City of Man

I am not with my students this summer. They are interning in California. Studying in New Orleans. Each member of our merry band is alone, for the most part. It is a bad thing: they cannot lean on each other. It is a good thing: they cannot lean on each other. Since the semester ended, numerous students have reached out to tell me that the summer is a struggle. They demanded that I hold Bible study, which I had not thought to propose.

These are successful, charismatic young men. They live in “fun” cities riddled with every form of debaucherous entertainment. They are surrounded by participants willing to accompany them on whatever misadventure their overworked minds might dream up, and what are they doing instead? Calling their campus missionary to lament the depravity in their midst. Tuning into a Zoom call at 9PM on Wednesdays to talk about the Bible.

In the fall, these students did not notice the poison in the air because they had not breathed anything else. Slowly, we carved out a space in a dirty, smelly, two-bedroom apartment that the fools did not even lock. There was clean air, and they learned to breathe it. It was a change that they did not notice until the summer took it away from them. Now they are holding their breath, coming up for gasps where they can find them. They breathe in the Lord through the virtue that their brothers express.

This time in history is a blessing for those exposed to the truth. Our surroundings are so backwards that their nature is impossible to ignore once seen for what they are. It is dangerous for anyone to go it alone, but every one of the students with whom I work knows his choice.

Previously, I praised two students for their willingness to let their relationships be. Those two are aberrations among a contrary, subconscious practice in which others engage. Big picture, campus ministry here focuses on relationships. Primarily the relationships between members of the faithful and our Lord. Secondarily, it carries into relationships among the faithful. 

Relationships among young adults here do require attention. They are unhealthier than you or I know. However, many here treat friendship like an exact science. How many texts must I send you per day to be your friend? How many times must I see you? I do not ask these questions, but others do. Applying material criteria to an immaterial concept leads members of the community to miss the invisible, necessary components of their relationships when those relationships lack visible trappings to which they may cling. Put another way, they focus on material ornamentation over immaterial substance. I hope that I would have the courage to die for another person, but my willingness to die for that person does not mean that the two of us must get along. The misunderstanding seems to arise from the presupposition that a person must like someone to love them—and that liking someone must manifest in a particular, visible way. I like plenty of the people here; I do not like others. I want them all to go to Heaven regardless, and I am willing to do what I can to help them get there. You would think that would be enough. You would be wrong.

Outside of my will for their ultimate good, my experience informs how my relationships with others unfold. If everyone is my best friend, then no one is. However, it is easy for me to not grasp at relationships now because I have the ones that I want. I know where and to whom I belong. Here, people in the Catholic community attempt to exact a sense of belonging from others without considering compatibility. In its absence, many of their relationships lack depth. Depth is replaced by surface-level pleasantries and—a word that I have come to abhor—affirmations. Accordingly, the dynamic often resembles a game of “house,” wherein participants suspend their true feelings to play a part: the purpose of which is to protect the feelings of others who play the same game. In so doing, the invisible, sacrificial components of relationships fall by the wayside in favor of overt demonstrations of affection. For example, these thoughts that I have just described do not net well on the scale of feelings because warm’n’fuzzies are not their desired effect.

I promise that the point here is not to complain that people are bothering me with their friendship. Rather, it is to draw attention to an oversight that stifles the personal and spiritual development of young adults. Friendship involves support, but it also involves correction. It is easy to give and receive support, but it takes trust to give and receive correction. Trust contradicts the measurable approach to friendship because it requires surrender of control. Trust cannot take effect when it competes with a naked desire to belong. Consequently, half-friendships abound under the guise that they are complete. Half-friendships do worse than lack trust; they encourage it to atrophy while their partakers escalate an arms race to show each other how much they care.

What contact leads people to develop a relationship? I never considered that question before I learned where my organization had decided to send me. It came to mind during the latter half of the summer after I’d found out. My job here would require me to develop relationships with students. What could hinder a genuine relationship more than making it part of an agenda? I could not believe that a student would waste his time with someone paid to befriend him. After all, none of them would see consequence in my presence beyond that of a goody-two-shoes chaperone sent there on a well-meaning but misguided frolic. No telling of my story could convey what it was like to live it, so why bother? That is where I would have left it if I trusted untested theory over faith.

