We are a small community, but we are close. The city of New Orleans is all at once charming, beautiful, and frustratingly dysfunctional. At times and in some places it is dangerous. We make our community here.

Early August this year someone from the Lafayette/Acadiana community (our neighbors to the west) reached out to extend an invitation to join them and the Houston community for Beginning Day. We knew immediately that we wanted to go.

My wife and I are the responsibles for our community. There were many elements of the Movement that we had yet to experience when we began hosting School of Community in 2021. Hurricane Ida had damaged much of our city, and the leader at the time moved away. He asked us to carry on hosting School of Community because of our (very limited) previous experience with CL. We had spent the 2 years prior in Baton Rouge meeting with our friends Tom and Marta and their daughter Chiara, who was born shortly after we began. Regardless of our inexperience, our School of Community group grew close. Our meetings are a weekly reorientation toward the most valuable part of life.

We are aware that some parts of the charism of Communion and Liberation are still unknown to us, and we hunger to learn and go deeper into it. The invitation to Beginning Day in Houston was an answer to that hunger. It was a proposal to connect with the core of the charism and to learn from a well-established community.

Truly, we didn’t know what to expect.

We met everyone for Community Day on Saturday in Huntsville State Park north of Houston. Including the children, we were about 90 adults – from Houston, Austin, Dallas-Forth Worth, Lafayette, New Orleans, and even Atlanta. Our day began with morning prayer, followed by a hike, Holy Mass and a picnic. Andrea from the community in Austin gripped us and everyone else with his commentary on “The Ballad of the White Horse” by G.K Chesterton. Then we played a game that culminated in all of the children wearing armor we made together out of cardboard and duct tape, soldiers for the kings in the story. Marco led us in songs from the songbook, which my wife and I have little previous experience with. I was struck by the way that singing together was clearly about uniting the group, both in playful songs and in deep ones.

Sunday was Beginning Day proper. We met at an auditorium of Dominick Village, a retirement home south of downtown Houston. Using an improvised apparatus to hold his microphone in place, Fr. Michael Carvill spoke to us about Davide Prosperi's lesson and shared his experience attending the International Assembly in La Thuile. I was struck particularly by one sentence he said. He spoke about living in communion with Christ and with each other, and he finished with, “There really isn’t a second step.”

So often I have been a part of groups that seek to spread the Gospel through a kind of religious activism, intentionally seeking out people to bring them into the fold of the Church. This impulse has its place. But I am profoundly convinced of Fr. Michael’s view: when we live in communion, we discover true and authentic life, and others are attracted to it. I am convinced of this because I have met people who radiate Christ through their intense presence, the way they seem totally in touch with reality, and the way it feels to be paid attention to by them.

Andrea from Austin shared a very beautiful witness. He made my heart burn with his description of the intensity of the love of his high school friends and how it changed his life. We closed the day with Mass and lunch together in the auditorium. Then we returned home.

We’ve come away with a renewed faith in the simplicity of the Gospel and the charism. We have a renewed hope that God continues to activate it in us, in our community group. We are now confident that we are not missing anything, because our community is a place of communion.

Brandon, New Orleans, LA