered something together, and now she’s almost 14; she’s going to start high school this fall. And I feel that she really trusts me, and she’ll come to me with real stuff. And I also know more clearly what’s fine to do and [00:29:00] what’s fine to let go of. So, I think those are some of the fruits of that time. We came back and we were open to a new season in our family life, and I pretty quickly got pregnant. And so now we have Oscar. There’s a big gap in those kids, but it feels like an extension of the pilgrimage. It was like a whole saying yes to our family life together and doubling down on it. Sometimes you just want to escape your family life. You’re like, This is a lot. I can’t wait until they’re grown and gone and we can get my freedom back. But I think through the pilgrimage, I really felt, No, these are the people I want to love more than anything in the world. And I felt that I was on a journey to learn how to love them more. And the fruit of that was openness to receiving more children, which I think before then I had been reluctant about, because I thought, I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I have it in me. I don’t know. And I think it’s because my own understanding of love and intimacy needed healing. So we went on a wild ride, and they became siblings to a little baby. Christina Gebel: Yeah. Casey Stanton: Yeah. Christina Gebel: I can’t wait until Oscar’s older. [00:30:00] And he’s like, “You all did what?” Casey Stanton: Yeah. Christina Gebel: He’ll know. I was like, That’s incredible. And honestly, obviously being a birth doula, the timing of all that is not lost on me. It is just like this new life, right? This re-creation, this generative energy. And something that came to me while you were speaking was that we really are pilgrims as a family on the life journey. Casey Stanton: Yes, Christina Gebel: You all went on a pilgrimage, but this is kind of the big Pilgrimage with the capital P. And I know our time is winding down, and I just have a couple more questions for you. One is, the point of this series with Radical Family is not for somebody to sit here and listen and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing, but I could never do that.” The point is to hear stories like yours, from your family, from your work, and say, “That stirs something in me.” And it might even just be like a little wisp of a flame, [00:31:00] and it inspires. These are topics that deepen faith and inspire action on this podcast. So, what would you say to somebody that’s listening to you, that’s listening to other episodes, hearing families talk about these incredible journeys of faith. How would you encourage them or what wisdom would you impart to them if they’re just starting to get these whispers of an idea or a direction to go in? Casey Stanton: I think I’d say, trust the whisper. I caught this vision in March, and we didn’t leave until July. There was lots of discerning and considering, and talking to folks and asking questions. There was a book that someone handed me; it was called like Family Sabbaticals. Oh, great, someone has written a book on this! I’m not the first one. And of course there are a ton of people who’ve done stuff like this and all kinds of research on how to pack really light. Everyone’s just gonna have a backpack. What are we taking with us? [00:32:00] Don’t take a lot for the journey, but I think whatever we’re called to, it’s not that everybody’s called to make that particular journey, but I do think we’re all called to learn to trust and follow the whisper and to allow ourselves to be surprised and to not be so afraid to risk. That’s the gift of the invitation. You kind of risk walking on water, right? You risk doing something that you can’t quite imagine doing without faith. And that happens, I think, in so many settings, like whether it’s discerning can walls can expand in our house so we could take in people that need a place to stay right now, or where we can stretch to make the food go farther that we need to steward for those who need it. I feel like there are so many people who are filled up with generosity and kindness, and I think what was humbling on this trip for us was that [00:33:00] we were on the receiving end of hospitality. We got to Spain, and it had become winter and we had started out in July in Mexico. And so, we didn’t have winter gear, and we met this marvelous family through these different Jesuit networks and connections, and they just literally pulled these two coats out of the closet to hand to my kids. It’s just being ready to give and give freely and then also to name when you have needs and to receive them. And so it was that kind of exchange of gifts that I think also is inside the whisper, that we all have things to give and we all have needs that we need to ask for help to meet and to receive from others. Sometimes we just keep all that to ourselves. And so, I think sometimes the whisper is to speak some of it out loud. Speak the vulnerabilities out loud, speak the wildest dreams out loud, write the book, start the band like Christina Gebel: yeah. Casey Stanton: Yeah. Christina Gebel: That’s, Casey Stanton: do the podcast. Christina Gebel: This really was my whisper. Yeah. Yeah. To be frank. And the first [00:34:00] series was on Acedia and how the False Spirit starts saying: Who are you to start a podcast? And our call is to push back against that and say, I’m a created child of God. And to discern our way through those doubts and those fears. So, I’d like to end our conversation with where we started, which was back on the Synod piece of all of this. You all as a family participated in a really real way. But many families experienced the Synod through news articles, the internet, in the pews, or whatever messages were told to them about the Synod from the pulpit. So, having done what you’ve done and been so deeply moved by the Synod process, what specifically for families do you see as a role and a [00:35:00] call to participation in the process? Casey Stanton: That’s a great question, Christina. I would encourage spending time reading the final document. There’s a lot out there about methodology, like how we do communal discernment and the implementation. The ongoing process is really about how do we become synodal at every level in the life of the Church. And so what does it mean in our domestic church to adopt practices of communal discernment? I think that’s a live place where this can touch down in people’s lives. One of my colleagues, who’s also super involved in the Synod, last year for Lent, she had her teenagers. They sat around the table and they did a conversation in the Spirit, which is one of these Synod methods where you speak in rounds and speak to the center, and you’re noticing what convergences are. But they used this method to discern what their Lenten practices were going to be and what they were going to do as a family. And she said, “I didn’t think it would work. I thought it was totally going to fail, but it was amazing.” And [00:36:00] they came up with stuff that I never would’ve come up with and it was so good. And so part of it is honoring that our kids and each one of us is a vessel of the Spirit. Some of the methods around the Synod are inviting us into practices that make that real in our lives. And so how can we do that? How do we practice communal discernment? What are some of those ways in our own homes and lives where we can actually discern together? And so that would be one, and that’s a fun thing to think about trying to develop out a little more, I think the Synod really is about our public life together. I did have some various people say, “Oh, Synodality starts in the home.” And I said, “Not really.” As someone who went out of a Synodal pilgrimage, I think Synod’s actually about our collective life and our life together and how we are distributing resources, setting priorities, and deciding what really needs attention and must be addressed. That’s about our shared life together and so many of us are underdeveloped in participating in [00:37:00] that. We don’t know how to do it. We aren’t invited to. The next thing I would say is, okay, we actually don’t need more permission to try to initiate processes inside of our own local communities. So looking at the Synod document and seeing where the opportunities are in our own parish, when was the last time we did a robust listening campaign to ask what the needs of the people are right now? What are the pressures on people’s lives these days, especially in these times that we’re in right now? Have we stopped to listen to that and been intentional about it? Because part of what you’re listening for is what are the convergences, what is shared that we had no idea about, because we’re mostly just friendly and we’re making small talk and being polite and wishing each other well and praying for one another. So it’s cracking open some relational space to then say, oh, actually, a lot of people here are sharing some key concerns, and what are we called to do in response to that? So read the final document and then take it to prayer and think about how this would strengthen our own community to have a communal discernment process that would invigorate our local life together. And no one has to carry that on their back alone. It’s meant to be a shared endeavor. But those would be a couple places. In our own households, how can we actually invite more communal discernment? And then in our communities, how can we be catalysts or animators of these processes, which are not aimed at a singular reform in the Church. They’re aimed at renewing every part of the Church’s life through spirit-filled participation and discernment together. Christina Gebel: Wow, that’s incredible. I need the mind blown emoji right now. But it also speaks to, for me, the way that families were back in the day was like parents would decide this and then everybody would follow suit; or, take care of your own family, and that’s your first priority. Whereas this Synodality thinking is communal and opens up the family [00:39:00] to the wider world. That’s an aha moment for me, wow. Thank you so much, Casey. You are a woman of faith and just an inspiration on a number of levels, and thank you for letting us into your family life to hear about how your work intersects with that. It was so inspiring, and I think there’s going to be a lot of whispers of flames that come out of hearing your words. Casey Stanton: Thank you so much for the invitation and for your curiosity. It was fun to reflect on this very formative time in life, and prayers for all those who hear and are discerning what it is they’re called to do to kind of love their own people a little harder. Christina Gebel: Amen. Casey Stanton: Amen. Thank you. All right. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com [https://christinagebel.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 10: Fostering & Adoption through a Faith-Filled Lens

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 10, “A faith-filled lens of fostering and adoption.” Welcome back, everyone. I am really excited to be here with you today, still in our second season called Radical Family, where families are making bold choices to live out their faith, and I am so pleased today to have two dear friends, local to where I am in North Carolina, who have made the faith filled decision to grow their family, and I think you will really love to hear their story, hear them reflect on that time in their life. So with that, I will hand it over to Heather and Patrick Curran. Would y’all like to introduce yourselves? Heather Curran: I’m Heather and I [00:01:00] am a nurse and a lifelong Catholic. I was raised in Southern California. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick in college when we were both at the Jesuit University of Loyola University Chicago. Woo. And then we married and moved to North Carolina where we have been for a long while now. And we have been married creeping up on 20 years, but about 17 time really flies. I’ll pass it on to Patrick. Patrick Curran: Thank you, Dear. Christina, yeah, it’s great to be doing this with you. I’m Patrick Curran. By way of introduction I’m Heather’s husband and in the foster care journey. I have to say she’s definitely been the leader, but I’m certainly an avid and willing participant so glad to be doing that. As she mentioned, we’ve been married for almost 20 years. And I think for this context, it’s relevant to say that our faith is maybe part of what brought us [00:02:00] together. And our faith is what led us to our faith community here in North Carolina when we moved here in 2020 and our Heather Curran: In 2010. Patrick Curran: Thank you. In 2010, too many zeros. Our decision to become foster parents and the journey through all of that has been supported by that faith community in incredible ways and continues to be so I’m grateful for all of that. And I’m sure we’ll obviously unpack that more and a little bit about our background and how we came to that. Christina Gebel: Yes. And absolutely we will unpack it ‘cause I know personally, just by the pleasure and honor of knowing both of you, that there’s a real discernment journey there and a great story. And I would say a very happy, not ending, but a very happy present that we will get to, certainly Patrick Curran: Ongoing. Christina Gebel: Yes. A very happy ongoing presence. But perhaps you could take us [00:03:00] back to the beginning. I knew you all when you were. In one of the 17 years, and you were think thinking about growing your family and you were attempting to do that. Can you tell us about those years and share as much or as little as you’d like to about your journey to starting a family? Heather Curran: I think from the beginning, both Patrick and I were very interested in having family. That was always a part of our conversations when we were dating. Our way of dating, I think, was always thinking about the future and I don’t think either of us were good at being casual daters. From the time that we were growing in our relationship, what would a family look like if we were to marry, was always a part of the conversation. I knew beginning in college that there was potential that it would be a challenge for me to get pregnant. [00:04:00] So that actually was a conversation that we started having before we were even married. And if that were to be a reality, what would that be like for you, Patrick. And would that be something we could maneuver together? In our marriage at the time, both of us very easily said yes, adoption would be a very reasonable choice for us. And something that even if we were able to have our own kids, we would be open to talking about. And I think that really helped when later on down the line, that became a reality. At least for me, it was very comforting to know that this is something that we had been in alignment on, from the get-go. Fast forward, we’re married, we were open to having kids from the beginning. It was just something both of us had always wanted and imagined for our lives. And it was not happening. And not happening. So the first year, nothing, but that’s okay ‘cause we’re trying to figure [00:05:00] out how to be married, and that’s its own challenge with its own ups and downs. And fast forward probably five years we had settled in North Carolina and we were really in a place where we felt stable as adults. We had a home and well before we had hoped for a family, it was fine that we weren’t, ‘cause maybe we weren’t totally prepared, but now we felt we were in a place where we really were ready to be moving forward with that and it wasn’t