The Parousians as a Community of Friends

From Will Newman of the Parousian Leadership Council:

"I did not seek out the Parousians. I was relaxing on a couch, minding my own business, and casually reading Pascal. Because of the last of these offences, I was seized upon by Tobias Danna and Caleb Bernacchio and immediately drafted into the eccentric Catholic literary society whose one year anniversary we are now reflecting on. For the better half of this year, we have mispronounced our own name, the upsetting (if inevitable) sign of the autodidact. However, this lamentable lapse in intellectual rigor did nothing to prevent us from exploring our faith and also growing close as friends.

When contemplating any given community in its dimension as a forge of friendship, one runs a double risk. Haphazard musings on the bonds of camaraderie possess an uncanny capacity for schmaltz. In the blink of an eye, you’re spelling love with a ‘W’ and your thoughtful meditation has degenerated into a very special episode of Blossom. An alternative approach favors a more cryptic, more subtle analysis of social phenomena. But the detached precision of layered euphemisms reads more like the recruitment brochure for a UFO cult than a heartwarming testimony on the virtue of brotherly (and sisterly) love.

Therefore, I will simply offer a few casual reflections on my experience with the group. Hopefully, they will convey a little something of not only what I have felt, but of what my newest friends have as well.

This Easter, I will observe the fourth anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church. The Pastoral staff and RCIA team at my parish welcomed me with open arms, educating me in the faith and providing solid examples of Christian piety and charity. For a year or so after my entry, I was still rather active with the RCIA program, until the demands of work limited my participation in the Church to the attendance of Mass. During these years, I felt myself growing emotionally distant from the faith. I made no intellectual renunciations, I still believed. But skipping Mass, whether for work or play, produced decreasing concern. And sure enough, I rapidly resumed a life little different than that before my conversion, this time
with a thin veneer of Catholic devotion.

This state of affairs persisted until I returned to college last year. Determined to plunge deeper into the life of the Church, I spent very little time searching for a group of friends who shared my faith before I was conscripted into the Parousians. Now, I’m quite sure I don’t have to explain to anyone reading this about how endlessly fascinating and incomparably exiting a debate over the sacramental aesthetics of pop culture can get. It’s practically the definition of joyful abandon.

However, for me, the true heart of the Parousian experiment is not academic dialogue but friendship. It can often be difficult to ascertain the geniality of a given group (especially, in my experience, when that group has religious dimensions.) When I gave my first presentation to the group, I half-expected several members to whip out a stake and a blowtorch and present me with the First Annual Giordano Bruno Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Heresy. When this didn’t happen, I knew I was among friends. And friendship, I discovered, is the key to living the Catholic life and living it well. It is the key to keeping the faith. (Yeah, yeah, I know all of you hardcore Patristic buffs out there have an objection: “But what of the venerable Hermits?” you protest. Clever. But they were surrounded by the Communion of Saints in ceaseless contemplative prayer. Cadit qaestio.)

That friendship should be at the core of the Parousian experience is natural. Our name, after all, points forward to the Parousia, the return of our Savior and the gathering of all the faithful into a mystical union in the Body of Christ. So as we move forward together in faith and joy, let us pray that our activity continues to be a little foreshadow of the Big Friendship yet to come."