At times I am not the most reverent. I pray fast when I am in a rush, and I do not always genuflect in a perfect lunge. However, I do believe that God works at every moment of my life. If I believed that I needed to map my interactions to ensure that students adored me, then I would not yet have had my first conversation. There is nothing complex about making an introduction, and each one leads where it goes. I speak to some students every day. I have spoken to others just once. Still others have never said a word to me, but we exchange nods when we cross paths.

Many words could describe the interactions with students that I have had. One word that could not is “grasping.” Since my arrival, I have not forced any relationships. Rather, I have responded to the people that have come before me in the ways that I thought that I should. It is not for me to decide what results those responses “achieve,” but eight months have shown them to me. Two of my strongest relationships are not two of my closest, and they occur with people I did not expect. There are more that I could describe, but I chose these because we are not close.

One is a senior. He is not one of the students with whom I deal directly. Our contact is the Catholic Center: routine and incidental. However, its consistency gave each of us the opportunity to accumulate data on one another—even if we did not realize it. During a trip to St. Louis in January, mishaps shifted me to a hotel miles from the male students over whom I had charge. I had to organize them by proxy. No sooner had that thought occurred to me than did that senior come to mind. Hours later I wondered why I delegated that authority to him so easily. I’m not sure that I knew his last name. Then I realized that I had seen his character on display all semester. We have spoken more this semester. Not by much.

Another is a junior. Our interaction is similar to that of the senior. She is involved with the women on my team. Upon my return to campus in January, she gave me a Christmas present. The present was a plush toy: a jar of peanut butter with a smiling face. My team and I decided to call him Skippy. I am not inclined to presents (though I will not refuse them), but Skippy told me about a relationship that I did not know was there. That stuffed toy reminded her of me, and she was comfortable enough with me to buy it. I do not know how others see me, but Skippy gives me a clue.

It is evident when actions reflect a respect for being. To let others exist without calling them to account to oneself. Two people do not need to be best friends, or even like one another, to have a strong relationship. There is strength in the shared understanding between two people about what their relationship is. I have not always had the best relationships with my siblings. It has not always felt fair that I did not get to choose them. But I have always known that I have to love them, and both there and here it is enough.

Students do not like authority, which is a hurdle to the proposition that they submit their lives to Christ. Submission to Christ means following one master at all times. Contrarily, the university allows a student to choose any option he wants. Why would he choose the option that deprives him of others?

They say that college is a place to experiment. It seems that “experimentation” invariably involves indulgence. Mostly drugs, tobacco, drinking, and women. The differences among their options are an illusion. They are all flavors of momentary pleasure provided by sin. And they call it freedom. Freedom, the way they see it, is the ability to choose. Freedom, the way they see it, is a lie. Every choice is submission to the thing chosen, and every sin has a binding effect. In John 8:34, Jesus says “[E]veryone who practices sin is a slave to sin.” No student chooses to asphyxiate on his own vomit. Many students chose to drink until they do. Despite its effects, they persist in sin for the sake of the feelings it gives them. The sensations of sin make their choices for them, and every step downhill makes the climb steeper. 

Freedom is the ability to make a decision independent of the temptations toward pleasure and away from pain. Freedom is to do what you ought. Choosing virtue is service, but it is service to life. Virtue enhances freedom because it does not bind the virtuous with feelings that he cannot resist. Instead, it does him good that his intellect can recognize and that his will can continue to choose. I have never experienced withdrawals from skipping a day at the gym, but its effects tell me that I should go back. Freedom is to follow Christ because Christ makes the right choices for us. Freedom may not feel good in the moment, but it does good at all times. Without Christ, we are deceived to trade our lives for tasty poison.

Serviam is Latin for “I will serve.” St. Michael the Archangel said that in reply to Lucifer’s cry that he would not serve. St. Michael understood that God was life. Lucifer rejected life for his pride. Enslavement to pride gave him eternal death. But Lucifer was the greatest of the angels; I am a fool if I presume that I would have made a different choice in his shoes.

Digression aside, this is the frame that I use with my students. I do not tell them what to do. I tell them the truth that they choose sin because its sensations control them. I tell them that they are not their own masters. They bristle, but they do not hide. In the face of vice and virtue, they understand the reality of their choice. They cannot make the excuse that the Bible wants to ruin their fun. They know that their lungs are for air, no matter how good it might feel to breathe water.

