What Being a Community Means to Me

08-05-2023AllFr. Robert Aliunzi

Dear Friends,

Since my assignment here among you, first as an associate pastor a year ago and now as your pastor a month ago, it has become increasingly very clear to me how community-oriented our parish is. We are a warm and indeed very welcoming community of believers. The concept of community means a lot to me because it has taught me precious values I can always relate with, and it has greatly influenced my leadership as a pastor over the years and here is why:

Growing up in my village in Uganda, I have always been made to understand myself as a child of my community. My life was shaped by the rural village environment where darkness brought out night runners, countless stars, and a variety of wildlife. Where every child was a child of the community regardless of whether that child was from a rich or poor family, was a biological child or child of a neighbor.

Dear Friends,

Since my assignment here among you, first as an associate pastor a year ago and now as your pastor a month ago, it has become increasingly very clear to me how community-oriented our parish is. We are a warm and indeed very welcoming community of believers. The concept of community means a lot to me because it has taught me precious values I can always relate with, and it has greatly influenced my leadership as a pastor over the years and here is why:

Growing up in my village in Uganda, I have always been made to understand myself as a child of my community. My life was shaped by the rural village environment where darkness brought out night runners, countless stars, and a variety of wildlife. Where every child was a child of the community regardless of whether that child was from a rich or poor family, was a biological child or child of a neighbor.

For instance, we had the rich ones - children of civil servants, military officers or businessmen who were dropped off to school most mornings on bicycles or motor cycles that unfailingly always stopped to pick up friends’ children or even total strangers on their way back. Some of us who walked to and from school moved in groups making these journeys always enjoyable. This was also because these trips for us were often characterized by lazy walks and detours into impromptu roadside soccer matches and most memorably, by “stealing” the juicy mango fruits and sometimes the sinfully delicious jackfruits along the road. These “thefts” however, were allowed by the community to cater especially for children of the poor, as long as the fruits were not picked for sale. Holidays and weekends in the village, were similarly communal. As children, you woke up, rushed through your chores, and then disappeared into the neighborhood when no one was looking. Lunch came whenever and wherever it came from. Whichever house we ran into when hunger pains and the sweltering afternoon sun became unbearable, always seemed to have enough food for all, despite the deprivations created by the war and the economic collapse especially during Idi Amin’s regime in the seventies.

In the village community, everyone knew everyone. Everyone had a responsibility over everyone else and everyone cared for everyone and especially for every child. No crime, once discovered, went unpunished. A complete stranger, having reached the conclusion that your conduct was unbecoming, would summarily introduce your face to his open palm, each slap punctuated with a warning: “Do. Not. Do. It. Again!”. Running home in tears to tell the Old Folks that so-and-so had beaten you was never a wise thing to do: The expected sympathy was invariably and unfailingly met with the ensuing home-grown and extremely violent form of justice.

We didn’t realize it then but (even though I do not recommend it now), that grooming taught us certain values like empathy, generosity, and resilience. We learned to share, to forgive, to work as a team and the value of saying simple things like sorry, please, excuse me, thank you. It taught us humility and humanity and respect for elders.

Sadly, so much of those values are now lost in most of those villages as they are lost here in our own great country as well. So how did we go from having so much amidst so little in my village community to having so little amidst so much? Some of the reasons are easy to see, like the social disruptions caused by the AIDS epidemic, the two-decade war in northern Uganda where I come from, and the world bank driven structural adjustment program and political mismanagement.

But there is something else, something much harder to define, that has broken the cord of social grooming I grew up knowing. An entire generation has grown up parentless, valueless, and mannerless and violent due to some of those factors. Many more are now being raised by single parents than ever known before. Even where both parents are alive, they are not present to their children. So, we can partly explain the angst to the breakdown of the village, as it were, and the man-eat-man nature of urban life so much akin to what we witness here in our country. Want and envy easily morph into anger and worse.

This is precisely why a community is very important to me. Here in our parish, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, my desire as your new pastor, is that we continue to build a strong community where everyone who comes here feels welcomed and at home; a community where everyone welcomes everybody and where everyone is an usher to everyone else. I am very delighted that we receive numerous accolades from our visitors both visiting priests and lay people in that regard. Let us continue to do that while deriving our strength and legitimacy from our intimate relationship with the Eucharist and devotion to our Mother Mary.

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, I love you!