Denver Newsroom, Jan 16, 2021 / 02:00 am (CNA).- Like many in 2020, Catholic author Leah Libresco Sargeant found much solace in the past year in spiritual reading— as well as in copious amounts of baking.
“The big thing this year, especially with the new baby, is making large batches of cookies and then freezing a bunch of the dough so that there could always be fresh cookies, even if it’s a very busy day and it’s not plausible to make any. It’s great,” she laughed.
Leah is a convert from atheism, and writes and thinks a lot about ways to build up strong Christian communities. In fact, she wrote a book about it a couple of years ago, called “Building the Benedict Option,” in which she encourages Catholics to create opportunities in their lives to interact more with their faith community.
These additional, intentional interactions can include taking the initiative to host people more often for dinner or events at your home, especially on feast days. Her book offers tips on how to make these interactions more successful in building tight-knit Christian communities.
Although many of the suggestions in Leah’s book are predicated on face-to-face interactions, she said she has found ways to adapt her community-building practices during coronavirus times.
“I think one of the hard things is just having a routine shattered; some of the connections you have with other people vanishing. And it takes a bit of work, then, to build up from scratch what you otherwise could rely on from other people,” she noted.
For example, she’s taken the initiative to maintain several penpals, keeping friendships alive by conversing via snail mail. A habit Leah practiced even before the pandemic was sending things to people that she found spiritually enriching— such as book passages, or information about interesting saints— in the hopes that they would find it spiritually enriching too.
Most dioceses in the United States, save for a few in the West, have reopened almost all their churches for Mass with continued precautions such as social distancing and mask wearing. Catholic churches in Princeton, New Jersey where the Sargeants live have generally been accessible since the summer of 2020, but Leah says there have been times when the Sergeants have had to miss in-person Mass and instead participate from home via livestream.
“We try and make that an opportunity to pray for people who are in more remote places, who have a traveling priest who doesn’t come every week, even in normal times— or people who are living under persecution,” Leah told CNA.
“To try and take this unexpected and unwanted fast from the Mass as an opportunity to pray for people for whom [access to the sacraments] is an ongoing struggle, pandemic or no.”
Part of the key to making it through “unexpected fasts” from the sacraments is to reach out to others and offer to walk through it with them, she said.
“If you can’t go to Mass, or can’t go to Mass as often as you used to, part of the question might be: do you have a friend who is also in this position?” she said, adding that you could call that person on the phone and offer to pray with them.
“Is there a way that this can become something you share with others, rather than just a time of isolation?
Adding that she does not want to “sugarcoat” the difficulties in keeping a sense of community alive during the pandemic, Sergeant said restrictions on public gatherings, including Mass, have made spontaneous, organic interactions with her neighbors more difficult.
“I think in some ways what the pandemic has done is strengthened some of my ties with people who I’ve fallen out of touch with a little, and who don’t live nearby, and weakened them a bit with my actual neighbors,” she said.
On the other hand, Sergeant said she has found that the extra time spent at home during the pandemic has helped her and her family to pray more in their home.
Leah and her husband Alexi welcomed their first child in January 2020, so a lot of their domestic church traditions in the past year have been shaped by that joyful fact. For example, the Sargeants decided against putting out a physical Advent wreath in 2020.
“A lot of our traditions have to be things that are less tangible, because literally everything in the house goes into [the baby’s] mouth,” she laughed.
One “intangible” habit that Leah and her husband have gotten into is doing spiritual reading every Sunday, out loud, to each other. They’ve made their way through works such as the biblical poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus and “The Day is Now Far Spent” by Robert Cardinal Sarah.
Leah has also continued her habit of blogging, attracting several hundred followers to an email newsletter in which she writes on topics such as motherhood, the benefits she has found from working from home, and a variety of others from a Catholic feminist perspective.
One of the keys to a healthy spiritual life is silence, and cultivating periods of silence every day for prayer and peacefulness. Leah says she’s been working on this for a while, and added that the birth of her first child has, perhaps paradoxically, helped her to find quieter moments than she had before.
“For me, a baby is sometimes an excuse not to find those periods of silence. But…a baby forces you to be fully present in the moment, to put aside some of your own goals or own plans for the day,” she explained.
“And if she falls asleep on top of you after what’s been a rough afternoon, suddenly it is enforced silence…and if you weren’t planning to have any silent prayer too bad, now is the time!”
The human toll of the pandemic has a lot of people thinking about death— not only the deaths of others, but their inevitable own. Leah says for Catholics, who believe in resurrection, thinking about death is not necessarily a bad thing.
“The Church has always told us to meditate on our own death, and to make that part of our spiritual practice,” she pointed out.
“[God] defeated death and freed us from fear of it, but that doesn’t make it easy. That’s why we talk about this as a spiritual practice, something we have to do deliberately again and again, to build up that trust in God and that knowledge of who He is. And so I think the pandemic is really forcing that good spiritual practice on us in a much more stressful and frightening way than if we’d chosen it ourselves.”
This meditation on what it means to die, and for things to end, applies not just to individuals, but to the Church as a whole. Even in non-pandemic times, there are always going to be people at Mass who are journeying through grief and suffering, and pastors shouldn’t shy away from addressing that, Sergeant said, seeking to assure people that experiencing spiritual aridity and grief does not make them “bad Christians.”
“There’s always someone in your neighborhood, in your parish, who’s going through a time that’s just as hard as it is now [in the pandemic], but it isn’t shared,” she said.
“So part of the question is: Whatever’s going on now that’s helping us take care of each other, how do we continue that when there isn’t the shock of a pandemic to remind us that people around us are suffering?”
The pandemic hasn’t only brought challenges, however. There have also been some fun opportunities for enhancing the Sargeant’s family life— several of which involve baking. Leah recommends seeking out a sourdough starter, as it makes for a fun baking activity as well as a potential gift to pass on to others.
“If you’re only feeding one thing in your house, it should be the baby, not the sourdough starter,” she laughed.
This interview originally aired on Catholic News Agency’s podcast, CNA Newsroom. It has been adapted for print. Listen to the interview below, beginning at 9:40.
CNA Newsroom · Ep. 89: Taking Back the Year
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