We have two exchange students from Mexico living with us--they arrived last week. Agreeing to having them stay with us was an intentional choice, though I had some apprehensions, because we literally knew nothing about them besides a name and age. We try to teach our kids Benedictine hospitality, to "treat all guests as Christ," and so we felt this would be a good opportunity to do just that, have Christ stay with us for a few weeks. Our home is our domestic monastery, where we "do" ministry--aka "life." We may be ripe for criticism for not being intentionally Catholic enough. We still have not made the recitation of the rosary as a family a daily habit, and I sometimes fall asleep before blessing the kids or reading them stories from scripture. We are not perfect, and we don't always live up to our calling, but it is at least intentional.
The two young men ended up being a real blessing--pleasant, respectful, and easy going (with big appetites). I drive them to campus every morning and we ride home together after work. We all have dinner together as well. Going from nervous to enjoying their company was a pleasant answer to prayer. They are learning English quickly, as well as American culture (this is the their first time in the U.S.) Last Tuesday I invited them to come to my 6am men's prayer group, with the caveat that they not feel pressure if they didn't feel comfortable with the idea. "Si, we will come," they said. And so we left the house at 5:30am that morning and they joined me with a dozen other men in prayer and reading scripture. Not only that, but they asked when we were going back next. We also invite them to (Spanish) Mass with us, and they said they would like to attend that as well.
St Paul VI said in Evangelii Nuntiandi that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” What, then, is a witness? My favorite description is by the late Archbishop of Pairs, Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard:
“To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
Lumen Gentium, promulgated in 1964, talks about the kind of lay apostolate we find ourselves trying to establish:
"For where Christianity pervades the entire mode of family life, and gradually transforms it, one will find there both the practice and an excellent school of the lay apostolate. In such a home husbands and wives find their proper vocation in being witnesses of the faith and love of Christ to one another and to their children. The Christian family loudly proclaims both the present virtues of the Kingdom of God and the hope of a blessed life to come. Thus by its example and its witness it accuses the world of sin and enlightens those who seek the truth."
Evangelization in this sense is not a technique or a memorizing apologetics, but making the Christian life attractive in a tangible way that is authentic and lived, not gimmicky or corporate. We learned the kind of affect simply being in the presence of another family living the Gospel can be thanks in large part to our friends Dan and Missy, who opened up their home and lives to us years ago. With four kids, activity schedules, and Dan's demanding job, their invitations to just hang out at their home were a practical privilege and nothing special or out of the ordinary. I wrote about their witness here.
It was also the witness of a large Catholic family while I was in high school that was a large part of what drew be to become Catholic myself. I remember thinking to myself, "I want what they have," thought I didn't know that it was they had exactly. They were very ordinary, but their Catholicism was intentional and distinct, lived in simple ways like going to Mass every Sunday, family prayer, and having pictures of the Sacred Heart visible in the home. I don't even think they realized the impact they were having on me at the time, though I did get to tell Mrs. Pye over the phone twenty years later, to her pleasant disbelief.
My nieces and nephew have an expression they use: "Livin' Life." For example, my son fell on his bike and ripped his pants and got a cut on his knee. "He's just livin' life," they would say. Meaning, life is what you do and it's not always neat and tidy, and that's okay. It's the authenticity and willingness to share you life, I think, that matters and what people notice. We are nothing special, just passing on what we've learned ourselves as a family.
But that's the really the point, isn't it? Our faith is incarnated in our daily life because God Himself in the person of Christ was incarnated as a man into his particular Jewish culture, into a particular family with an ordinary occupation. He went to weddings with his friends, broke bread with them...the ordinary stuff of life. And our daily life is what people and can relate to most. So our attempts to make our family and home a domestic monastery of welcome respite is both a practicality of having limited time and opportunities, and also an intentional response to being a witness to the Gospel in the way we are called, and we thank Him for the opportunity.