Churches and Faith Communities as Third Places/ Third Place Stories
There is a Catholic Chapel in a desert whose name and location are wholly unimportant. There are a few chairs, maybe enough for 10 people, a tabernacle, a crucifix, and an altar. But with the heat and the noise and the stress that accompanies military deployment, this Chapel was a place of solace, solitude, and silence where Catholics gathered for Daily Mass and the Rosary. That chapel gave me a deeper sense of community than any local ‘Third Place’ could.
I built friendships with many who prayed silently in that Chapel. Instead of feeling the pressure and overwhelm of a long list of volunteer activities and groups, badly needed donations, and social commitments that fill any parish bulletin, there was only the simple contemplation of God. We were together, a community.
The relationship between the active and contemplative life is essential to our faith. I sometimes think we have lost the contemplative component as a means of solitude. We’ve forgotten the quiet chapel as a place for people to bind their wounds through prayer before engaging in the active work of serving others and building true friendship focused on their good. It’s as if we’ve forgotten how to put away our phones and listen for God, trading our sacred places and settling for safe spaces.
A columnist in the New York Times recently wrote about the difference between “gift love” and “need love.” Our idea of a ‘Third Place’ is one at which the broken can fill up their “need love,” filling a void in their hearts with the love of others. In our modern times, I believe that there is too much brokenness and loneliness to believe that these “third places” can fill that void.
Instead, the Chapel gave me a chance to fill that void with the experience of the love of Christ through prayer, so in turn I could freely give through loving service and friendship to others. I hope that as we create ‘Third Places’ in our Parish halls, we fill them with people who have encountered Christ in a simple chapel, as I have.
-Anonymous