When Words Fail, and Love Overwhelms Us

As I wade into the trenches of perhaps the most intense parting of my life - rivaled only by leaving Notre Dame and beginning the long distance chapter of my relationship with my girlfriend - I find emotion and insight swirling about me. I remain grounded in my contextualized perspective that leaving  must involve carrying what you've found and who've you become with you as you move on. However, the emotions power through that truism to demand a deeper perspective.

Allow me to muddle through it all with you.

The relationships I have formed with these students are of a flavor I have yet to experience. I focus so intently on these students that I often neglect to build relationships with colleagues. I leave behind a few dear friends who happen to also be co-workers, but on a larger scale, my impact was quite minimal in the landscape of the staff. This is an added wrinkle I must develop as I mature because quality campus ministry depends so heavily on collegiality. I just freeloaded on the pre-existing teamwork in my current job whereas in future endeavors I will have to be more proactive about cultivating such a community to support the work I'll shepherd.

In terms of the students, the kind of presence I am for and with them is mostly new for me. It was hinted at by my experience as Mentor-in-Faith with Notre Dame Vision, when the age difference was similar. However, it takes that paradigm and blows it up to massive proportion, from a five-day intensive course to a year-long journey together.

The relationships are given fuller term to develop and grow, so they take on such nuance and particularity. I get to become the go-to for different people for different things. I can wander the grounds of our campus, encounter different students, and be excited for their various entreaties. I become the big brother to dozens upon dozens of beloved little brothers and sisters.

At first, the jokes about leaving were easy to deflect - "You're leaving me!?" or "How can you leave us?!", often emoted in artificially dramatic exclamations. However, as the reality of parting creeps nearer, the comments have taken deeper root and a profound personal character - congratulations for my new job and my scholarship, authentic excitement that my girlfriend and I get to live near each other finally, actual tears of disbelief that I won't be back, heartfelt affirmations that I'm one of their favorites, notes and unsolicited exclamations of joy about the connections we've forged or the way their faith has grown this year, and kids' even saying "I love you" straight up.

This is when is gets real. That's when I can't just smile and laugh and say someone else will come and make a new difference or that I'm not worth it. That's when I just want to hug my students and never let go. That's when words fail, and love overwhelms us. This is what Christ meant when He reassured that where two or three are gathered, there am I in the midst of them.

I had the thought that this must be how priests and celibate religious are sustained. I remember asking a priest at my high school how he goes on without a wife or kids, and he told me and my fellow students that he looks at us as his children. Now I really understand what he meant. We didn't just fill in a gap for him; we really were his kids. The love that can be shared when a priest or nun or even a Dan invests his/herself completely into a community abounds and overflows one's cup through the quality and depth of relationships that can form.

These relationships aren't just the means to fulfilling one's vocation or paying the bills; they are the fuel that keep the heart pumping to give and receive the love of God constantly. For me, I need the sustenance of an exclusive human relationship, of someone who gets me better than anyone else, who prioritizes me highly in her life, and gives me the love of God first so I may return it and pass it on. But in the midst of this sea of love, I see how the priest or sister, who embraces this different challenge, can navigate the celibate life and carry on in joy.

This reality recontextualizes my emotional state beautifully. As I sign yearbooks, pose for and take pictures, and share my email address with my dear teenage friends, I can't help but feel like I would at the end of a retreat. The retreat high carries you through the final day, the partings, and the shock of reentry to life, but it is sure to fade. Currently, I'm riding the high.

I'm delighting in the pictures. I'm laughing at the texts. I'm basking in the love of emails and notes. And I, a self-proclaimed retreat junkie, know better than most that it will most certainly fade.

Yet I also know better than most that just because the high fades doesn't mean that the faith and love within me have to fade, too.

The greatest way to sustain the good feelings of happiness is through the relationships that created those good feelings. Happiness is fleeting and surface-level; joy is deep-seated in the heart and lasting. These young men and women are the smile on my face, the love in my heart, the confirmation that my gifts and passions are serving the needs of God's world. I cannot force them to text, call, email, Facebook message, or even to remember me, but I can invite them to maintain our connection with deep gratitude for what has been.

And that is just what I will do. True, beneath the too-often flimsy promises lies the reality that we all won't keep in touch perfectly. However, I find solace in the fact that a few will.

Every community and job and person that touches our hearts forever owns a piece of it. Thank God, love is not supplied finitely, and that these pieces of our heart are not limited edition. Those few who stay connected with me will remind me of the whole and keep alive the part of my heart that is forever theirs.

And as life and love carry me and you and all of us on the sea of life, our sacramental lives are the ebb and flow of the waves that carry us toward love and good and God. The Eucharist brings us the nourishment and renewal of the God who became man and remains close to us always. The reach of Jesus Christ transcends time and space to reinforce and sustain those relationships, in that Something and Someone who is bigger than any one of us, so that no matter how far and wide we may spread, or how many years elapse between our meetings, we remain ever intimately connected.