happening and we were ready to investigate the next steps are there things that we can be doing to make it happen. So, we went to a fertility specialist and did some workup. And for women out there that have been through this, that piece has its own emotional journey. I think for me, I went through HSG ultrasound. It’s a very vulnerable experience, and I feel [00:06:00] comfortable sharing that here because I know for other women, this is also a point at which a reality you’re afraid of can become very real. And for me, while I was in the ultrasound, I just, I knew based on what was happening with the people around us and the healthcare professionals, that there definitely was a challenge. It didn’t even feel right for me while it was happening. And I was like, okay, this is this is a reality. And I think I had that nagging feeling for a long time, but it was in that moment on the table, and I started to sob during that experience and Patrick was right there, and I could see it in his eyes that he could see the pain. For me, I’ll say it was grief. There was a lot of grief in that moment. And then it completed. We didn’t talk about results. And Patrick and I just went to lunch together in Chapel Hill, and he just created space for me to be grieving and listened and received that. And I will always [00:07:00] be grateful to him that through this whole process, he has had his own things to process, but has always let me have my space and listened and been patient and asked first what it was and I needed what I needed in those moments and what was it that I felt comfortable with or was hoping to do next. In a relationship, that has given me lots of peace and made it, I think, a much easier, hard journey than it could have been. When we got the results, we had a great physician who is an expert in his field. But he started talking about IVF and for me, it has just been a gut feeling for me that was not a route that I wanted to take. And in that conversation I had said that, and he immediately said, is this a [00:08:00] religious thing? Because it doesn’t need to be. And I really bristled at that. Because for me it was a faith piece. It wasn’t [that] my religion has this rule. It wasn’t about I can’t do this as a Catholic. For me it was, I spiritually, feel, my gifts need to be used in a different way and our resources and how I want to move forward, I want to put in a different direction. So it was a negative experience for me in that moment. And again, Patrick, let me lead in how we moved forward from that, which was a wonderful gift. And maybe I should give him some space now that he offered all of that to me in those moments. But that was the point at which the conversation about moving forward with adoption [00:09:00] or foster care became very real, and we had to start making decisions about what that journey forward would look like. Christina Gebel: Yeah, Patrick, before you jump in on your reaction to that, I just wanna first thank you, Heather, for your vulnerability and sharing that, and for folks who know me personally, I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said. Just being on the fertility journey myself with my spouse, and also opting to not do IVF, not simply because it’s a rule, but just because it wasn’t for me, and having a supportive partner in that is just everything on that journey. Patrick, I’d love to hear what all that was like for you from your perspective. Not only accompanying, but witnessing everything that was happening and for me at least, in a very bodily way, [00:10:00] it’s happening to one spouse. But in your case, what was going on in your mind and in your faith conversation? Patrick Curran: Yeah. Thank you for that, Christina. There’s a number of things there that I’ve want to maybe touch on, and I appreciate you recognizing as a spouse, as a partner as someone who tries to live as a faithful person, I believe that God calls us to honor other people, right? And particularly in a Christian marriage, there’s a way of doing that. I think it’s very easy for the husband, for the male partner to be lost in that conversation. And to say I’m doing all this for my wife, or I’m like Christ calls us to sacrifice yourself for your bride. And I think it’s important that we not overlook the fact that men come to their marriages with dreams and ideas and [00:11:00] what all that is. So, maybe I can share a little bit of that. Going all the way back, as Heather mentioned, we had talked about this when we were dating and just the one little piece of color I would add there is that we both had at least in conversation, talked about wanting to have a big family. And, Christina, you know me well, you know that I love things that are big and chaotic. Yes, I can take things that are small and make them large very quickly. And I have 19 first cousins, and I love each of them in strange and unique ways, and always had dreamed that we would have a large family. And, in my own discernment process of my life and my career, that was a big component. I love the idea of big family and so as Heather mentioned, as our marriage progressed and we were trying to get pregnant and being unsuccessful with that, and then eventually going through the fertility workup, I’m not a medical professional, [and] I was in an adjacent space while they were doing the HSG procedure and I [00:12:00] also knew that something wasn’t right. I was like watching this grainy image on a monitor, and I just had this feeling that like this part of the conversation was not going to be smooth or easy or go the way that we wanted it to. I think Heather, when we were dating, had invited me to offer up those ideas that I had about family. We had a joke at one point we would have 37 kids. Obviously no reasonable person expects their wife to naturally have 37 kids. We were always talking about adoption. But I think we had carried the idea that we would have some natural children and then have some kids through adoption. And we were always curious what would our genetic mashup look like? That part of the dream, I think, we had to surrender. I don’t want to say that it died because it didn’t die, we chose to offer that up. We had always had this idea that we would have a big family and as we were getting [00:13:00] those test results, it became obvious to me that the ways that we had talked about doing that was not gonna happen. I could tell in the way like the physician was talking about what was gonna happen surgically and medically. I was like, we’re not on the same page here. The way that she thinks about her body and the way that I wanted our decisions to be respected in that process. We were just misaligned with how that was all gonna happen. But the assumption that we weren’t going to move forward with IVF we’re following what our religion tells us to do because that’s what the religion says, right? It’s like a non-thinking action. I would say [that] is very distasteful and off-putting to me in any conversation and for any person of any faith. And I think part of why you’ve started this whole effort is to help bring together that space that we’re faithful people with our entire selves. And so then the decision to look into [00:14:00] adoption and kind of what route would that be it was a natural continuation of where we had been, but it also required the opportunity to lay down at the foot of the Cross what’s, yeah, this is coming back raw… [getting emotional] What were the things that we were gonna let go of? What were the dreams that we had dreamed? What were the prayers that we had prayed as young people as independent people before we ever knew each other as a young couple who was dating as a young married couple? Who do we feel called to be? And to allow space for that grief to be there and to believe that there’s purpose and intention. And all of the things that come on Easter Sunday. And on Easter Monday. What you mentioned before it’s not just about accompanying maybe that’s not even the right word, because I think for as much as I was holding space for Heather, she was also holding space for me. And so really [00:15:00] that’s marriage; that’s journeying together. Christina Gebel: Oh, my nose and my eyes keep running over here. [getting emotional] I think one, because I can feel it, right? I can feel it in your words. And I know you as beloved friends, and it hits so close to home for me, too. I really appreciate, Patrick, that you said out loud that sometimes partners don’t always get the full, I don’t even know what the right word is, in this journey because on the one hand we focus so much on the bodily things that are going on or not happening. And if you really love your spouse, which you do in the way that Christ loved the Church, how can you not have your own grief and reaction and journey, simultaneously? I don’t know that there’s many spaces out there that name that so gracefully. So I appreciate you sharing that vulnerably ‘cause I can imagine that there’s [00:16:00] people out there that are like, yeah, I can totally relate. Patrick Curran: And I think it was present to me also that the way that we, as Catholics talk about family, we talk about the woman’s role talk about the spouse’s role and this idea that we’re going through these medical conversations. And as much as I very much have longing to have my own biological children, it’s her body. Like, I’m in no position to tell her what to do with her body. Yeah, I don’t know where that lands for other people who might be listening or how they would integrate that with their faith perspectives. But if there was any space to hold for Heather, I think I wanted to make sure that she knew that whatever choice she felt she wanted to make or needed to make or felt called to make she wasn’t doing that alone. And she wasn’t doing that either in spite of me or that she was gonna have to fight with me [00:17:00] that I was in this with her. She was making decisions for both of us. And I think she was aware of that and I wanted her to know that she was fully supported in doing that. Heather Curran: And I don’t know how you feel about this, Christina, but I think one of the things that was challenging at this point is you don’t realize the expectations that you’ve created in your mind until they’re not met, or you realize that they’re not gonna come to be. And that’s anything in our lives that we become disappointed by. You grow up thinking, I’m going to finish high school and then I’m gonna do this piece, and then I will meet the person that I want to spend my life with. And then we move on to having a family. You do this piece and then you check this box and then you do this box. And the reality for many is that it doesn’t happen quite like that. And suddenly we’re at this point where we have to make intentional choices about [00:18:00] how to pursue this or that, or realize that some pieces are just not going to be. And in the Catholic setting, there were a whole lot of people that had a lot of suggestions, how we might make this happen, and the miracle that is coming to be and hold out faith and with all kinds of well-intentioned loving thoughts and prayers. And they were very hard for me to receive and very hard for me to intellectually and spiritually grapple with. Then I also feel terribly ungrateful because sometimes I’m mad about what someone has offered or I just am sad about it. But where is my spiritual joy? There’s just so many layers. And I remember a conversation with my mom where I was [00:19:00] really just bothered by the idea that I should just be waiting for a miracle. And I’m like, miracles don’t happen for everyone, or they’re not what we expect them to be. I just really had a hard time with that idea and was like, I’m not gonna sit here and just say, my miracle is coming. And the reality is now I look back and I have two miracles in my house. They did not come in the way that I envisioned them. And it was a decade of grappling with lots of different things before that was our reality. And I am so grateful for them with all of that in mind. And for anyone going through this, that 10 years is long, and it feels like forever, and you don’t know when it’s gonna end or what the other side is gonna look like. And now that we are where we are, I [00:20:00] can’t imagine our now being any different than it is. But all of that time before was very hard. And there were many tears and moments where Patrick found me curled up in a ball in our room. Just sad. So there is a miracle in that. And I also am very careful with how I talk to other people that are in that place about it because they have to have room for pain. Like I had room for pain ‘cause it is hard and it hurts. And we hear so many messages about all of it every person’s journey is different. And it’s a lot to hold. So Patrick Curran: I think maybe just three pieces of color about this that are coming to mind for me. I’m thinking about your question what was your journey like prior to starting this? First and foremost, I wanna say that both Heather and I come from very loving and [00:21:00] supportive families. So our desire to have a family. This entire journey from our fertility journey into adoption and then deciding to foster and then adopting from foster care. All of that has been very well supported by our immediate families and our extended families. I actually hope we can unpack some of that a little bit later and we’ll talk more about the influence of that. And… Heather Curran: a lot of pins on things, honey. [laugh] Patrick Curran: I know. It’s a short podcast [laugh] yeah. So I think that it matters a lot, right? And we experienced God’s love in family throughout our entire lives and with the challenges that come with families as well. So that helps support us. And then, as we said before, our faith community within our parish was a big part of that. And it was 10 years of knowing people in that community from the time that we moved to North Carolina before we moved forward with becoming foster parents of people saying, [00:22:00] oh, my gosh, you would be great parents. Yes. Thank you. And then as Heather mentioned, sometimes people make comments that they’re intended to be helpful, but they end up being very hard and difficult to hold. But all of that time, we were being supported by our community in that space. And so then when we did finally have children placed with us in foster care and then adopt them, like that community was ready to receive them and they were excited for us, and they were joyful for that. Christina Gebel: This has been such an emotional journey for me just sitting here listening to you and knowing a lot of these things. I didn’t know about the 37 kids. [laugh] I will say that is the first time I’m hearing this [part], but, just all the emotions and grief, I think for me hits really hard. And also this navigating of people trying to help in the best way they can and trying to rationalize the situation [00:23:00] and their faith angle. And eventually you all started the process of fostering, adopting, I heard you say, that the grief never really fully just disappears. But what were those early days like of starting that process? Because I know for other people I’ve talked to, it’s a very daunting process in the beginning, and one doesn’t necessarily just turn on a dime and start the next path. So what were those early days like when you were just starting to get acquainted with fostering? Patrick Curran: The kind of initial posture from us was like, do we want to move forward? And what are the paths, right? Like we had talked about adoption as a concept. This was now suddenly a thing and we wanted to understand it better. What