Everyone here knows one rule of verbal engagement without ever having heard it: argument is for the classroom. Outside, disdain toward the line stops at the fear of crossing it like a dog lunging short of his invisible fence. Wordlessly, students proselytize through shirts, banners, and buttons that draw glances but not comments. Passing shoulders glance like flint against steel over kindling that they all wish someone else would light.

I am limited to the unsteadily neutral ground of campus, but I would not go into a classroom even if I could. From what students tell me, classroom debate resembles saber-rattling more so than truth-seeking. Discussion is not what it was. Practically, the information that students privately consume prevents them from agreeing on reality. Social media feeds inform their perspectives, and feeds vary by the student. If one student does not know what content another student consumes, then that student cannot know why the other student sees the world as he does. Disagreement about basic reality makes any discussion downstream from it meaningless. Further, the same feeds of information diminish the value of the statements of a student’s peers. They listen to influencers for eight hours a day and each other for eight minutes a week. One comment from a nobody in class dies amid a choir of verified handles—all of whom possess more star power than I have. My voice in that mix will not help anyone.

Fortunately, words are not necessary to speak Truth. Five years ago, I was outside a bar in Gainesville when an old friend approached me. He was visiting from the military school that he attended. We wore similar clothes, but we could not have looked more different. His shoulders were back. His eyes were clear. He did not say a word. He did not need to. His composure told me the value of how I’d chosen to spend my time compared to that of how he had chosen to spend his. “Better” and “worse” can feel like abstract terms; they were more concrete to me that moment than the sidewalk on which I’d stood. While that night did not dislodge my attachment to habitual sin and vice, it did show me the power of Truth draped over a man with the courage to bear it. 

In the 2007 classic, BioShock, Andrew Ryan said that “we all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.” I had chosen to build my house on the sand of personal mediocrity, and I masked its destruction in weekend storms by sharing the company of others eager to do the same. Our shared delusion broke against the presence of rock. Back then I lacked the will to follow the example that my old friend set for me, but I never forgot it.

Here, the Catholic Center sits between the dorms and the bar. On Friday nights, so do I. Regulars swagger to The Boot at ten and stagger back home at two. I do not expect that my presence on the porch beside a cooler full of waters will strike any students quite the way that my old friend struck me. Rather, I hope that they may see me and wonder about the quarry just behind.

Deo Gratias.