Here, I see that much of the harm that students do to themselves occurs when their decisions pass them by. In daily life, one analogy has resonated with them more than any other: food ingredients. While discussing the true nature of their decisions, I explained that junk food and alcohol contain ingredients that diminish testosterone. Many of my students now refuse to drink beer or eat certain foods, and we have banned seed oils and soy at Bible study.

In the wake of their willingness to give up pleasures, they have begun to translate the concept to their spiritual lives. Prayer is, in some ways, equivalent to reading an ingredient list. Rather than acting on impulse, they have started to reflect on the real effects of their decisions on their souls. Reflection does not always result in the right choice, but they know that the choice is between whom and not whether to serve.

Deo Gratias.

The depravity that surrounds the students here desensitizes them. Their hearts have numbed to sin through prolonged exposure like dead, frostbitten limbs. Unfortunately, a dead soul does not catch the eye like rotting flesh. Otherwise we might have more urgency. However, sin is not the only metaphysical reality that the secular world conditions students to ignore.

Emphasis on self reliance distracts my students from reliance on God. At Tulane, parents, professors, advisors, and employers establish steps for the students long before they come due. Practicality aside, pinning down every detail of the future models to the students the lie that the future is theirs. They mirror the model that they see from their authorities, which leads them to focus so much on what is coming that they forget about what is. Further, their imaginary futures become so real that disruptions to them are unthinkable. At the outset, they never give Christ the chance to work in their lives beyond the limits of their plans.

Largely, my students neither rely on God nor have reason to feel like they should. Unlike their real plans, they discuss reliance on God with academic detachment. They nod along reverently to excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount, parroting platitudes like an executive reading a press release. The words are spoken and forgotten as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

Of course God expects us to look forward. After all, He gives us the faculties to do so. However, there is a distinction between scouting the future and living in it. It is a deception to believe that we control the future. That deception provides us with a false sense of security that never leads us to put anything real into God’s hands until we have no other choice. “Trust in God” rings hollow when said as a last resort. Disruption and uncertainty are facts of life that modern luxury has prompted us to forget, and the inability to respond when things do not go according to plan is on display here at all times.

In Bible study, we discussed God’s instruction to Abram to look at the stars. At that time, God said that their number would mirror that of his offspring. Some scholars said that God gave the instruction during the day (Genesis 15:12). In that case, Abram would have realized that God expected him to trust the presence of stars that he knew existed but could not see. God’s plan for Him was more real than the stars, but that plan would not materialize until he trusted God to enact it.

My students will not fully rely on God in one moment. Perhaps prayer is a start. Rather than an upheaval, prayer is an entrustment to God of a small portion of time for a use that a person cannot fully comprehend or quantify. Even if He does not yet have their lives, I am confident with what He can do with a few of their minutes.

Admittedly, I did not pray or trust God with my life until He showed me that I had no control over it. Through prayer, I eventually saw that He had been speaking to me all along. I was just too busy planning to hear Him.

Deo Gratias.

Recently, speakers at our yearly conference said that men need to step up for the church. Interestingly, none of the speakers elaborated. Several months ago, an employee of my organization lamented the lack of male presence on mission. The problems are the same; young men who want to be heroes are afraid of real risk, and the church does not ask them to suffer.

Many of the parishes I have attended have had in common a fear of persecution by society. Social norms encourage behaviors that Christians cannot condone. Companies toe the line to avoid backlash. We tell ourselves that we are not responsible for the beliefs of others; we live and let live. We tell ourselves that we are not our employers; we are just doing our jobs. We murmur. As we breathe the changing air, we turn to any course other than a response. Faced with the Trolley Problem, we stand by the lever. In our shoes, early Christians stood on the tracks.

Mission is no exception. We receive odd looks and sarcastic comments, but no one (that I know of) plans to have me crucified. Young men want to display courage, and we do not show them a shadow of it. Men in the faith treat the church as an activity. Those who “get involved” typically dive into its academics by mastering church lore like a fan might explore a fictional universe. Others carry up the processional cross and read for Mass. Some missionaries try to emulate heroism through shared physical challenges. It all remains within the mesh walls of a Catholic hobbyist Pack ’n Play.

Without opportunities for real sacrifice, college men make due with risk tourism. They haze and drink at the frat house. They sweat and bleed on the sports field and in the weight room. The specter of death is welcome so long as it looms temporarily and goes when dismissed.