Right and Righter

Time and time again, then time and time again... then a few more times, students in theology classes at the school where I teach wonder and ask about non-Catholics - do they have to adhere to Church teaching? Why? What if they don't agree with what the Church teaches?

Then we, as faithful, well-catechized, thoroughly formed Catholics trying to teach theology, become readily tempted to launch into argument.

I want to cite the Gospels and Acts, when Jesus vests authority in the apostles. I want to tell the story of Pentecost, the emboldening of these people to go and preach in Jesus' name. I want to tell the story of Peter, the rock on whom Christ builds His Church. I want to explore ecclesiology and unpack the realities of the Church. I want to throw down about the necessity of absolute truth. I want to invalidate relativism for the contradictory and shaky viewpoint that it is.

And there's the catch - our courses do all that. We hash out those pieces of the puzzle that validate the authority of our Church, that connect us to Christ, that explain our claims to authority and ability to teach in Jesus' name, that identify God as the source of Truth, revealed to us by Scripture and Tradition. We address those objections as part of the catechesis.

Yet this repeated objection becomes a road-block, a push back in the direction of revisiting that stuff. It drags us back toward arguments that we offered and discussed but ultimately must not sink in. In an infinitely long school year, they could be rehashed, but time is of the essence. We futily hope that our discussions will address their beefs.

This generation of youngens cannot wrap their heads around the idea that John Paul II is speaking truth to all people in The Gospel of Life. They can't believe that this man (the pope) and his advisers (the bishops) are composing advice that is based upon the absolute truth of God and directed toward - and useful and relevant to! - all people of good will.

In part, I think it's generational and teenage skepticism of authority. In part, a lot of my interaction with them suggests that they simply discount institutionalized religion on a count of the attraction of the "spiritual but not religious" fad. In part, I think many of them are disillusioned because the only religion they see is people practicing religion poorly - judgmentally, radically, intolerantly.

For whatever reason, they often will only get on board with the Church and her unpacking of absolute truth unless it happens to jive with their personal opinions.

When it comes to addressing these students concerns without rehashing previous days' worth of discussions, the issue has to be framed well.

I recently observed a colleague teacher emphasize dialogue to his students. Right on the money.

Many students have an image of the Church as "my way or the highway." True, our Church is one of all-or-nothing subscription. It's not a buffet; we're called to conscientious dialogue with truth. However, it's not meant to be so cold and militaristic. It's meant to be conversation, a what and why that unpacks the teaching to the heart and the mind. It's judgment of evil actions, affirmation of the goodness of people but condemnation of the stain of sin, whether social or personal.

When he asked me to chime in, I reframed the tension/conflict - it's not always a matter of you're wrong and we're right; it's often a matter of you and us are both right but we're righter.

Pro-choice advocates are right to value privacy and mothers'/women's rights. It's just righter to do so through a whole sexuality that embraces the completeness of marriage and a full understanding of sex rather than to encourage free sex, contraceptives, and abortion.

Death penalty supporters are right to advocate justice, law enforcement, and social peace. It's just righter to further those causes through life imprisonment and the opportunity for repentance.

Assisted suicide advocates are right to value the dignity of life, individual autonomy, and practicality. It's just righter to value life by understanding the fullness of suffering, the value of surrender, and the distinctions between passive and active means.

The tensions between the sides are full of friction, especially on these issues, but therein lies the challenge and the call: Christians are blessed with a beautifully cohesive and coherent faith, manifested beautifully in the consistent ethic of life - valuing life and its dignity and value in all forms from conception until natural death.

Our task is to manifest, in our actions and words, a faith that upholds the dignity of life. We must demonstrate the light and joy and the culture of life, amid the battle against a culture of death.

Ultimately, most people aspire to be part of a culture of life. Our dialogue, grounded in our understanding of Truth as delivered to us by Christ through Scripture and Tradition, must help everyone discover how we can help and hurt that force of good. And while we must discourage and condemn evil when we find it, we shouldn't assume evil in all our interactions.

We must find the good.

We can have dialogue in which both sides are right and seek the mutual illumination of conversation. Viewpoints of right and wrong can lead us to be dumb and dumber. Let's discover a context of right and righter, and let the One Who is Right shine.

Limiting the Unlimited

On Friday, I grabbed the keys to a school van and loaded it up with baseball equipment and a handful of my players. Our last game of the season was against our in-town public school, a hated rival from just 10 minutes down the same road our school is on.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, the van was pretty quiet. Sure, it was Friday, and the school week leaves teenagers drained and dragging (until Friday night rolls around, at least). But this silence resulted from something else.

