What Should Church Look Like?

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frida-berrigan/what-should-church-look-l_b_4086273.html

Frida Berrigan
Board member, War Resisters League; Columnist, Waging Nonviolence

Posted: 10/11/2013 3:57 pm

There was a whisper behind us: "Those Berrigan kids don't know the rosary." Surprised, bemused, maybe a little scandalized -- the noises rippled softly through the funeral home's largest visitation room. I was in college. My mom's younger brother had died of lung cancer and we were there to pay our respects to Uncle Bill -- a handsome, voluble construction worker and father of three daughters, who had given up cigarettes and beer more than a decade earlier.

It was a little scandalous. We were raised by a priest and a nun, people who literally spoke Latin and lived and breathed the essence of Catholicism with a capital C for decades. But, despite that -- or rather because of it -- we were raised in an early-church-sort-of-catholicism that didn't have a lot of patience for pomp and circumstance.

What did that look like?

For starters, there was no rosary involved. Eucharist of watered down wine and old bread was shared around a circle in the living room, consecrated by whoever was "up" that week and shared by agnostics, atheists, Jews and even some Catholics (but it had been a long time since their last confession). It was pretty informal, but I recall that our father, Philip Berrigan, gritted his teeth when one woman shared the Eucharist with her dog, and would get mad at us for picking our feet or playing with our fingernails as the host was coming around the circle. We had nothing to compare this ceremony to, and so did not show the proper reverence (or even basics of hygiene) that he thought of as baseline.

What else did our church look like?

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