Unfortunately, modern emphasis on material security makes risk and liability in “real life” feel worse than sin. Notably, many of the young men on my campus say that they wish that they had fought in the crusades. In the same breath, they describe their plans to work for unscrupulous companies. The schizophrenic disconnect between their daydreams and decisions is the duality of Christian man caught in a militantly atheistic civilization and told to steer clear of its teeth.

Admittedly, sacrifice in such a scenario is easier said than done. Persecution looks heroic in movies. Not so here. No red crown awaits the young Catholic office dweller, student, or missionary no longer willing to tacitly accept norms that history has uniformly opposed. Only red tape. Imagine it. Few would recognize the principle behind his objection, let alone care. His stand would not survive an email or a trip to HR or student affairs. Its memory would die immediately in the minds of the half dozen people who heard about it.

Not that anyone should flip his desk and storm out of his building. Don’t do that. However, the attitude common to my students speaks to the original conundrum. We envision grandeur. Grandeur is not there. Instead of accepting less, the fear of soft persecution has kept us from even assessing the intolerable components of our circumstances. In turn, we play privately with bravery while men outside the church see no one fight for it.

If the church wants men, then it must ask them to suffer for her. Perhaps we are only a speed bump. Better that than a doormat. Young men without dependents must act on what our faith demands in spite of what the world approves, come what may. The rest must do what they can. The Lord may not expect us to wear the red crown. He does expect those able to button the red collar. In Greek the word “martyr” means “witness,” but men cannot witness what they do not see.

Deo Gratias.

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.

I never read the Bible when I considered it the sole source of Christian authority. Now I lead Bible studies in the club that says it’s not. Surprisingly, leading with so little experience does not make me nervous. St. Thomas Aquinas called the Summa “straw,” so the difference between the best and worst of my input cannot be material. Logistics is another matter—though it is one of nausea rather than nerves. Setting times and locations, buying and cooking food, etc. People plan events for a living, and I would rather die. Granted I deal with ten people and jalapeño poppers, but those ten are twenty-year old boys over whom I have no authority. It’s not like I would excommunicate them, but the threat of pushups couldn’t hurt.

My stage is small, but I did not appreciate the distinction between attendee and leader until week one. If no one has defined a group of concentrated stares, then I propose the word “ambush.” I stare back, and I see everything but apathy in their eyes. It does not surprise me that they care; it surprises me that they show it. I told them that they had no reason to trust me, and maybe that’s why they do. They trust each other too. They speak in turns like a stream of impressions in a single mind. Their words converge without competing. They collide without conflicting. They flow together toward truth, and they are getting closer.

I am here to convey Truth to them with charity, but I am not here to make them like it. Christ said that His followers would deny themselves, pick up their crosses, and follow Him. Not so fun. It helps that I deal with athletes. They say yes to pain every day. But pain is easy, and pain is cool. I want them to say no to pleasure too. A salesmen might try to mask the hurt. I told them that it should hurt. People don’t go to the gym because it feels good, and the same is true of people who pick up the cross. They understand that.

But to understand the cross is not to take it up. These boys will not become saints overnight anymore than they could have benched three plates on day one in the gym. Weights have numbers that say “can” and “cannot,” and training turns “cannot” into “can.” Abstract weight is not difficult to grasp, but it’s not as concrete as a barbell on the windpipe. What crosses can they lift, and how can they know? Weights have numbers, but verses do too. Mt. 5:11 is beyond me, but I recently picked up 28:19-20. I’m faking 5:41 by driving someone to Waco next week (don’t tell me how far it is; I don’t want to know). If you’re reading this, then you likely lift 5:42.

There is a saint inside each of them ready to come out. All it takes is exercise of the Word. A person who lives sin and says that he cannot be a saint is like a person who breaks his own bones and says that he cannot be a lifter. The question is not whether they are saints. It is whether they will allow God to make them saints. Faith without works is dead, and a gym membership is nothing without the weights.

Deo Gratias.

If slamming on the brakes can damage a car, then I damaged my car last week. It was worth it. In fact I have never sat so gleefully at a light that I missed because I ran it six weeks ago. At first I met its gaze, but it looked at me unaware that it had lost. Assurance gave way to doubt as my mind replayed the scene. The light turned green, but my skin stayed red. All except the white of my knuckles against the wheel.

