I have moved four times in three years. Every time I relocated, finding a church proved to be the most daunting task. I hopped from one parish to another, looking for one that felt like it could be my home and my community. I approached every event and Mass with patience and hope. Yet with each passing Sunday, I felt more like an outsider in the Church I loved. How could I be a part of the Church if I couldn’t find a parish?
As a young adult, I longed for a place where I could share my experiences and be nourished in a community. I wanted a listening ear and a thoughtful heart who could walk with me on my spiritual journey. At parishes, I kept finding that I was looked past by ushers, and I drifted in and out of events, Mass, and fellowship without anyone noticing that I had been there at all. Even when I did reach for a bulletin, making eye contact with the person handing it to me, it was like I didn’t exist. It didn’t seem to matter how many conversations I had with parish outreaches or how many times they introduced me to their priests; I felt invisible to the parishes I tried out, repeatedly.
The only way I found visibility was through offering my time and my skills from prior ministries that I’d been involved with. At the time, that was all I could find in a parish to call home, so I threw myself into parish-sponsored ministries and tried to find community from the inside.
Still, I found myself feeling alone. I didn’t feel valued, or even listened to, by the communities I joined. I was a resource to be used for ministry without being ministered to myself. It felt devastating when I would leave a parish with my fierce ache unquelled.
I am not alone in this ache, especially among twentysomethings and thirtysomethings. This new generation of young adults struggles with depression and anxiety at rates exceeding those before them; we are desperate for connection, desperate for love, but find joining established parish communities can be a challenge. We become despondent in rooms full of people because all around us are communities and families—yet with all of these people, not one seems genuinely interested in knowing us.
Only the Lord in the Eucharist seems keen on our presence.
And as a Church during this Eucharistic Revival, it is time to reimagine how we notice, acknowledge, and embrace our young adults.
Nourished by the Eucharist, we are called to go out and evangelize the masses. We are called to give our energy, our identity, and our entire will to Christ for his purposes. What we often overlook, however, are the quiet drifters rolling in and out of parishes on Sunday, looking for a space to call home; we miss them as they look for the bulletin or hang back in the pews to pray. Our busy schedules pull us out of the church before they even get in the narthex. A single young adult blends into a crowd of departing parishioners more seamlessly than a family with young children. Our ministerial eyes are not necessarily trained to see these young adults because they may not so obviously need assistance.
Our Church’s young adults need our prayers and accompaniment. The first step to sharing our spiritual, physical, and emotional support is simply to notice their presence in our pews and chapels.
In this day and age, evangelizing looks like eye contact while handing them a bulletin. It looks like asking a young adult if this is their first time at the parish. It looks like chatting with someone while making blankets with them. It may even be as simple as taking a mental note of someone young and alone at a Mass and offering your participation at that Mass for them and their intentions—perhaps even telling them that you’ve done so!
For young adults like me who want to join their nearby parishes, evangelizing may look like simply being included, even just by one person.
Two months ago, I experienced being seen by just one person. I had moved again, and I signed up for a blanket-making event just two weeks after attending Blessed Sacrament parish in West Lafeyette, IN, for the first time. It was there that I met Mary Ann. Twenty years my senior, we bonded over how poorly we handled needles and thread and how thankful we were that knotted blankets required neither one. Our conversation turned to hobbies, and two other volunteers connected with me over our lack of sewing skills but our drive to create. I went from one connection to three, adding Gwen and Sadie, nearly ten years my junior, to the conversation.
During those two hours of making knotted blankets, I felt at home in a parish for the first time in my adult life. With perpetual adoration down the hall in a small, brown-walled chapel, I finally found a community where I could laugh, share, ask questions, and listen without transactional expectation.
I made sure to stop by the adoration chapel before I left that evening, pouring out the relief in my heart to Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament. One of my first powerful experiences with the Eucharist was during a time when I was fraught with loneliness that had me begging God for a community to really call my own. The empty, jagged ache only began to subside because, in my loneliness, I engaged with the Lord in the Eucharist.
With every broken friendship and missed connection, amidst every lonely night by myself, I found comfort in turning to the Lord. When all I wanted was to be seen, Christ was always there for me. And all I needed to do was look up at the monstrance, look up during the Consecration at Mass. I began to go to weekly, sometimes daily, adoration, and I imagined my Lord sitting on the altar, waiting for me to come see him.
While the loneliness was never erased, the hollow pain began to fill with the love of our Eucharistic Lord.
I still pray that other Catholic young adults who really seek to live their faith are able to experience this encounter with Jesus as they search for belonging. I pray that their restlessness will be met and succored by the deep love of our Eucharistic Lord.
It can be easy to look at these young adults who struggle with loneliness and lack of connection with a parish and think that we can “fix” it for them. But the burden is not on us to “fix”: we are not called to make mission projects of our brothers and sisters. We are called to love, to accompany, and to serve through our friendship. We cannot evangelize our brothers and sisters if we do not truly, deeply care for their hearts and their souls. We are nourished by Love himself to love one another. Our Catholic communities are called to reflect the perfect communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The beauty in reflecting the life-giving relationship of the Trinity is only enriched when we know Christ in one another.
Walk With One provides a perfect way to start this kind of intimate accompaniment. Broken into four concrete steps of spiritual accompaniment, Walk With One empowers us to meaningfully walk with one another on our faith journeys. Its guidelines provide the tools to ask impactful questions, spiritually intercede, and examine how you can best support a friend, family member, coworker, or stranger in their walk with Christ. By our actions, we can make a statement that communicates the fact that the goal is to walk with someone to Jesus.
“Be shepherds with the smell of sheep,” Pope Francis once wrote. Aren’t we called to do the same as our bishops and our priests to one another—to serve and pray for our family in Christ through all walks of life?
As our Holy Father recently noted, “We should not think of this mission of sharing Christ as something only between Jesus and me. Mission is experienced in fellowship with our communities and with the whole Church. If we turn aside from the community, we will be turning aside from Jesus. If we turn our back on the community, our friendship with Jesus will grow cold. This is a fact, and we must never forget it. Love for the brothers and sisters of our communities – religious, parochial, diocesan and others – is a kind of fuel that feeds our friendship with Jesus. Our acts of love for our brothers and sisters in community may well be the best and, at times, the only way that we can witness to others our love for Jesus Christ. He himself said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35).”
My hope for our Church is that we embrace the scent of our mission fields. I hope that this parish I have found welcomes me with a heart that reminds me of Christ in the Eucharist. I hope that those who are moved to reach out to young adults have the courage to notice them. I hope that the next time you are in a pew, ready to worship the Lord, you see a young adult doing the same and are filled with gratitude for the chance to know them and be known by them.
Most of all, I hope that you see the light of Christ in a young adult’s eyes as you say hello to them. Eucharistic love is truly as simple, as heartfelt, and as real as greeting and talking to your family in Christ.
After all, a simple conversation transformed my prayers from desperation to gratitude.
Colleen Schena is an Indiana-based writer with a passion for the stories of disciples moved to action by the Eucharist.