could this look like? We knew through hearsay that adoption could be very expensive. That was part of the choice not to do IVF was like, we could spend a lot of money [00:24:00] doing IVF or we could spend a lot of money adopting a kid that needs a family then of course you have decisions like international or domestic. There’s an entire forest of decision trees to be navigated. And Heather really took that on for me at that point. And then fast forwarding, we actually ended up starting the process twice. Heather Curran: For me, I have always, for better or worse, made decisions based on my gut I have realized through relationships and conversations with other people, that I sometimes make big decisions in a way that’s different from others. I don’t make long lists and do lots of big planning, and there was just something that kept bringing me back to the idea of foster care. I was very overwhelmed by the [00:25:00] number of different pathways for adoption, the international versus domestic question, the how do you maneuver, what organization manages this in an ethical way? There was just so much to me, and I just kept coming back to, if there is a need in my community and my desire and want is to fill our home with love of a child, why don’t I use that to meet this need? Some of that comes from the Jesuit way of talking about my greatest desire meets the world’s need. And that just clicked for me in this idea and this thought I couldn’t really look away from that once it seeded itself for me. And I knew that was a big ask because [00:26:00] foster care doesn’t automatically come with permanency. And for us, we knew that we wanted the ultimate piece of adoption. And that is not what foster care is per se. And I think we knew that intellectually, but then as we were doing the training, they really made sure that hit home for us. And we had to talk about that a lot. And I think we felt open to that. But it also had to be something that we continually revisited and talked to each other about and thought about. And it’s the piece that people really have a hard time understanding when we talk about foster care to other people because there is that desire for permanency and people want permanency for us, and they want permanency for the child. And the idea of why a child is in foster care sometimes is the extreme [00:27:00] reason for why kids are in foster care. And there’s an automatic assumption. I think sometimes parents of children in foster care become villainized and there are a lot of different ways that people come into care or hit rock bottom, so when we were going through training, they talk about the number one goal of foster care is reunification. And when that cannot be, that is when we move forward with other options for permanency, including adoption. And again, I think we could intellectualize that both of us felt like we could commit to that and spiritually that would be challenging, but that we understood that was the reality. And that also. Comes with its own many challenges and the reality of that is harder sometimes than you think [00:28:00] it’s going to be. Or not harder than you think it’s going to be ‘cause it is hard. But like Patrick was saying, we decided to go through our local county foster care system and we started the training and we were getting to the part where they were getting ready to license us. And we had some shifts happening in our home professionally and realized that we weren’t stable enough for us to bring in that instability that would come with foster care. And so we had put it on hold until we were in a better place. And so we got to go through the training twice and we got to think about all of these pieces twice and really get them rooted in our minds. What do you have to add to that, Patrick? Patrick Curran: So many things. Yeah, I was just reflecting, maybe going back. All of the Ignatian methods of discernment Heather’s is follow the spirit faithfully off the edge of a [00:29:00] cliff and Christina Gebel: what a great cliff it is and Patrick Curran: or the great cliff. Christina Gebel: Great cliff. Patrick Curran: It’s so true. There’s a couple of threads there about like, where is Catholicism living in all of this? And again, it goes back to the roots that we have in our families. I could tell you very explicit moments when my dad, who is not outspoken, and as a young person growing up, he was not like, oh, Catholicism first. That’s not my dad. He was a father and a husband, and somebody just tried to do right by his family. But there were a couple of key moments where he was like, we need to live the Beatitudes right now. And I’m like, I don’t, okay. I’m seven. What does that mean? I think about like all of our experiences at Loyola and the environment that we were in. Specifically the quote that Heather just mentioned, this idea of vocation being, where our deepest desires meet the world’s deepest need. That theme as an expression of our [00:30:00] faith was something that was not by accident in our training, in our formation, and, resonated with both of us and has resonated in our professional lives. And so here we are at this kind of key crossroads of who do we feel called to be as adults, as individuals, and as a married couple, and the decision to lean into foster care because it is a need in our world. Now that said, we’ve interacted with many people who have thought about and discerned becoming foster parents because there’s a great need. It’s clearly not the thing that they’re called to. I think there’s an important part of discernment and I don’t wanna claim or make it sound like we went through some very intentional structured discernment process. There is a process there, and we did approach it [00:31:00] faithfully, meaning that in the way that we live our everyday faith, we continue to ask God, where are you in this and where are you calling us? And I think Heather is very free about following God through any door that God opens in front of her. Which I guess I’m a very resistant sheep lost on the mountainside like that. But that ended up taking us into our local community, foster care. And that’s a beautiful thing and has been a tremendous gift. So, there is a structured discernment process. And I wanna say that to give credit to our trainers and the people who run our county led foster care program, I think do a really good job with the parental training and a part of that, and they tell you straight up is A, we’re trying to scare you out of this. B, the purpose of foster care is reunification. So we are asking you to give your entire heart to these children, and we are promising you that we are going to break it because their goal is to keep those kids [00:32:00] with their birth family, and that’s what’s best for the kid. So again, if we’re approaching this as Christians and we’re saying, God, you’re inviting me to die to myself for someone else’s sake, then without trying to be a martyr, the invitation is to lay down your own desires and do what is best for the child. And I genuinely believe that every true parent does that. I don’t think you have to be a foster parent. I don’t think you have to wear a red cape or be some kind of superhero or magic Christian. I think if you have children in your home and you love them as a true parent, you put their needs in front of yours every single day. And the call of a foster parent is to do that and to recognize that means potentially giving up the gift of the child. And again, I think as Christians there’s a part of our spirituality and our theology that says the children in our home, whether they’re biological or not, are a [00:33:00] gift from God and whatever they’re called to in their lives, God calls us to give them up and to trust God’s will for them. Let God make the miracle out of them that they are. So I think we have simply tried to do that. And so, then there have been real moments where we have had to grapple with the desire for adoption and that desire for permanency. And as Heather mentioned in 2014, we had gone through the training the first time, and part of that discernment process the trainers actually said to us, there’s some resistance here. It doesn’t feel like you are ready. And that was their part of the discernment, right? And we had to sit with that and figure out what that was. And it was four years before we came back and did that again. And I remember at that point we were coming up on our 10th anniversary for our marriage. And I had said to Heather I feel like I’m getting old and crotchety and a little stuck in my ways. And if we’re going to do this, then let’s really do it. And if not, [00:34:00] then I think we need to mutually discern if we’re going to be a couple that doesn’t have children, we have a lot of gifts and a lot of bandwidth, and how are we gonna be using that? And so we determined at that point that we were still very interested in pursuing this journey. We went again, back through the training, completed the licensure, and it was not an easy process for getting placements in our home, which was strange. But then after about seven months from the time that we finally got our license to when we had our first placement [who] was a young five week, baby boy who was blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and if you know anything about foster care, that is the exact opposite of what they tell you to expect, right? It’s the whole thing is if you’re, you should expect to have school children usually of either mixed race or minority race in your home and the idea that you would have an infant, baby boy, blonde hair, blue eyed is just a random thing. What I think was most [00:35:00] striking and potentially difficult at the time was he looked like he could have been our natural child. It’s the Advent season, by the way, when the boy gets placed with us. So our church is filled with all the stories of Mary and the coming of children and this whole like elevation of the family in our Christian narrative and what does that look like? And all of a sudden, we show up at church with a baby carrier. And people are like, oh, my gosh, we didn’t even know you were pregnant. And so our whole community who had been on this journey with us and were wanting so much to see, the love that we had for each other in our marriage, pour out into the gifts of family, just felt, oh, this is incredible. And we were surrounded and uplifted in so many ways by that. And then fortunately for that baby boy one of his biological family members, was able to eventually adopt him. So he was placed with us for only six weeks. We had initially been told upfront that we should expect to adopt him because the case was a little complicated and they weren’t sure what was gonna happen. But they [00:36:00] started out by asking us, are you prepared to care for this child for the long term? And not just in the term of a long-term foster placement, which might be one to two years, but actually adopting him. By all means, yes. And I specifically remember holding him in the hospital, like looking at his face and saying I’m committing myself to you. And having these spiritual reflections and praying prayers of thanksgiving to God that somehow our first foster placement is someone that they’re asking us, will you adopt? And then in a very quick turn of events, a good thing for him, but a hard Cross for us to bear was that he was placed with his aunt. And that, as far as we know, has been a very successful placement, and he is thriving and doing well. But it caused a lot of pain for us. It clarified for us how much our hearts were desiring for adoption. And we [00:37:00] didn’t realize how much us having a child would bring out other aspects of our community. And they were so excited for us. Our family members were like, we’re finally grandparents. The aunts and uncles are getting all excited, there’s all this stuff going on. And then all of a sudden, he was gone. And so it wasn’t just our pain, it was pain for the community, and we didn’t feel like that was fair and we both still had this desire to be parents. So, fast forward, what ends up happening? Through a process of healing and conversation in a quick short few weeks, we had decided let’s move forward with adoption. For anyone who doesn’t know, adopt us kids.gov.org.com, dot something. Go look it up, go find it. Christina will put it in the show notes. [yes, I did and it’s https://adoptuskids.org] There are thousands of kids available for adoption in the United States that need a loving home. They’re broken just like you and me. They need great parents, so [00:38:00] go adopt them. But we were looking on this website and we found a few different sibling sets and other children who were available for adoption that we had been talking with our social worker. The next first step for us that seems to make sense is to move down this path of adoption; we still wanted to do foster care, but it wasn’t fair to a child in foster placement who was going to be reunified with their family, hopefully, that they would have all these expectations from us or from our community and whatnot. And literally, I kid you not, this is three weeks after that baby boy was placed with his aunt. We’ve gone through, made these decisions. We’re supposed to meet with our social worker to review this list of children that we’ve identified as ‘we’d like to learn more’ and possibly see if we would be a good fit for an as an adoptive family for them So, we’re scheduled to meet in the afternoon with our social worker. That morning we got a call from the placement worker about another five week old baby boy. She called me, [00:39:00] Heather was at work and I was available, and so I was like. I’m feeling like I’m gonna say yes to this, and that’s ridiculous. We are grieving so much right now, and my wife is going to be like, what is wrong with you? Why would you even say yes to this? And so I told the placement worker, I was like we’ll have to call you back, but I’ll let you know. So I called Heather and she said, are you gonna say I’m nuts if I wanna say yes to this that’s how I do discernment. God, you are present when I’m surprised and when everything kind of lines up the way that we think it should. And it felt like God was saying to me, you’re missing everything I have prepared you for a young child. Even when our first placement came the way that our friends filled in the gaps with here’s the crib here’s all the baby supplies that you need. ‘Cause we were ready for school age kids ‘cause that’s what they told us to be ready for. And so we had all these things for a baby and then we were looking [00:40:00] at older kids who needed a family. And then here comes this call for another five-week-old boy who today is our 6-year-old adopted son. And he’s awesome, like, just lots of surprises. But, the journey’s not straight. And I think the interaction of faith and the everyday parenting decisions and adult human decisions they go together. They go together in ways that require the tension of hope and sacrifice all in the same moment. Christina Gebel: Wow. I have so many faith parallels coming up, and I keep going back to your words, Patrick, about laying everything at the foot of the Cross. How many times you guys did that? Like having gone through everything you had with fertility biologically the uncertainty of [00:41:00] that and the non permanency of that process. You could have easily said, okay, we’re gonna go with a slam dunk path this next time around. But you kept laying yourselves at the foot of the cross. Patrick Curran: Oh, let’s be clear. I wanted the slam dunk. You wanted the slam dunk. Heather Curran: Like normal adoption