I picked up on it when I heard noises coming from the lap of my shotgun passenger. He was playing a game on his iPhone. And a quick survey of my rearview mirror revealed that his teammates were all doing the same thing. Nary a word was spoken. Every set of eyeballs - except the driver's - were glued to a tiny touch-screen.

The next morning, we played a just-for-fun scrimmage, some players, some parents and siblings, and me ending our season with some light-hearted competition. A couple hours swinging the bats, throwing a tennis ball around, and trying to hit a jack over the tantalizingly close homerun fence on the softball field. After six innings of ball, the sprinklers going off, and a lot of laughs, we put a cap on the season with a 12-10 victory for the home team. I came out on the losing end but managed to take a ball yard.

After the game ended and we cleaned up after ourselves a bit, six players were left in the dugout, waiting for rides. Again, an almost unbroken silence reigned where laughter and jokes should have been. Six sets of eyes focused on smartphones. Game over. Time to text.

This is a tough issue.

I tried to resist and stood strongly on my soapbox for ages, but I, too, have a smartphone. At first, I turned the cellular data off to keep temptation at bay, but one can't even picture message without it. So now I had the internet in the palm of my hand. I made a rule that, just like when my iPod traveled with me in my pocket, I'd restrict my data usage to WiFi, with exceptions for times of legitimate need (like the maps to get directions or Safari to find an address or store hours). I've survived the first 3 months pretty strongly accordingly to those rules, but the compulsion becomes so strong when the boundaries evaporate and those little red numbers appear on my apps.

Ultimately, I don't necessarily think there's a great moral absolute at play here. Smartphones are not inherently evil. The internet is not inherently evil. It comes down to, as always, intention. But given the prevalence of internet access and the constant ability we have to shift our attention to a handheld device, I think intention has to include omission.

Even if shifting our gaze down to a phone isn't evil, might preoccupying ourselves from other things around us be a move in the wrong direction? My concern isn't so much that phones drag us down. It's that too much use of our phones keep us from realizing each other.

Facebook, other social media, and our phones should supplement our personal relationships, giving them new avenues in which to grow an exist, but those things should not become the primary means of communication and sustaining relationships.

Think of the waiting room at your doctor's or dentist's office. Typically, you'll be in for a long wait, so you grab a magazine to pass, or even "kill", time. Nothing wrong with that. Get lost in the political issues afoot, or catch up on Hollywood happenings. Too often we are starting to treat any "down" time as being like a waiting room - meeting up with friends at a theater or mall, waiting for a table at a restaurant, a lull in conversation - and that's scary.

I can't tell you how many times I see people standing around in a circle looking at their phones instead of chatting with each other. I have pulled my phone out just because everyone in my vicinity has gone there and I don't want to be left out. I have pulled my phone out because I sometimes forget that this potential for conversation used to be our default.

It's a dangerous trend for us to default to a smartphone, to a personal, customizable world rather than to community with others. Sometimes, we go to our phones to share an article, a video, a picture, to include others, start a conversation, have a laugh; sometimes it's pure compulsion. We are increasingly drifting to that set of square icons to check up on the social scene rather than partaking of the one in our midst.

The trend is present in ads, and it's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario - do the ads reflect what we're already doing or do the ads goad us toward behaviors by their power of suggestion?



I showed a Droid commercial to my students. Some of them understood the implication of our phones' becoming literally one with us as seriously dangerous. Others dismissed the commercial, saying that we don't have to do something just because a commercial tells us to do it. My question remains...



Then I think of this Sprint commercial, which implies that everything we do should be captured on our phones and shared, without our devices or their data pools limiting our activity. I am all for the opening of information, for more and more to be readily available to be researched, discovered, learned.

I am grateful for Blogger and the chance I get to compose thoughts and disseminate them widely. However, I don't bare 100% of my soul on this blog. I share myself openly and genuinely, but there are things that are private to me and my family or friends. I tell stories and offer insights, but a fraction of my life remains my own, unpublished to any social platform. Again, I'm not saying Sprint will eradicate that boundary or that we ought to get rid of it because Sprint told us to do that. However, the trend is real, something for us to confront and reflect upon.

Do we feel the need to be plugged in 24-7-365? Why do we have to check for little red numbers every 5 minutes? Can we go without sharing things with others? Can we go without checking what others are sharing?

My point is not to poo-poo smartphones or apps. I just hope everyone can stop for a moment to reflect upon their habits or compulsions.

I need to recommit to my WiFi rule. I need to trust that emails about my potential new job or my plans for grad school will not go anywhere even if I don't check and see them right away. I can let myself play 7 Little Words and Crosswords while in the bathroom but not while sitting at a table amid conversation.

How can you create fair and just limits on your usage? Can self-denial lead you to realization? What moderation might you need?