I use an app to help me learn Spanish (no, I still don’t speak it well at all… but I’m working on it!) and every now and again I get a pop-up message that says “it’s time to practice your mistakes!” It kind of makes me laugh when I see it, and I think, if there’s anything I’ve practiced plenty of times, it’s my mistakes!
Through my lifetime and career in the Church, I’ve come to appreciate that so much of learning comes from making mistakes. Ultimately even the worst moves we make are not failures, if we learn from them. Margaret Guenther, in her book Holy Listening, says that looking back on a career that looks very different than she had intended it to, she sees that “nothing has been wasted or lost.”
When you read that changes are coming in the parish, you may flash back to mistakes that have been made here, or in other Catholic parishes you’ve belonged to, or you may see the announcement of changes to come as a commentary on your memories of good times in the past. Both are understandable, because being part of a parish is as personal as it is communal.
When we think about the mistakes that have been made (not just in churches) in the effort of moving forward, we can worry. We can think “oh we’ve heard this kind of talk before, and look how THAT turned out!”
When we think of what successful parishes look like, we often look backward to the last time we can remember things going well, that time of our happiest memories in the Church, the last time we felt like things were really humming along. When parish leaders say “here we go forward” it’s tempting to say “let’s go BACK!”
But of course, forward motion is what God calls us to. And when God calls us forward, we’re invited to bring all the mistakes and the happy memories with us as we go. Nothing — nothing — that has happened in our parish in the past has been wasted or lost; all of it is part of our parish’s story. We take what we’ve learned whether we remember it negatively or fondly, and move forward together, with the Holy Spirit to guide us.
After this crazy year and a half, we bring a whole new bunch of mistakes and happy memories with us as we go. Thank you for being part of this parish’s forward journey and part of the mission of sharing the Good News of Christ and healing to everyone. God has great plans for us, and nothing will be wasted or lost.