Churches and Faith Communities as Third Places/ Third Place Stories
I grew up in a military family. For twenty-six years, until I was a senior in high school, my dad was in the U.S. Air Force, where he worked as a family physician. And as is the case with many military families, we had to move a lot. I was born in the U.K., though I don’t remember my time there; my family moved to northern California before I was two; then we moved to Ogden, Utah, when I was five; we moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when I was seven; then we moved to Alexandria, Virginia, just a year later; when I was eleven, we moved back to the Charleston area; and finally, we went back again to Alexandria when I was thirteen, just as I was about to start eighth grade.
With all that moving, I went through many changes at a young age: I was constantly leaving friends behind and having to make new ones, constantly changing schools and houses… There were only a few things I could count on to remain the same: most importantly, my family and the Church. Wherever we were living at the time, each Sunday my family went to Mass at a Catholic church. The people would be different in each new parish, the pastor would be different, the music often different too: but the prayers of the liturgy were the same, the word of God was the same, the central message of hope and salvation and peace and belonging, the same. And thanks to this continuity, to this catholicity of the Church, each individual parish we went to was our home, it was an anchor where my family could put down roots—physically, only for a time, but spiritually, in a permanent sense. In the Church, I could always find myself in the Father’s house, among the Lord’s flock, in the dwelling-place of the Spirit, wherever I might be.
Perhaps that’s part of why I felt called to serve in this Church: so that all others, especially those continually on the move, might also know the Church as their home.
-William Manaker, S.J.