paths… Patrick Curran: …Are not a slam, Heather Curran: ….Are not a slam dunk. True. And there’s, there isn’t a promise of permanence. And you can get so close and have these same experiences of so near to something… Patrick Curran: Yeah. Heather Curran: And then it’s not, and there is grief there. That path is not straight or easy either. And I see that in our friends that have taken that journey or reading different experiences. I think things come back to expectations and you create this expectations of what it’s gonna look like in your head or for me, like what will look like as parents and how people tell you’re to make a great [00:42:00] parent, then you have a child and your house and you are exhausted. So yeah, I think especially with that first placement Patrick shared, just there was such an emotional release of this has finally happened. After all of this time and talk and desire, we have this infant that we didn’t expect. What a beautiful gift. It’s Advent. People are excited and we’re trying to hold in our heads, this is foster care. This is not a straight path. We are holding this tightly but loosely. And at the same time, your mind still travels 30 years down the road. Yeah. And when that all shifted, it happened in a week. When family was identified, people were telling us they’re gonna have to do background checks and yeah, it’ll take four months, it’s gonna take months. And they identified this family on a [00:43:00] Thursday. I met them on the Friday. We were meeting to talk about relocation on Monday. It happened so fast, and I had whiplash. And when we initially met them, Patrick was out of town. And I knew in that meeting again, it was like when we were in the the ultrasound I knew as soon as they were in the room, this was not gonna go the way that my heart had anticipated. And I knew that wasn’t the wrong thing for the child. It just wasn’t what I had hoped for or wanted. And those feelings. Again, hard to manage ‘cause you want to be grateful for the gift and the reality of what that meant for him. And then thinking about having to share this with all of the people that have been so excited for us. And those people have all still [00:44:00] been present through everything and wonderful. When we decided to do foster care, I realize now that we made that decision not only for us, but for all the people around us and for our parents, for our siblings and their kids. They are a part of this journey and they are riding these waves with us also. And I have been buoyed by their resilience in these times and their ability to support us in their own grief. And even the preschool teachers where our kids go are like, you are setting an example of love and spiritual journeying that is good for our community. And in that coming and going and saying goodbye, that is our spiritual faith. There’s many times where I think it’s not fair to do this to the people around [00:45:00] us, but the reality is that this is life and we are allowing people to journey it with us and they are supporting us. It’s mutual. And that’s not a bad thing. And to be grateful for taking those steps together and to have those people with us present and witnessing and caring for us in those times, Patrick Curran: We believe in the God of the Ordinary. I think what’s coming up for me right now, Christina, I’m looking at the questions that you had sent us earlier and this idea of radical and radical family. Again, I don’t know that I would consider what we do radical, but in the world of Ignatian discernment, I think part of, what Ignatius’s gift to the Church was challenging us and inviting us to reflect on where do our own attachments keep us from God? And I think in this journey we are continuously challenged to [00:46:00] recognize what are the things that we are holding onto. What are the things that God is inviting us to and when are those things not the same thing? And so like Heather said, how do we hold on tightly but loosely and then have the freedom, have the faith to let go? I was talking with a friend of ours earlier, I don’t know if this is true or not, so somebody can fact check it, but he was thinking that the word radical shares a root with the word “rooted.” And when I think about how we were able to make those decisions, it comes back to being rooted in our faith tradition in our families who nurtured that faith tradition in our community. Where we live, breathe, and express that faith. And ultimately in our individual relationships Yes, I have a [00:47:00] relationship with Jesus Christ, and I love him, and I’m very mad at him frequently, and I don’t know what He thinks of me all the time because I don’t hear enough when He says, I love you, right? And as a father, that’s the message I want my son to hear. As a foster parent, you have to be rooted in that kind of radical love, to have a kid in your home who is gonna need you in ways that you can’t imagine. Again, I’m not sure it’s different from the way any other true parent parents their child, but if there’s anything radical about it today, it’s that our American culture, the society that we live in, even the broken, polarized Church that we live in, I don’t think invites us to let go of our attachments. But instead, has this message of how you can have more of what you want, more of how things should be easy. More, more bigger [00:48:00] family. 37 kids started out as 36 and then it got to 37. And I think in our rootedness, ultimately, we’re hoping to find freedom. And it is a gift to be able to share that with the two children that have been entrusted to us. And we love them both radically, Christina Gebel: Whoever you spoke to, I wanna go back to that. Whoever you spoke to was correct in their interpretation of radical and rooted, and I talk a lot about this in the teaser for the season. That radical came to me in a homily by one of my favorite priests in Boston. He was talking about we need to be radical. And, for me, I’m like, yeah, radical, progressive chain ourselves to the building or something, and he was talking about how there’s this interesting play on the word here and that’s how we usually use [the word] radical colloquially, but radical, which also I think of [00:49:00] radish, which grows in the soil, is really actually to get to the root of something. And he talked about when you actually get to the root of Christianity, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, Christianity is actually quite radical. So there’s almost this circular logic there in that, really, if we really sat down and really spelled out what it means to be a Christian in our modern world, and you put flesh on those bones, Patrick, when you said to not have everything fall into place, like we expect so much of our lives to do in the modern sense is quite radical. That’s what’s also coming up for me as y’all are talking. You mentioned earlier in the conversation, a lot of people come to foster care, through the sense of need. And I think on a cognitive level, especially for people who are committed to social justice, like that’s very [00:50:00] clear, and that might be the doorway that people enter through, right? That might be what the whisper is, but whether or not it’s a call. And a call takes you through all the ups and downs and joys and challenges that you’ve shown us so beautifully in this conversation. That sense of call I’m getting from you the roots were very deep. They were like intergenerational roots. You spoke so beautifully about your families. It’s like the roots were there back then… Patrick Curran: And I didn’t even mention, I have adopted cousins that I didn’t even know were adopted. And not because it was a secret, but simply because the way that our family has loved them over years and yeah, roots. Lots of roots. Christina Gebel: So, I know we’re winding down our conversation, which means we’re saving all the best wisdom for last. This last question is, if you [00:51:00] were to encounter someone who’s just starting to think about this path, obviously there’s a lot of, a lot of information out there, a lot of good people, good trainers out there and people in your parish and there’s a lot of that. But what I’m hoping you can answer is what are some things that you would suggest praying about spiritually as you approach this path? What are some of the spiritual questions or even just a framework? Or a mosaic of discernment for somebody who’s about to seriously consider this, and people discern in so many different ways. Just you both, the sheep, the cliff, I’m somewhere in, I’m somewhere in between those, and I’m not sure which when I am, there’s gonna be some cliff people out there listening and there’s gonna be some sheep people out there listening, so I’d love to hear from each of you in your own unique flavor of discernment, [00:52:00] what spiritual things would you point them to? Heather Curran: I don’t know about spiritual things, and maybe I’m just discounting the spirituality of my thoughts right now. But there are some very practical things that I have encountered in conversations with people. And their understanding of foster care that you have to think about before you jump into the process or discern. And one is your own biases. What are the things that you believe about foster care, children in foster care, parents of children in foster care, and the reality about reunification? I think people tend to…They hear that, but even for us, I think in the beginning we are hearing it. We were committed to it. But we had a need for permanence. And that time between the first [00:53:00] time we took the class and the second time we went in and actually got our license, I think it took all of that time for us to get into a place where we had processed our grief, about our ability to have biological children, and we’re actually in a place where we could receive a child that may or may not stay with us. And then the reality of that actually happening is a whole nother level. And if you are coming into this because you have a desire for children that hasn’t been met because of infertility or whatever, you do have to process that before you come into it because it is not fair for the child you receive to receive all of that emotional desire. The other piece is for me, what has become very apparent and important and I struggle with is biological families are important and we [00:54:00] do have to engage them. And it is because that’s the best thing for the child. There is also making sure that there are boundaries in place to keep your child safe and being open and aware of the realities that are happening. It’s multilayered, there’s lots of things going on, but I very often encounter people who say, I would love to do foster care, but I hear that you have to interact with their families. And I just can’t do that. Or the idea of them going back I just can’t do that. And this is where, for me, the realities of our Gospel and our faith and the ideas of forgiveness and openness and caring for others where the rubber really hits the road. If I believe in those things, this is where I need to put that into action for my child. And it’s hard. [00:55:00] It’s really hard. When I went into this, I think I had all these visions of worst case scenarios and how hard it was gonna be to deal with families and how difficult visitations would be and how they were gonna treat me and just being worried and concerned about that. And we’ve had some really great scenarios, and I’ve been very surprised. And we also need to stay aware and wise and create boundaries, but it has been beneficial to our children to know their families, to understand where they come from. I am in contact with my daughter’s grandmother on a weekly basis, and she is loving and wonderful and sends gifts to both of our children. That is where our family is growing and it has been a gift. And I see people very resistant and [00:56:00] afraid of that. And if this is a direction you’re going to go, you really need to grapple with how are you going to be open to those connections, and what is it that you are going to bring to those relationships? It’s not just the child. The child is coming with a whole set of people. I do not do that perfectly. I have a lot of opportunity for growth, and I want people coming into foster care to be really open to the potential of those relationships and their benefit to their child, but also their benefit to them. And God is good and relationships can be healing if we allow them to be. It’s another place where you have to hold all the tensions. Christina Gebel: Those are great ideas. I think that [00:57:00] piece is really important I haven’t heard that highlighted as often as probably it should be. Yeah. Patrick, what are you thinking in terms of practical or spiritual things you might offer someone at the beginning stages of this path? Patrick Curran: Sure. First I want to underscore. Plus one and give credit where credit is due to what Heather just said. You made the statement that you struggle with this. The reality is that we have relationships with our children’s birth families because Heather has taken that up. And our path through foster care to adoption for them has been made smooth because you leaned into those relationships. I think I’ve also taken for granted how much people don’t talk about that. And what I would add on the spiritual side, and if you’re discerning that is we are people who place a very high value on community. And so it has [00:58:00] actually been a struggle for us to try to balance our own family needs with their family needs and holding in a place of importance, what we believe will be good for them in the long run, which is having those ties back to their birth families and the days that they have questions about their identity and what is that gonna mean. And then everything that Heather said about this gets to the heart of the Gospel. What do we believe about redemption and God’s action for humans, and foster care is a world filled with broken people. So, I think my own set of what would I be discerning about at the beginning of this, first and foremost, as much as you can get your own house in order. And I think what I mean by that is try to get clear on why do I feel motivated or called to do this. What are the [00:59:00] things that are moving in me or around me? And many people come to foster care because they are a kinship placement for someone in need in their biological family. So, it’s not something that they’re desiring or looking out for, but they courageously said yes. And that’s its own kind of faith. And so I think at the beginning, if it is something that you’re thinking about, get clear on why and bring that to prayer and ask God to help you know yourself. Heather Curran: Yeah. Patrick Curran: And to know where is the Spirit moving in you? I would also say for the folks who are planners and like to be very prepared they’re now deciding I will get my house in order to be a good foster parent. There’s no such thing in foster care, right? And so I think one of the very practical things to discern and begin to plan for is how will you navigate the unplanned? How can you be more flexible in your life? Where is God [01:00:00] inviting you to do something that’s outside of your comfort zone that you otherwise might never do? And do you have time to reflect on that and find the grace in those things? And I, for some reason as Heather was talking, the Scripture coming into my head is the, the story of Ruth, right? “Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.” (Ruth 1:16) When you bring a foster child into your home, they need from you and you need from them, and you have to be able to elevate their needs. And so you can’t plan for that. You can’t predict it. Things come out of nowhere all the time. I think there’s a lot of very practical things that any good foster training program will help you think about. I think maybe another thing was just what is your experience with trauma and what kind of training do you have or would you be willing to get around supporting people that have traumatic experience? And there’s a lot to that. Christina Gebel: Great things there to [01:01:00] look into and every time we come to a close in this conversation, and the other ones I’ve had I’m envisioning people out there listening to this and just thinking like, there’s gonna be a spark in someone somewhere, or maybe it’s gonna fan the flame of something the Spirit is putting on someone’s heart. And even if somebody wasn’t, completely, ready to discern this issue, there were so many gems here just about faith and discernment that I think there’s gonna be a plethora of sparks that are lit by this conversation. And I just wanna thank you both so much. I have endless gratitude for this conversation for you as friends, for you as parents, for you as fellow Catholics. I just wanna say thank you because this [01:02:00] conversation…the Spirit’s gonna take it to places that I feel in my heart we can’t even imagine. So thank you. Heather Curran: Thank you, Christina, for doing this podcast and opening the door for these conversations for other people to hear them and add them to their discernment and their contemplation. And you have a lot of depth to you, your questions and your seeking and your spiritual life, and it’s a gift to the people around you. Christina Gebel: All right. With that, the Curran family, Patrick Curran: Yeah, thank you, Christina. Yeah, what a joy to talk with you today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com [https://christinagebel.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community

Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community with Others. So welcome, everyone. This is our inaugural episode of Season Two on the Moderate Catholic. We have wrapped up Season One, and we are now moving on to Season Two. And I teased the topic a little bit earlier, but it is radical family, and the topic, radical family, is about families making bold choices to live out their faith. And I’m so excited to kick off this season with four very dear friends of mine whom I met at a stage in my life and continue to be inspired by. And they’re going to talk to us today about what it means to live in intentional community with others. So, with [00:01:00] that, let’s get right down to it. My dear friend Jonathan will introduce himself and his wife, and then we’ll pass it to Carla. Jonathan Wittig: Good morning. Thanks for having us here. I’m Jonathan, and this is my wife, Lisa. And we have three children: Caroline, who’s 11, Ben, who’s nine, and Katherine, who’s seven. We were longtime Chicagoans and are now new residents in Minnesota in the past couple of years. So, I’m excited to be here today. Carla Lents: Hello. Thanks, Christina. We are Ryan and Carla; we actually grew up together in Indiana and then moved to Chicago and have lived here for over 20 years. We have two sons, Caleb, who is 15, and Micah, who’s 10. Yeah, really excited to be here and talk about this. Christina Gebel: I am really excited to have you here. So, the reason that I know these folks, these awesome folks, is through a program that I continue to hold near and dear to my heart, which is Amate House program in Chicago. It’s a [00:02:00] faith-based service program where folks who graduate college can decide to dedicate a year or more as a fellow in service at a job in Chicago. And I was blessed to do that between the years 2007–2009, and that’s how I got to know Lisa as one of my house coordinators and eventually Ryan came on as program staff. I’m really glad that our faith connected us in this way, and what a better launching pad to discuss the topic of living in community. So, the first thing we’re gonna talk about is just how y’all came together. How did you get to know each other? What time period in your life? What were you doing? Enlighten us into how this all came to be. Lisa Wittig: Yeah. So, as Christina mentioned, I was working at Amate House back in 2007 when she was a fellow with the program. I had recently graduated from the program myself as a volunteer. That’s actually where Jonathan and I met. We both volunteered [00:03:00] together for a year, and I was working at Amate House. And then a few years into that, there was a staff transition. Ryan actually came on staff and started working at Amate House. We were in the same role, working with the program, supporting the volunteers. Ryan quickly became a good friend, and Jonathan and I met Carla and hung out with Ryan and Carla a few times. And at one point, Ryan came to me, and he had this crazy idea. Would you be interested in living in intentional community again? Certainly, a unique situation because we were married, and Ryan, I believe at that time, you had Caleb, who was a baby. And so just thinking about that idea, I was like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy. I wasn’t completely opposed to it, but I was like, you know who you should talk to? Jonathan has actually mentioned this before in our relationship to me as something he is interested in, and he’s also the dreamer and the doer in our relationship, and I am like the planner and executor, so I was like, Ryan, you need to connect with Jonathan. You two need to talk because I don’t think I’m the one to carry this dream to fruition, but it sounds exciting. Ryan Lents: Maybe I can pick up from there. I would say, for me, I think part of the curiosity of this was that a big part of our role at Amate House, Lisa and I, was being these house coordinators, and so it’s a very unique role. It’s like being a campus minister and an RA, although we didn’t live with the fellows. But we were a primary point of contact for them and would do things like office hours, community nights, retreats. So, we really accompanied them throughout their experience, and I would say vicariously lived through their experience of community, all the ups and downs. And it made it very rewarding and very challenging, and as Lisa mentioned, we had transitioned from a life stage of being right out of college where we had lived in community. I had not done Amate House as a fellow. I had been at a different program called Nazareth Farm in West Virginia, and that was a deeply formative time in my life. And I would also say I was pretty immature. There were a lot of things I needed to learn about life and about living with other people and about just how to grow up, and community was so deeply shaping in that way. I came to really realize how much I had missed it by being in this role where I was walking with people that were experiencing those ups and downs. Initially, I thought this is just something that you do when you’re not tethered to marriage and children and mortgages and things, but then I interrupted that presumption and said, what would it look like to actually go on this type of journey? And to think about this stage of life. And so that was the launching point of some conversations with Jonathan. We became fast friends, bonded around a lot of things that we had common interests around, but I think that idea of saying, hey, what would it look like for us to discern together and to think about how we could live out our faiths and our commitments as husbands, as wives, as friends in this unique stage of life as we’re starting family where there are a lot of just really big pressures and challenges and difficulties. It’s hard to live in the modern world. There can be a lot of really unhealthy messages that we get about individualism and doing things on our own. I got those messages really loud as a twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old. And those messages are just as powerful when you’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, especially as you’re thinking about some of the real adult things that come on at that stage of life. I think we found a lot of common challenges and ideas that really started to make this thing seem like it could be real. Jonathan Wittig: Yeah. Just adding on to that, when I was in college, I was involved with a lot of intentionality within the campus ministry department at my university. And so, my roommates and I would try to live out community together in our own ways, even counting the toilet paper squares to see how much of stewardship we were living out on a day-to-day basis. A little crazy. But my year of Amate House was a challenging year where our sense of community was difficult. The service in the community was wonderful. Amate as a whole was wonderful, but I had a very [00:07:00] challenging year. But the concept of community living—I believed in it strongly. My simple explanation is Jesus lived in community. He was with these other guys, and they just went around together. And I’m sure that some of the disciples were frustrating to live with on a day-to-day basis. But they found the goodness in it. And they probably rose higher from the challenges that they faced on a day-to-day basis. And that’s how I hold community living, even when we chose to do it, or even in college or in Amate House, like there were a lot of hard days. But I think that those, like, you learned patience, and you learned kindness, and you learned self-reflection. And you hopefully are growing and not just so self-involved all the time. And I share that perspective with Ryan. I think that’s one of the many challenges we face right now in our common societies, that we’re all kind of self-involved in. But yeah, that made me want to continue to live this beyond this ate volunteer year because it makes total sense. I wanted to be able to have that community as we raise our kids. And there’s more to that, but I’ll share that [00:08:00] later. Christina Gebel: Yeah, so I really love what you all have been saying, and Ryan, I was like, you and I did Amate House. I can relate to thinking like this is something you do in your mid-twenties, and then you do other things and include other people and even little people and bills and all that stuff. And as we were talking, I’m realizing that we were kicking around this phrase “intentional community,” and the five of us have an idea of what that is, but to anybody new to the concept, maybe just a few reflections from you all on how you would define that. We use this phrase, “intentional community,” in conversation, but what is it? And in this pre-decision period of making the bold choice, how were you thinking about that? What kind of values were coming up for you? Ryan Lents: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that phrase, “intentional,” is really important because I think with so many things in life, we can have a lot of hopes and dreams for things. But for me, the piece about intentional is, what are the routinized kind of ongoing daily practices that reflect a commitment? And I think the same is true in marriage. It’s like you could talk about intentional marriage. Just because you make a commitment on one day doesn’t mean that on day 1725, that it’s gonna be as easy. It takes an intentional effort and commitment to say, yes, today I will love my spouse and animate those commitments that we made on the day that we exchanged rings. I think the same is true in community. Our experience was one of a lot of active discernment where we would do a good job of framing big questions that we were living into with our lives. We didn’t just say yes one day and then cut a check for a deposit for the house that we ended up living in for two years. We actually spent a whole year meeting on an ongoing basis. I think at one point we were meeting every two weeks. Part of that was just to build relationships together. The four of us had come to become good friends, but there are different conversations you have when you’re going out for pizza and beer versus, hey, what would it look like to share a mortgage together or share the cost of groceries or cook meals and that sort of thing. We really went through a whole process of asking questions like, what kind of living arrangement would we want? We had a chance to visit a community of two families that were living together where they had a two flat. So, they actually had two separate spaces, but then they made active efforts to do meals together or have hospitality. We talked about what would a commitment to cooking meals together look like. How do we want to commingle resources around finances and things like that? We realized that there were so many of those questions, then begat like a lot of other questions and this is where it was helpful, where we had a good mix of gifts. We had high level thinking of what we’d like this to do, how might some of these things be a reflection of our values? And then to Lisa’s point around logistics, like how are we gonna keep track of things? How are we gonna balance a checkbook? How are we gonna keep track of receipts? How are we going to make sure that we are following through with things? And so, it took a mixture of our collective gifts to really sort that out. Lisa Wittig: Yeah, and another like important piece of intentional community is really understanding what it means to be intentional. Working at Amate House and certainly many of us having lived in community before, had a little bit of a basis of understanding of what it means to be intentional when you’re living with a group of people. But I think it’s not like we’re just choosing our best friends and living in an apartment together for a couple years and taking turns making dinner and hanging out at night, playing games. That did happen and that was one of the great parts of living in community with the Lenz family. But also, it was about living with people who you would maybe be irritated with or have a pet peeve that would rub you the wrong way. And then you were in a place where you had to make a decision, like, how am I gonna handle this feeling I’m currently having? Am I gonna [00:12:00] brush it off and ignore it? Is it something that I can ignore and it won’t be an issue? Or is it something that’s gonna fester and get harder and harder? And Carla, I don’t know for you, like, where your head space was going into it. You all had a child. We went into it as just a couple. We didn’t have children yet, but, like, knowing when you become a parent, like you are now, you have so much more to consider in your decisions, in how you wanna be intentional, especially in raising a child. For me, trying to be really intentional about how we were approaching relationships and what decisions we were making was a really important piece of it. But I don’t know, in parenting, if you feel like when you came into it, you had that whole extra thing to consider in terms of what it meant to bring your child into a house with these other people. Carla Lents: Yeah, when I think back at the discerning time, that was the thing that loomed largest in my mind the whole time, like, do I feel comfortable moving into a place with my child and these people? It was like this balance [00:13:00] of having the values conversation—what are our shared values? —then also the nitty-gritty of all the finances and the day-to-day stuff. We spent almost a year meeting together, talking about these things. So, by the time we were getting to the point where we were making the decision and saying, yeah, let’s figure out where we can live together, I actually felt