Dramatic retelling aside, I would have seen the red light if I had learned from it. Instead, I let my comfort with the three streets that I walk each day disguise my inexperience with the rest of them. Living in New Orleans does not make me a native, and working as a missionary does not make me one. I can barely type “§” after three years of law school, and I have not exchanged case law for canon without a few hiccups. The lights that I do see every day have taught me, but I must learn from the ones that I don’t. My little league coach said that I absorb information like a sponge, so I’ve wrung out below what I could.

Don’t: tell a Jewish person “it’s ok” that they are Jewish; try to explain the Trinity without consulting the Catechism; close an auto-locking door without bringing the keys; play a catchy song on repeat before silent prayer; hike to a post office without determining whether they accept credit card; open a closed confessional door; take exit 12D to St. Patrick’s downtown—no matter what Siri says.

Do: remember that the word is “convert” and not “transfer”; remind non-Catholics not to eat Jesus after you invite them to Mass; put your shoes back on when a gym staffer asks; gently correct statements that are technically heresy.

All of that said, locking myself out of my apartment does not stain my soul the way that sin does (but it feels pretty damn close). In that sense, routine “red lights” do arise here, but less routine means greater exposure to unexpected ones. Temptations can surprise me like my light did, but after that it’s on me. The campus did not surprise me, and it has not tempted me. Ladies wear less to class than they did four years ago, but that trend is older than I am. I figured that I would look at the ground out of precaution; I find that I do so out of sorrow.

Scandalous sin is easy to avoid. I am not inclined to it, and students watch me all the time. The difficulty is where they can’t see. Consequence casts a shadow over my interactions with them, but my character flaws struggle to gauge how large it looms. And over whom. Did I speak with enough conviction? Too little charity? Am I understanding a struggle or approving a sin? I ask these questions out of care for my students, but pride also wants my every word to land flush.

The temptation that I did not expect—the red light that I did not see—is my focus on rhetoric for its own sake. Back home my thoughts were like a draft that I never had to present. Not perfect but always perfecting. Now each conversation feels like a hearing, and their transcripts never come out quite right. After years of polishing my thoughts, I struggle to accept the blemishes of speaking them. But I will. Fans don’t watch the game in dirty jerseys, but players don’t play in clean ones.

Deo Gratias.

I discovered that no one here uses cardinal directions, which explains why the sun sleeps in later than I do. Humidity walks me to the gym in its absence, downriver several blocks and lakeside several more. I come out wetter than I went in, and our journey ends past the drop-off line of a grade school. Children arrive holding hands with their parents while I pass by holding beads with my rosary. We are not so different in God’s eyes, and I look more out of place among them than I feel. A teacher with a microphone drowns out my musings, and a cold shower washes them away. My morning cup of coffee feels like a reward, and I have several minutes to read before prayer.

It never occurred to me that a person could pray for an hour, and I’m still not sure that anyone does. It is no coincidence to me that folded hands stage twiddling thumbs. In May I would spend fifteen minutes on a rosary (twenty if I dragged) and ten on debate over what prayer was. By now I’ve said enough Hail Marys to make Our Lady sick of me, and a priest assured me that almost anything counts.

God’s redline of my prayers would make even my dad blush, but I will risk a few thoughts nonetheless. First, prayer affects me the way that lifting does. I cannot pinpoint moments when my heart and mind change, but they do. Practically, I ask God to open my heart and then try to be honest about what comes up. He moves the wind; I move the wheel. Reading the Bible details my map and clears the fog. Your results may vary.

The stability of semi-structured days gets me out of bed, and their variety keeps me awake. One priest I met used to box, so in conversation I compared modern outreach to an old boxer shaking off the rust. He replied that he could still kick my ass. Fighting a priest was not on my bucket list before then, but it is now. Father’s got three inches and about thirty pounds on me, so maybe I’ll put it last—right after having him hear my confession. Later I asked him to lead a boxing class for my guys. He said he’d think about it.

This week a fire consumed the Catholic Center grill. I put it out and learned that fire extinguishers do not have recoil.

On a marginally less violent note, we recently ate lunch at the home of the archbishop. He served us a salad that had strawberries in it. I hate strawberries. People who learn this about me push me to try them, which I never do. But when the archbishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans puts food on your plate, you eat it.

Altogether my days have emulated the beauty and chaos of the city, which will suit me unless I get shot.

Deo Gratias.