One was that most “young adults” are too busy with school, family, and/or career to spend much time working on their relationship with God.  They didn’t have extra time for prayer, or service, or learning more about their faith.  They could, however, be counted on to make time for fellowship, if the opportunity were presented in a way that met their tastes.  (They weren’t making this up, apparently it is based on well-researched and published fact about this age group in the Church.)

Which made sense to me, because I feel pretty busy most of the time, as did everyone there it seemed, until I thought about it more.  They wanted things that would appeal to young adults, so fellowship came first, and (according to this research) service came last.  But everyone who showed up for this night of fellowship (and learning, and prayer!) was also involved in some sort of service to the Church.  Everyone, unless you don’t count me, since I only sort of tag along.  There were teachers, diocesan workers, and a guy who plays cello at Mass.  Now I grant that these are not a representative group of Catholic young adults, but they are the ones who are interested enough in Catholic young adult things to show up, and they were all doing service before they started worrying about building a young adult community.  So.  This assumption that what we young adults need (or want, maybe, because do we know what we really need?) is fellowship was my first concern.  Craig was scribbling things about “being rather than doing”, but he’ll have to tell you about that.

Another problem is defining this “busy” which affords us hours to look at Facebook, but only minutes a day for prayer. I think you can see the problem here, so we’ll save that for another day.  (Of course, again, convincing the phantom “young adults” who weren’t present for this discussion that this is a problem is a problem in itself.  Hmm.)

Something else gave me pause when I stopped to think about it.  We spent a lot of time dividing people into groups and discussing how we could minister to those groups.  And I do not think this is necessarily negative – I want a group of families with young children to go to the park with.  There is a special bond that can be found between people who are in the same sort of circumstances of life.  I think this is a necessary sort of community to form.

But that seems to me most of what we talked about doing, and I wonder what (or better, who) is being excluded.  And I wonder if this is partially a product of age-segregated schooling, and that we are just so used to being broken up in this way that we don’t question it.  We think we need something for middle school students, then for high school students, then for college students, then for young adults, then “adults”, then golden-agers.  And while I know perfectly well that high school kids don’t want to hang out with their middle-school-aged siblings, I wonder what we are losing by separating people into age groups.

One of the arguments for homeschooling is that it helps to break down this age segeragation a little.  Rather than spending eight hours a day with children of the same age (and usually the same socio-economic status, and often the same race), kids spend their days with their family, who cover a range of ages, and then with the people they meet on a daily basis, very few of whom will be their age, and who will hopefully cover a much wider range of diversity than your average elementary school classroom.  Why can’t a ten-year-old be friends with a seventy-year-old neighbor?  Craig did this growing up, and the experience has served him very well.

But the concern all this raised for me on the long, quiet drive home last night, was really about how we are cutting ourselves off from each other with distinctions like “young adult”.  It is hard to see the face of Christ in other people.  Even people we love dearly make us angry, refuse to do things the way we would, or just are different from us in ways that make it a challenge to love them sometimes.  And we know their good sides.

Multiply that challenge a hundred-fold for people we don’t know, don’t agree with, and don’t respect.  How can we hope to see the face of Christ in an elderly woman holding up the grocery line by arguing about the price of ground beef, if we don’t know any elderly women struggling to make ends meet?  How can she see Christ in us, despite our impatience, if no young person has every offered to help her get her groceries into the taxi that waits for her outside?

The further removed we are from a “type” of person, the harder it will be for us to love someone like that when we encounter him or her.  And how else are we to show Christ to that person, than to love him as well as we can?  If we are to live out the reality of the Mystical Body, no one can be excluded!  Hands, feed, noses, belly buttons, are all necessary to make Christ whole.  Even that ugly yellow toenail is part of Christ.  It may not be excluded.

So what happens to our worship (and I mean that broadly, ranging from personal prayer, to Mass, to serving God by serving his people) when we segregate and separate ourselves from people who aren’t like us?  What does our worship suffer when we discount the children because they are too distracting?  What do we lose when we exclude the elderly who need assistance from a stranger to make it to Mass?  When we give up on a baby before it is born because we know it will have Down Syndrome?  What does our worship lose when we exclude the young, single, poor mother because we are ashamed?  The homeless man because of his smell?  The flamboyant gay-marriage activist?  Whether we like it or not, all these people are part of Christ!  How can we love Christ if we cannot bring ourselves to love them, and how can we love them if we cannot even bring ourselves to talk with them and listen to them?

So by now, almost twenty-four hours after the meeting, I am wondering, not what role the BR young adult ministry will play in my life in the near future (ok, I am wondering that, too), but I’m really wondering what we will have to do to break down some of the divisions and allow the Body of Christ to meet itself and learn to love itself again.  I guess that was worth the three hours we spent in the car to go to this “fellowship” meeting.

I think I learned how to turn the pictures and forgot.  Sorry.

“I’ll tell you about the zoo.  We went to the zoo.  And then we saw the animals.  And then we didn’t go see the lions.  Abnd then what did we did?  Samantha and us and you and mommy and me and Samantha and NaNa.  I didn’t want to walk.  Because my knee hurt because I got blood because I fell on th ground because I wnet on the mountain on the grass and then I got hurt.  Then I got a yellow snowball.”

And here are the pictures…

Gorilla – they were busy today.

Posing by the orangutans.

Samantha’s new friends.

more reading

and collages

I hope you can see how much glue was required for this.  There wasn’t much more paper added after this point.  Next time, I’ll follow my better judgement and use a glue stick.

spaghetti bridges

That has nothing to do with “c”, but Craig had to test the experiment he was doing at school the next day.

But day two included…

Dress up

Samantha climbing (that starts with “C”!)

And caterpillar cookies!

It was a delicious day!

Before you get too excited about it though, remember that Lucy is only two.  So “homeschooling” at this point is going to focus on a letter a week (with themed books, crafts, snacks, etc.), a saint or two a week, and lots of playing and being two.  But I’m hoping that getting an early start on the structure (!) of organized (!) home learning will pay off when we get to quadratic equations and the like in a couple of years (kidding, only Craig thinks that will really happen).

So check out the new page, there promises to be plenty of cuteness oozing from it in the weeks to come.

One benefit of being outside so much is all the nature we get to see in our own back yard. We found a frog in the laundry closet! Here is a pic, and we have a video of it making its escape, as well, but it’s too big to post at the moment. These are the sort of things I am really, really looking forward to with homeschooling.

My book list on the side has been updated. I’m on a homeschooling binge at the moment, re-reading Elizabeth Foss’s wonderful book, as well as a couple of new ones Craig decided to order from Amazon rather than get from interlibrary loan.

Our seniors are done with school, and we will be, too, at the end of the month. I just have one quiz and exams left to make!! This is all very exciting, and coupled with the encouraging homeschooling reading, is giving me back some of the energy I’ve been lacking lately.

Here are a few more pictures of the girls doing what they do.

Samantha attempting to eat grass.

Lucy drawing.  The Easter eggs she made at Grandma’s months ago have been recycled into Easter season decorations (on the wall behind her).  Most of them have now been removed and the stickers rearranged again (and again).

Lucy’s block house.

Samantha is teething like a mad woman and enjoys the pieces of Lucy’s puzzle.

Cutting play-doh

Clearly, it’s been a busy week.  : )