"Just" having fun

I will admit that before I got to the stage of encouraging my husband Edek to join the Catenians, I had a few mental obstacles to overcome (it took me a while to recognise a good thing when I saw it!). One of them concerned spending a certain amount of time and money (as “middle Britons” with a family, we don’t have either of those in as much abundance as we’d like) on membership of an organisation that was, as I thought, purely social. I could see the value of the Association in the days when Catholics were struggling for acceptance in the business world and needed their own network of support. But this hardly applied in the twenty-first century. Shouldn’t we join something “worthy” and do good, instead?

Before the Crawley Catenians rise up en masse to quite rightly debunk what I have just said, I will emphasise that the Catenian Association and its members actually do loads of good – for example, raising substantial amounts of money for local and national charities and supporting parishes and dioceses in a number of ways. And of course, being a Catenian doesn’t preclude membership of a charitable organisation: plenty of our members do both!

Above and beyond all that, though, I have learned not to turn my nose up at the “purely social”. Like everything else in our created world, relaxation, fun and companionship are gifts from God. Like everything else in our world, they can be horribly abused and exploited. They can be mindless distractions from the deeper realities of life or they can be grace-filled means to grow closer to Christ. One way or another, what we do in our spare time will shape us. It will either diminish us and contribute to the debasing of the world, or it will enrich us and empower us to fulfil the fundamental calling of the lay person – to order the world in accordance with God’s will. One good way of doing this is to share the warmth of the fellowship we have experienced with others (aka evangelisation).

In short, I realised that encouraging my husband to join a Catholic social network was a very “worthy” choice to make. Here’s to having fun... Cheers!