Catholics from Ashland to Portland and from the Cascades to the Pacific will be meeting in homes and parishes during Lent 2008 in an effort to slow down their lives to get at what is really important.

The parishioners will read and study the Sunday Scriptures, share faith and daily struggles and work toward reconciliation and healing in their personal lives, homes, neighborhoods, churches and for the Archdiocese of Portland as a whole. A final push is under way for parishes in western Oregon to sign up for materials to guide the small group gatherings.

Catholics in the region have been gathering for Ember Days each season for several years to pray for healing and reconciliation of clergy sex abuse victims and everyone affected by the scandal. The Lenten small groups will broaden that spiritual effort, seeking healing in all parts of life.

“We are not just talking about child abuse here, but reconciliation in families, in parishes — anything that separates you from God,” says Deacon Thomas Gornick, director of evangelization for the archdiocese. “It’s a time to come back and reconcile both those private sins and public sins that exist in our lives.”

Materials for the meetings come from a collaboration with the Diocese of Hartford in Connecticut.

There, since 1986, the church has maintained one of the few diocesan offices solely to promote and help ongoing small Christian communities.

The office publishes a small group study guide three times per year called Quest. The booklets, which go out to 49 states, contain reflections and questions that aim to help Catholics tear down walls between faith and everyday life.

“These groups are ordinary people helping each other to connect life and faith regularly,” says Marianist Brother Bob Moriarty, who has directed the Hartford office for 18 years.

The main concern, says Brother Bob, is not simply to form nice small groups, but to create a structure that will help the parish.

“The idea is to cultivate small Christian communities as basic units for the parish, as part of a long range plan to strengthen the life of the parish as a whole,” he explains. “In our experience, members of small Christian communities are among the most deeply invested in the life of the parish. And that’s no surprise. When people feel like they belong, then people feel responsible for it all.”

Brother Bob suggests approaching parishioners by letting them know the groups are a kind of retreat, a slowing down, not just another task in their already-harried lives.

When Gornick was invited to speak earlier this year at a stewardship conference in Hartford, he and Brother Bob discussed the need for a rejuvenation in the Archdiocese of Portland, which was finishing up its 33-month bankruptcy. The idea emerged to focus next Lent’s Quest publication on reconciliation and healing, not much of a stretch for the writers since those are key themes of scripture, especially during Lent.

The season will operate under some principles of reconciliation set out by Passionist Father Robert Schreiter, a theologian. First, all reconciliation begins with God, Father Schreiter writes. Also, reconciliation is more of a spirituality than a strategy.

Father Schreiter contends that the history of past hurts cannot be cancelled, whether it is abuse, divorce or a simple snub. The idea is to recognize the pain openly and seek to move forward.

“The experience of Reconciliation makes of both victim and wrong doer a new creation,” he writes.

The process of reconciliation, he adds, “creates the new humanity is to be found in the story of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

One hope church leaders hold is that sessions will bring parishioners back to the sacrament of reconciliation. Parish reconciliation services will be planned in conjunction with the group meetings.

Each parish will have a coordinator for the groups. Quest materials come in English and, at the suggestion of the Archdiocese of Portland, in Spanish.

“Reconciliation is not about blame, punishment or retribution,” Gornick says. “For Catholics it begins with God in Baptism. Reconciliation is the work and gift of the Father. God constantly reaches out to us to reconcile us to himself.”