pretty comfortable with it. People have talked about this idea of naivete of moving into an intentional community and learning what the word “intentional” means as you’re living that out. And that was really the case for me because I had not lived in community prior to this experience. I had lived with roommates and things like that, but it was not a community situation. I think there was a big learning curve for me personally, in terms of what that meant, but also, as Lisa alluded to, I didn’t really know what—I didn’t know about what parenting in front of other people would be like. Also, I had one child, and so everything [00:14:00] that we were encountering with our child was new to us as we were going along. So, we were just like, okay, I don’t know if this is normal in front of these other people or anything like that. It was very raw and real that first year. Ryan Lents: Just saying what most parents know, right, is that the first child is the test child. So, like, for better or for worse, we were able to figure a lot of stuff out with us. Carla Lents: Yeah, it was also a very grace-filled time in that I think hopefully Lisa and Jonathan benefited from seeing us fumbling through dealing with a toddler once we moved in together. I know it was very grace-filled for us to at least talk about, like hanging out together and stuff. But one of the most amazing things of having a young child in community was, like, you put them to bed and then you can be like, “Hey, we’re gonna go for a walk.” And there’s people in the house. That’s not a thing that, like the majority of parents who live in a single-family [00:15:00] home and have little kids, you’re, like, stuck. That was just one little thing that I remember as being, like, amazing. Jonathan Wittig: I just wanted to jump in on some of the pre-decision formation that I recall. And even if you meet for a year, you can’t go through every scenario and answer every question. And so, there’s stuff you’re gonna realize the first day, the first week, first month, first year that you’re living in a community that you just couldn’t have planned for. And so, one of the things that I always think of our formation period was being very intentional about, what do we do when we come upon conflict? And just thinking it through, we don’t have to know the answer. Let’s figure out the method by which we’re gonna approach this. So, we can all feel heard and respected and hopefully find a good resolution. I think that was a critical part of our formation, just figuring that out. And then likewise, on the joyful side, if we want to bring something forward, what’s our approach for doing that? We had monthly meetings that were focused in terms of planning and stuff like that. And then I won’t say we had weekly prayer that would be a space for kind of connection. And then [00:16:00] there’s probably space in between for how we bring up new ideas and we can talk through those. And so, there are different spaces for each of those. We could figure out those ideas together. I think that was critical for having a sustainable community. Christina Gebel: Wow, there’s so many gems coming up. Like, my mind is buzzing with all of the things that y’all just said. What a beautiful way to reflect on all of it. And Carla, I was really struck by what you said. Bringing parenting into this, the first child, the quote, unquote, test child. And I’m assuming that child turned out really well if I know you two. So, it’s just special. What a unique coming together at that moment. And you’ve been talking really beautifully about just the balance between values and logistics and what stood out to you as concerns, and what were some of the things that you thought might happen and how to anticipate [00:17:00] those. At what point did you feel like a decision had been made? Did y’all set, like, that one-year timeframe, or did the spirit come down and tell you, “Hey, it’s time?” How did y’all arrive at the actual decision point and to use parenting language, did you have any big feelings about that as you went in? Carla Lents: My memory of, I think it was in the springtime or, like, late winter after we had been meeting for several months, I remember someone asking the question at one of our gatherings and just said, “All right, we’ve been talking about this for a while now. Are we ready to take the next step?” I think there was definitely a consensus around, “Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s try it out.” We stepped into it, but we still left our outs. We didn’t sell our condos. We were renting. We had a one-year rental lease of the place we were gonna live in together. It was like, “We’re gonna try this for a year and see how it goes.” And so, it felt like a natural and appropriately sized step to start trying things out. It didn’t feel like, “Oh, we’re getting married right now.” It felt like this is just a natural step forward. My memory of it was like kind of excitement, the feeling that I remember. Ryan Lents: Yeah, once we, I think, found that there was a lot of alignment around some of the big things that we were discussing, it was like, “Okay, we can admire this from a distance for a while, but what would it look like to actually start to work towards a plan?” And so, as we started to zero in on neighborhoods that might make sense, I think that was part of the challenges. Geographically, we were pretty far-flung when it came to our jobs, and then adding in childcare, where Caleb was going during the week, there was no one place that checked all the boxes, and we were sensitive to wanting to be in a place where we felt like we could thrive in community. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a place where gentrification was going crazy, and we wanted it to be a place that we felt like, yeah, we could really live this out. That ended up being uptown for us. We ended up renting there for two years, and yeah, it was a house that really worked great, I think, as we were getting started for this kind of experiment that we had entered into. Christina Gebel: Awesome. And y’all have touched on this in your different responses and even bringing up, “Hey, Jesus lived in community,” but even with Jesus’ kind of being the example with his 12 disciples, a lot of people still don’t make this decision. So, I’m curious, what was it about your faith that spoke to you and really was the underpinning of making this choice? Ryan Lents: Yeah, so I think all of us had been formed in Catholic social teaching in some way, shape, or form. I think as we were talking about it, I see Catholic social teaching as ways that we actually make the kind of big idea of faith like practical and real. Like what are the commitments? What are the things that we actually walk in our daily practice that reflect that faith in Jesus? I think that it was a way for us to put our values into action together. There’s lots of ways that you can live your life, but I think, for example, as we were starting to surface some of the values that were important to us, we named things like sustainability. We wanted to make sure that we were being responsible with the resources that we had, a lot of things around stewardship and connectedness. Jonathan pointed to simplicity. What were ways that we could be, yeah, just be more responsible with resources? We were all Catholic, all of us came from a Catholic background and perspective, but we talked about how we didn’t necessarily want to be exclusive in that way. If there were other people who were to come into our orbit who would want to join us, we wanted to figure out a way that would necessarily be a prerequisite. And that ended up being helpful, especially as we offered hospitality, which was another big value. One of the things I remember most about our first two years is we had this incredible first floor that was great for hosting people. And so, there were these meals and dinners that we would host, where at times we would have over 30 people in the house, and it would be like a potluck, and it would just be this beautiful place to start the evening in prayer, but really just to encounter one another. And many were neighbors. Some were folks that we had met through other circles. And it was just a really beautiful way to put that into practice. For the first two years, we also lived with somebody that Jonathan had met at Loyola who had a real devotion to a monastic kind of tradition. And so, for him, morning prayer was really important. That was something that I remember from my experience at Nazareth Farm. We struggled with that a little bit; the 6:00 AM or 6:30 AM start, whatever it was, became a little bit more difficult. So that was a place we struggled a little bit; we all valued this practice of prayer, but in terms of making that a tangible commitment, that was one that we had to do a little bit of testing around. We did a few in-house retreats during our time together that were powerful; we would either be self-directed or find something that we could go to together and then discuss. I think that we were trying to be active and accompanying one another in our own faith journeys at various points. Jonathan Wittig: I would say also at this stage of our lives, we were younger and eager and searching and trying to live out our faith without as many distractions as there are now at this stage of life. And having other people who live out their faith in different ways was so empowering, like, oh, I’m gonna sit down and meditate. Do you wanna join me? And I wasn’t thinking of doing that, but sure, I guess I will, or all of us worked in some type of service-focused job, or we were involved in some way in the community, so there were just a lot of opportunities to push ourselves in a positive way that came organically from living together. And it paid a lot of dividends to our children. Ryan’s a talented guitarist. And we would do worship sometimes in the house, and Ryan would just jam, and I can’t play anything. And so, it was great for my kids to see that and just be exposed to that, and Carla was just very artsy, and our youngest kid, that’s all she does. And I don’t know, I like to believe that Carla had an impact on her. And so that exposure is one of the many joys that I had from community. But the faith component of that is something I wanted at that time, and it was definitely a major benefit from living together. Lisa Wittig: I would say too that spontaneous exposure was definitely a huge benefit and something we valued and appreciated. But I also want to say that another piece of that intentional community aspect is the accountability piece, where it was great to have exposure to new and different things so that we could learn and grow ourselves. But also, just being with other people all the time is a form of accountability that not everyone experiences in that kind of intentional way. And so I think that was another piece of it that was really helpful to us in this very formative part of our lives, where we could say faith was important to us, or that stewardship or simplicity was important to us, but we actually had [00:24:00] these four other adults that we were living with that were like, “Oh, now I gotta prove to them that it’s important to me, I gotta walk the walk,” which is an important piece of growing. I really value having that kind of accountability that we provided to each other. Christina Gebel: Yeah. What better way to practice accountability than to live with other people? That’s such a key point. It’s not only about your inward actions, but also about your communal actions, and those actions are in, of, and around each other. I loved the piece about sustainability because that’s something I think a lot about too, and just how we are on autopilot in the US. We’re all kind of living in our respective dwellings, and maybe there are intergenerational households, but we all have, you know, a kitchen mixer, or there’s a proliferation of things [00:25:00], and to really be intentional is counter-cultural in that sense. So I’m very curious as to what people in your lives thought about these decisions—loved ones, friends, random people next door to you, whoever was observing, because, as you were saying, this is more than roommates, and I’m wondering what the people around you thought and how you explained to them that this is more than just living together or simply living together with roommates. Lisa Wittig: Yeah, such a great question. We had the benefit of coming from social circles in Chicago that had heard of or seen or even experienced intentional community, so that certainly made it a little easier in some instances to explain or to share about. Although even people who had lived in intentional community before were like, “Wait, you’re gonna do this with children? Are you crazy?” Or like with a husband or [00:26:00] with a partner. It was definitely a shock to a lot of people, like when I think about explaining it to my family in another state who had never really had that kind of exposure to the idea before. I remember having to talk them through it and explain it. And like with my family, I was like, “It’s like roommates. We’re just gonna be living with roommates.” I got to the point where they couldn’t exactly understand it, and so I had to just default to that. But I definitely remember trying to be like, “Look, here are the good things about it. We don’t have to buy as many things because now, we’re in a house with people who have some of those things. I only have to do half the chores because we can split up chores among four adults.” For my family and my side of it, who hadn’t really been exposed to those ideas, it was a little easier to default to the more simplistic ideas behind it, because they just didn’t quite grasp or understand what it meant to do something that was this spiritually challenging or emotionally investing. It was just such a farfetched and new idea to my family. Jonathan Wittig: For me, my family is a little bit more understanding. Three of my siblings had done volunteer programs, and so they lived in community, and so they at least understood the concept as adults. They were like, that’s cool. I would never do that, kind of thing. I think that was a common reaction. My parents were very excited and supportive, and that was good for me. Carla Lents: It’s funny, I can’t remember in the beginning how we explained this to people. I think what Lisa said, around people can understand the economic benefits very easily, so if you lead with that, then they’re like, oh yeah. So, anything that’s weird, you’re just gonna put up with, because you’re getting so many economic, I think that’s the language that our society kind of understands. The countercultural aspect of it, people just shrug off. They’re like, that’s good for you. I know now in hindsight, our parents, really, over the years as they interacted with us and came to visit and got to know Lisa and Jonathan and the kids, just experiencing it and seeing how it was different. So, I think there’s that. As you explain it to people in your life, then you start hearing about other people, oh, I know somebody else who does that. I feel like we did get connected to a few other intentional communities in the Chicago area where people that we knew who knew someone else and that sort of thing. Ryan Lents: I think, yeah, with my parents there was this, oh, that’s nice. And there was this, I don’t understand it. I just think about how the last couple of generations before our generation, there was such an investment in independence. Those were the first generations where you saw this widespread phenomenon of people moving across the country. A lot of that was seen as economic mobility and independence, and it was often lauded as this like thing of progress, but there was a lot that was given up in that process, right? Like, I think about how for most of human history, families lived intergenerationally together. Part of it was an economic necessity, but there was a lot of bonding and mutual support that was just part of that deal that became very easy to see as replaceable, and so I think in this time where we are experiencing so much loneliness and isolation, for many people as they really start to think of it, they would maybe say, yeah, I like having my own space, or I like having my own privacy. And I would say, yeah, like there are things you give up, right? Like you don’t get to just pretend like you have the whole house to yourself, but then I would quickly name off eight things—here are all the things that we gain that make life meaningful and rich and supportive. Those are things that are hard to quantify, but they make life so much more livable, and what can be a really hard time to live in these days, most people, I think at least, even if they said, I could never see myself doing that, most people we encountered were able to be like, oh, okay, I can understand. Lisa Wittig: Yeah, and just to put an example to what Ryan was just saying about the benefits, I sometimes think about the COVID times, and I reflect on that time as literally like maybe the best three months of my life. Some of my favorite memories come from those, like that March through June. Society across the world was just sheltered off from everybody in their lives, and us included. But because we lived in community, we had this built-in support and trust and emotional stability for each other where we were able to say, all right, this is a weird, strange, difficult thing that’s happening, but let’s make the most of it. There’s so many memories I have from that time period I just think about and laugh and smile because we had such an amazing benefit of being together and being able to support each other during that time that a lot of other people didn’t have. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s such a great point about COVID, and talk about two unique situations, COVID-19 and living together. What an interesting time to be in intentional community, and my heart just warmed up when you said those were some of your best memories. We all who were more isolated at the time started to miss that connection, and you had that really built into your life. And I’m gonna insert a little curious question here. Y’all have talked about receiving the thoughts and reactions about what you did from people, saying, “Great, or that’s great for you and not me.” And when I’ve talked about this, even when I’ve talked about you to other people, because again, you really are my heroes in this, a lot of people have said, “I could never do that because I’m an introvert,” or “I could not do that because I need privacy.” And the people in my life who I think I would want to do that with are probably smiling, because I have some dear loved ones with some strong introvert energy in my life, whereas for me, it’s like, oh my gosh, I get to be around my friends all day. This is great. I could go on in perpetuity, obviously with challenges, of course. Did any of you have that concern around introversion or even privacy? Did you encounter that? Lisa Wittig: I don’t know. I’m introverted, and I loved it because as a parent, you have certain obligations to ensure that your children stay alive, and in order to do that, you need to be present. But when you have other adults in the house, okay, now I get to go for a walk because I have three other people that are here and can make sure the children stay alive. I don’t know. I don’t think that argument stands very well because I feel like I was given a lot of opportunities to be introverted in that communal space. Jonathan Wittig: I think it strengthened our marriage because, as we were still young in our marriage, we were trying to navigate differences in how we communicate, which we’re still doing. So, I think it’ll be a lifelong journey, but I was able to seek Ryan or Carla or Tony for different needs, and I didn’t place all that on Lisa, which I think would’ve been what I would’ve done had we continued living together. So, it gave us more time to grow in our marriage together and navigate just these things that are difficult. I think that having those outlets probably freed Lisa up. I’m an extrovert, and I like to chitchat, and so I think it ultimately benefited us, I would say. Ryan Lents: Yeah, I think where I land on this is I, as I’ve gotten older, I think I come to appreciate introversion. Extroversion is not a binary for me, like going to a cocktail party where I have to do a lot of small talk and go up and introduce myself to people, I don’t know is like the worst thing I could ever imagine. When I have to do that for jobs or other things, I’m like, what’s the earliest I can leave, and I come home and I just want to be in a quiet room by myself, right? If you are in a dynamic where you’re with people who you have been vulnerable with and there’s like a mutual sense of trust, that’s a very different thing, and it can still hold intention, like with what Lisa said, like even in a nuclear family, you have to have boundaries. There are times that, yeah, I’m raw right now and in a bad mood, or I need some space, and those boundaries are important no matter what kind of arrangement you’re in. To be in a place where you can be radically loved and accepted for yourself, for all of your warts and shortcomings, and know that people are not gonna throw you away. Yeah, I hope everybody has an experience of that in their life, whether it’s intentional community or not. Like that’s, I think, a precious thing that we have the opportunity to cultivate together in community. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. We talk about spousal love as a type of radical love of accepting each other at all times—the good, the bad, the interesting—and to bring that type of love, which is, I think, the way God loves us, to bring that type into the fold with more people. I can’t say it enough that that choice is just so profound and interesting and really powerful in its vulnerability. Switching back to those early days, was there anything else you realized maybe once you had made the decision and were finally in it, that you might have overlooked or underestimated or overestimated, or just anything else from those early days of creating norms and habits and flow? Carla Lents: Caleb was two when we moved in together, and we were moving in with people who had never really lived with a toddler. I do remember feeling self-conscious about, like, how. He [00:36:00] was acting, even though he was just being a 2-year-old in general. But also, as we mentioned before, I didn’t know that. But there were a lot of graces, and I think people also recognized that this is what it is. We’re living together. That’s definitely something I remember. But also, in hindsight, you just recognize that that’s life, and he would’ve been a two-year-old wherever we had been living with him. I don’t know, Lisa and Jonathan’s memory of that early time, the first two months probably, of living with Caleb and what that was like. That was probably the biggest thing for me as we moved in together. It was like, okay, how do I manage this? Jonathan Wittig: I definitely watched a lot more Cars, the Pixar movie, than I ever would’ve watched on my own. That’s for sure. But I would give Caleb chocolates before bedtime as revenge, so it’s all good. No, I mean, I agree. I think the parenting aspect of community living was probably the hardest, just ‘cause we have different parenting styles and approaches. And so, like you, you see [00:37:00] something and you’re like, your judgmental side wants to come out, but I think that was part of what I liked about community, is the challenge of living community and just, okay. What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? And how do I react to that feeling? And then that was an opportunity to grow or not to grow, depending on what we wanted to hold there. And I agree that it was challenging many times, but it was also like, I loved it. Like, I loved Caleb, and I loved hanging out with him, and I had the maturity of a 2-year-old sometimes, so it was perfect for me. I just wanted to play with him, and it was so much fun because I didn’t have any kids at the time, and I loved his energy. Lisa Wittig: Yeah, it was a bit of a parenting warmup for us, ‘cause we got to live with Caleb for a year before Caroline was born, and we got to see, like, the challenges that parents face in their home with their child, and start to fast forward our thinking to be like, oh, okay, like what are we gonna do when we’re parents? And oh man, they have to deal with this toddler throwing a tantrum right now. Let’s just go for a walk. And we still had the freedom to be like really appreciative of that freedom, so it was [00:38:00] nice to be able to have that exposure, have that learning, and be able to learn from the wise parents that Ryan and Carla were. Once our kids came along, there was a lot more that we were able to understand and knew a little bit better how to approach, ‘cause we had that early exposure. Christina Gebel: Did you ever, like when your kids came along, kind of eat the humble pie and say, oh, this is toddlerhood, or did you have any of those humble pie moments? Jonathan Wittig: It’s delicious pie. So, for sure. Lisa Wittig: Yeah. I’m sure there definitely were some of those moments, but I’m really grateful for the experience of being able to co-parent during that time because I feel like parenting can be really hard. Anyone who’s a parent knows the challenges that come along with it. And to be able to have that kind of support from people who are there in it with you who can see when you’re reaching your limit and maybe step in now that we’re just a single family, not living in intentional community anymore. If we have a night where I hit my limit and like just need to walk away and Jonathan’s doing something else, like the dishes don’t get done. They just are there for whenever we pull ourselves back together and can come back to the kitchen. But when we lived in a community, we had an amazing, like, dish fairy who would come in, and it would be something we wouldn’t have to worry about or a stress that wouldn’t be on us later because we were able to support each other in those times when things were really challenging and hard. It was great to have that support. Christina Gebel: Yes, definitely. Honestly, I think about my line of work being a doula and a childbirth educator. I’ve always felt that families that do the best in the postpartum period, especially with your first, are the ones who have a lot of support in close proximity. And something I’ve thought a lot about in our modern context was what you mentioned earlier: upward mobility is becoming synonymous. With [00:40:00] darting around the country and getting the next big job, that pushes you a little bit further and farther. And so, there’s this interesting time in humanity where grandparents aren’t always living down the street, and I support so many families who are trying to make it work. And maybe that means the grandparents make a move to where they are. Or you hire a postpartum doula to get through those really tough nights. The loneliness of those early days with your first, and you’re constantly questioning, “Am I doing this right?” Am I doing right by this child? Am I feeding them? Are they okay? Lisa, as you’re talking, I’m thinking what a gift it is to have had another mom so close to you who can tell you, Hey, you’re doing good. Maybe try this and try that. Like to me, that is so crucial. If we are going to stay in this being, we are in different places from our immediate families. The village that we had in maybe the first part of our lives lives a lot farther away than maybe we thought it might. I like this phrase that I saw on a meme, like you can build the village, but you still have to be the villager. You know, you can have people around, but people still have to show up and do things amid their own stuff. Living in a community, the village is really proximal during that vulnerable time. Carla Lents: Thinking back like I had my first child when we were just living on our own. And then our younger child was born while we were in community. We also had some pretty difficult like medical issues with the second child. And yet thinking back to my mental health through both of those experiences, first child, no matter what happens medically or anything, it’s a big transition. Your brain is totally changing and all that. But I think back to [00:42:00] my mental health space in both of those experiences, and it was like, hands down much better the second time. There were challenges with both maternity leave times. The first biggest challenge for me was loneliness because I went from working full-time to just hanging out in a little apartment in December in Chicago when it felt like it was dark all the time. And then, the first month with Micah, I talked about some health challenges, and basically, I was in, like, this breastfeeding/pumping cycle that felt never-ending and not getting a lot of sleep. Every time after I fed him, I just needed somebody to hold him, and I would just wander around and be like, “Who’s holding this baby?” And Lisa, 90% of the time, was like, I’ll hold that baby. And that was just amazing. I think Lisa and Micah have a little bit of a special bond from that early time, not even just the first month, but the first six months of his life, which is interesting ‘cause Micah is a personality that I would be like, “That personality [00:43:00] does not match with Lisa’s personality.” But yeah, just from that experience, she understands him and he understands her on a level, so that’s something that I think is like a little miracle from the whole experience. Lisa Wittig: Yeah. I think back to our nights, Carla, where we’d put the kids to bed and we would go watch Call the Midwife. Carla Lents: Yeah. Lisa Wittig: Very happy memory for me. Christina Gebel: Oh, I have so much love now that you brought in. Call the midwife to the conversation. I’m just effusive in my giddiness in this conversation. I love that you all had kids and still turned on. Call the midwife. That’s amazing. So, just sitting here listening to you talk about that, Carla, I’m thinking of so many moms that I’ve worked with who have felt similar and would love to have a loving person like Lisa say, Yes, give me the baby. That’s amazing. So, we talked a lot about the joys and challenges at some point, and eventually this all [00:44:00] came to an end, and I’m really curious about how it came to an end. And also, what it’s been like since. So maybe you could start by telling us how this came to a close. Jonathan Wittig: I’ll take responsibility for that one. Lisa and I enjoyed living and experiencing culture, and that was one of the things that united us in our relationship. And one of my desires, or our desires, was to live abroad with the children and expose them to another culture and to another language and be the minority in that space and feel the comfort and discomfort of that. We were living in a community, and we had bought a house together, and it was the perfect house for us. And we lived there for five years. But we all stayed roughly the same size, but the kids kept getting bigger. And we were approaching the end of life for that house. We