The Adventure of Journeying Together
By Peter Bierer
Published in the Southern Cross Newspaper
Family road trips tend to be the stuff of lore. Growing up in the American Midwest, my family of six regularly piled into our Ford Econoline conversion van to drive several hours across state lines to visit grandparents and cousins. Even the short trips required planning, packing and multiple references to the road atlas.
You may have noticed the slogan the diocese has been using after the 2021 Diocesan Assembly, ‘Together on the Way’. It’s not a clever or gimmicky catchphrase that is trying to sell you on something. Rather, it is simply a description of what we are doing locally, nationally and globally, as well as a definition of the word synodal. These past few years of engaging in the Plenary Council, Diocesan Assembly, and the 2023 Synod feel an awful lot like those family road trips. We’re all piled in together in our various forms of Church family: household, parish, school, community, or agency; diocese, nation, and global church – and we are all heading down the road of synodality.
Like those family road trips, synodality can be messy. There are plenty of obstacles that pop up much like road construction or weather events. Things like the pandemic or war which disrupt the processes of gathering, listening and discerning together. Synodality also means letting the right people lead at the right time, sort of like asking the youngest member of the family to decide where we stop for lunch, or letting someone else drive the car for a while. It’s also about noticing who else is on the road. We can take great comfort knowing that we aren’t the only family taking this trip right now. Every Catholic around the world is invited to go on this journey. Other Christian churches have been doing this much longer and more consistently than we have, they may have something to teach us!