probably could have gone another year or two. We were approaching a space where we had to make the decision. And that plus the urge of desiring to live abroad was something that I was like, oh, maybe this is the time. We ultimately made that decision in concert with Ryan and Carla, and they were supportive of that. And so that’s what kind of ended that time there. In terms of how I feel now, I’m grateful for our time abroad and for where we are now, but I miss community living dearly. I miss living with the Lents. I desire to live in a community again for all the benefits and the challenges that brings. That’s something I desire for my future life, even at 40. Carla Lents: Yeah, I think a predominant thing that I remember right after we moved out of the community and we were living in our own house is that the first six months after we did that, Caleb kept asking, like, are we ever going to move into the community again? And. As he’s gotten older and he’s become a teenager, that’s waned a little bit, but I believe there’s a little seed inside him that, when the time comes that it could be reinvigorated in his life, he will look for that. I’m a happy crier. I’m sorry. Ryan Lents: Yeah. It’s crazy to think about, like, in 2020, that four out of the five [00:46:00] kids that two couples have, like, all three of Lisa and Jonathan’s kids and then yeah. Like our younger son Micah, we’re all born in community. I just think about how formative that was for them; up until 2020, when we did go our separate ways, like four of them had known nothing else. Yeah. The beautiful thing is, we’ve remained very close friends. We were just together last weekend. We’ve seen each other three times, I think, in the last three months, with just a little bit of a rarity because we are six hours apart now. But just the way that things have worked out, it’s been a lovely happenstance. When our families get together, it’s like cousins; they’re more than just friends. There’s a dynamic that they just pick right up together. And that bond is something that I think we’ll carry forward for the rest of our lives, which is a really beautiful thing. Actually, you should interview them. That would be really good. One of these days, maybe you could interview the kids and see what they have to say about this. I don’t think Caleb would actually agree to that, but I’m just saying hypothetically, it would be really interesting to hear their insights about this because they, even though it’s been over five years now, like, so [00:47:00] many of those core memories are there with them. So yeah. Lisa Wittig: I think one of the things I’m most grateful for is having given that gift to our children, because I think in the way children grow up in our society, they have to deal with the struggles and challenges of figuring out how to live with siblings, but also when you add in siblings who aren’t siblings, it’s a new dynamic. And there were special friendships there and special pieces to those relationships that I’m so grateful that they have. When we moved out, I think it was even like two years after we had moved out, and Ben was like, “When are we going to move back in with Micah again?” Just ‘cause he values that relationship, and every time we meet together with the Lents, he’s always so excited to see Micah, who was his best buddy when we were all living together. Jonathan Wittig: Still is his best buddy. Yeah. And he still holds him in that regard. It is also something that builds me with joy every time. And then Katherine, who was two when we left the community, so she really wasn’t able to experience [00:48:00] it. She doesn’t skip a beat. I think she loves every member here as the same as though she did live it. Like she just maybe just realizes that Caleb has a special bond with her and takes care of her like a little sister. And I don’t know. I love the kids’ dynamic together. Carla Lents: For several times when we saw the wigs after we moved out of the community, but Katherine was still really young. Then Caleb would always be like, “When are you going to make me a little sister?” So yeah. When we had Micah, he really wanted a little brother, and then he was like, why didn’t I get a little sister? Christina Gebel: I love that so much. So, we’re winding down. I’d like to offer one question before my final question to each of you. So, the second-to-last question is for someone considering this. Maybe people aren’t ready to take the plunge like you did, but what would you recommend to read or think about or people to talk to? Is there a world in which you can kind of do a [00:49:00] community light, if you will, and start trialing some of these things? What would you say to someone who’s just in the beginning stages of discerning something like this? Lisa Wittig: I think one of the most important things is to probably outline what your end goals would be or like what your priorities would be. I think for us that piece was pretty easy, I think. It took that year of discernment to come together and all voice them. Figuring out what that is, I think, was a really important piece because you obviously don’t want to go into something that high of a commitment without making sure that you’re at least on the same page with the other people that are going to be there doing it with you. Whether it’s like trying to live more simply, trying to build intentional community, or whatever those goals are, try to make sure that you have them written down and focus on them. Carla Lents: Just to elevate what Lisa just said. It’s like both the high-level values and goals behind it, making sure you’re aligned [00:50:00] there and then creating the structure, the containers, for coming back together on a regular basis, rechecking in on a regular basis. I think those were the two things that made us successful because we always had those values to remember the why, but then also you had the structure for keeping things on track on a daily and weekly basis. Ryan Lents: I think in the process of discerning, coming to understand like what our non-negotiables were. Like, what were the things that were absolutely essential. What were the things that there could be flexibility around? It’s interesting; we didn’t necessarily come up with an exit strategy specifically. And that could have bit us bad if we had not come to agreement about how to part ways. I think that the first two years we had a good experiment because we knew we were just doing this for a year, and then the first year went really well. So quickly we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do a second year.” When you get to the level of sharing a mortgage and your lives are really, truly intermingled, it just requires that ongoing communication and cultivation of trust to make sure that, yeah, we’re seeing eye to eye about our vision and future together. It really just takes ongoing communication to really make it work. And that would be true even if there were arrangements or agreements in place that weren’t as commingled as what we ended up doing. That piece around communication really helps quite a bit with addressing things as they come up, as opposed to letting things fester and getting to a place where then things completely unravel. It’s often when people just don’t share their needs in a healthy way that all kinds of things can happen that can cause a lot of harm. Jonathan Wittig: I’ll add that there are a lot of types of intentional communities that have a full range of values that they live by and how they live. And so, a resource, I think it was [The Foundation for Intentional Community] ic.org [http://ic.org] or something like that. But Chicago has a ton of intentional communities, and I recall most of the ones I was aware of or was drawn to [00:52:00] had hospitality as a value. And so, they would have an open dinner, and you can just come as an individual or as a family or whatnot and just be exposed. And so, you could just slowly get your feet wet without having to find five people to live with or anything like that. You can just get there, and a lot of ‘em have opportunities to enter into existing communities, so you don’t have to, like, go through the full process, and you can just see what’s already set up and opt in versus having to start from scratch. Lisa Wittig: I’ll just point out that, like, we chose to live in an intentional community with another family, and I don’t think there’s anything in the definition of intentional community that says it has to be someone that you’re not related to. So, there are plenty of ways that you can try to live out intentional community with the people you’re currently living with. I think that’s a great first step to figuring out what you want your journey to be and look like. Again, sitting down and thinking through, what are my goals? What am I hoping to get out of this? Like in what ways am I willing to make a sacrifice and be intentional about something? And just taking those kinds of [00:53:00] smaller steps. Like Jonathan said, there are a lot of great examples of different communities that we got to see and experience. People who maybe just lived next to each other or in the same neighborhood and made intentional choices to come together every once in a while or do certain things. In the same way or together, there are a lot of different ways to do it. But again, just sitting down at the beginning and deciding, where do I want to be? Where do I want to go? And what am I willing to really give to the experience? Ryan Lents: And you had asked Christina about resources. There were two books that were helpful in terms of some of the framings that we used for some of our own discernment. One is a book called [Building Community: Christian, Caring, Vital] by Loughlan Sofield, Rosine Hammett, and Carroll Juliano. It’s about a 30-year-old book now, but it’s one that I think we used at Amate House and incorporated some of the conversations that happened during orientation for those communities. And it was helpful for us. Then there’s a book called [Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities] by Diana Leafe Christian. She’s spent most of her adult life living in ecovillages; it’s like people that want to go off the grid and want to form their own community, buy land, raise livestock, and have gardens and things like that. There are people that kind of take it to a whole other level. She has a book that talks about a lot of things that didn’t really relate to our reality around purchasing land and those things, but some of the things around agreements and ongoing practices were helpful for us to look at and just to open our minds to the range of decisions that we might need to consider. So, both of those resources were helpful for us. Christina Gebel: Those are some really great suggestions, and I don’t think those were actually on my radar up to this point, so I appreciate you offering them. And again, the theme of this season is radical family, making bold choices to live out faith. And certainly, I think many would agree that the decision that y’all made to live together in this community was bold. And we’ve talked a lot about faith and all of that. [00:55:00] But to bring it back to faith, where has this choice that you made deep into your faith been, or has your faith grown deeper in the years since as a result of making this decision? Carla Lents: For me it is, recognizing that God puts other people in our lives that act as God that are God’s hands and God’s heart; conversely, it makes you recognize how much the culture of individualism has affected you. And it’s something that still exists even after living in community for seven years. It definitely still exists in me, but also you were talking about before the idea of it. Wanting to be a part of the village and having to be a villager wanting to see God’s promise enacted on earth. You have to be God’s hands. Ryan Lents: Yeah. Yeah. I think that community offers amazing opportunities to [00:56:00] deepen one’s faith and spirituality. Because in the daily things that you encounter, you get a mirror of both your own giftedness and the divinity that lives within you and the ways that hopefully a community affirms that. But also, yeah, seeing the divinity and the godliness of others that we get to walk with. A community that just is focusing on itself is one that is going to suffocate; it needs oxygen. Communities that are healthy and vital are the ones that are engaged out in the world, that give a damn about what’s happening on the block in the city. And we’ve talked very little about our commitments to justice in this conversation, but the organizing work that I do now and, like, living in community, just like my own clarity around my own vocation, and much of the work that I’ve done over the last 10, 15 years has really been shaped by that opportunity to live in community. And that’s been, I think, a really important part of it as well. Jonathan Wittig: For me, it was and has continued to be the challenge and example that each member of our community has given. I was sharing with Ryan when I was in Chicago with him, just [00:57:00] how I’m inspired by his work and I’m challenged by his work that he’s living out the example that he’s setting right now. I use that as an opportunity for me. How am I living out justice in my faith? And with Carla, it was her kindness and her peace that she carried with her all the time. And with Tony, it was his spirituality and his self-reflection. And Lisa brought us all together in terms of just keeping our house cohesive. And so, all of those were opportunities for me to witness other people living out their faith. And then also. Either be challenged by it or learn from it or grow from it. I believe in faith in action and each of those components as an opportunity for me to grow in my faith. And I appreciated it then, and I still appreciate it now. Lisa Wittig: I don’t know that I’ll add anything new to all of that great wisdom, but I think my summation is we are called to live in community. We’re called to be together and be with one another. The actual physical presence of having one another in your proximity just provides that extra accountability to [00:58:00] acknowledge that yes, you are here, I am here, and we are doing this together. We’re living this life together. And hopefully, being a positive influence on each other, hoping to enact change or make an impact in some way that’s possibly greater than if we were just by ourselves. Christina Gebel: Wow. I don’t even know how I can follow that because I am just awed by the wisdom of this conversation and probably will be for the rest of the day and the week. I just want to say I feel incredible. Lucky to know the four of you as people. And regardless if we had been talking about this topic and there were so many other directions we could have gone with, I admire each of you and the social justice that you commit yourselves to every day. And what a gift it’s been for me to be your friend in my own formation. I hope that this conversation will spark something [00:59:00] for other people, so that even if they’re not living under the same roof, maybe they’re just thinking more intentionally about life and how we live it and how it impacts other people around us in our immediate household but also in our community at large. So, I just again want to thank you all. It has been an honor, a joy, and a pleasure. Jonathan Wittig: A joy being here. Christina, thank you for having us. Ryan Lents: Thanks for the invitation. It’s been lovely to, yeah, Revisit this time of our lives. This is a public episode. 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