A Moving Target

Earlier this week, I led the monthly outing with my students to a south side food pantry. 8-10 students hop in a van with me and head on the road. We join a formidable squad of parishioners and help man very busy stations for the morning as work with local clients to get food for the week.

As we prep, I have to pick a date, clear it with the parish, clear it with our school admin, create permission slips, reserve the school van, spread the word to the class that gets to go for the month, and organize the slips as they come in first-come, first-served.

This week while we were serving, I was surprised to hear from school that someone was looking for the van, which I had used to take the group many miles away from school. I swore that I had reserved it, and when we reviewed the reservation in our school system, we realized that I had mistakenly reserved it for PM instead of AM. I was mortified.

I apologized by email and sought out the person who was inconvenienced by my mix-up, and he completely understood the honest mistake. I was grateful for his patience and compassion, but I was still frustrated because I don't make those mistakes. I am fastidious and organized and detail-oriented. I rarely to never made those mistakes in my previous jobs, and I didn't want that to change now.

As a product of 20 years of Catholic education, and now an employee in it for 3-going-on-4 years, I am all too aware of how under-resourced we are on so many fronts. We are constantly tight against our budget, stretched thin, under-staffed, over-committed, etc. So, I am patient and forgiving toward most of the shortcomings that result from those realities. However, I'm used to being patient and forgiving when others make mistakes or overlook things due to how thinly we're stretched; I'm not used to being the perpetrator of those things. And that's what ruffled my feathers a lot. I hated that my busyness and rushing caused my mistake.

I feel strongly called toward Campus Ministry, and I have felt very affirmed and fulfilled in living out this call for the last 3-4 years. I had the privilege for the last two years to work Campus Ministry full-time without teaching responsibilities, though constantly fighting to reduce and minimize by substitute teaching demands, supervisory responsibilities, and other auxiliary assignments. Now, this year, in a new job, I am teaching about a half-load of classes, and during this busy middle trimester, I teach 60% of the periods every week.

I struggle vocationally with the constant struggle to have dedicated time to just be the Campus Minister. It's difficult to talk about because the significant demands placed on a school, its administrators, and especially on its teachers create circumstances in which everyone is working from some deficit: principals, deans, instructional/academic staff, and other people running the school are slammed with parent calls, meetings for the course of the school, budgets, and trying to find time to proactively implement the dreams they have; teachers are tasked with a full course load to teach, often different classes to prep, massive stacks of grading and gradebook-keeping, parent calls and emails and conferences, homerooms and attendance, and the various clubs and sports they support with their "extra" time.

So, I don't want to be a woe-is-me Campus Minister, but here I go a little. I struggle with the larger system of Catholic education where Campus Ministry often straddles the academic and administrative worlds with serious tenuousness. Most schools will dedicate resources to create full-time, directorial/administrative positions for admissions, academics, counseling, technology, athletics, development/advancement and sometimes more, but Campus Ministry's inclusion in that equation is a crap shoot.

I cannot imagine what kind of math and juggling goes into how those big-picture tasks are broken up, departmentalized, budgeted, and doled out to different staff members. Often, most or all of the people in those positions are not only given directorial/administrative positions such that they gain an integral voice in the running of the school, answering to the principal and/or president. Additionally, most or all of these people teach zero classes, have no regular supervisory or substitutional responsibilities (though they are usually called in a pinch when necessity requires it), and are thus given the time to focus on their departmentalized responsibilities.

When it comes to campus ministry, it's a crap shoot as to how a school can and will handle it. Sometimes, that means no dedicated campus ministry; sometimes, that means asking a teacher to take on campus ministry the same way they'd handle a club, like student council, in their "extra time"; sometimes, that means having a campus minister who also teaches a few classes and has teaching responsibilities; sometimes, that means having a campus minister who is doesn't teach but gets stuck with ancillary time demands; sometimes, that means have a dedicated campus minister who gets to be on the administrative level; sometimes, that means have a director and department of campus ministry. The varying needs, budgets, and profiles of schools lead to all kinds of remedies to this challenge.

The frustrating thing is that demarcating campus ministry is often to usually seen as flexible. Rarely, if ever, do other administrative departments and positions get subject to such redefinition. For whatever reason, admissions directors typically focus solely on recruiting and publicity, counselors on counseling students, their lives, and their schedules, etc. But for campus ministers, you never know how it will shake out.

There's something about the pastoral, catechetical skill set that campus ministers need to have that often leads to our being double-used as teachers. Maybe the degree in theology, often even an MA or MAPS or M.Div, is too attractive to not put in a classroom. Maybe the fact that the curricular discipline of theology relates so closely to ministry is too practical to not utilize. Maybe the intended profile of the position isn't enough to create a full-time job and the added teaching duties enable the school to have the person on campus full-time.

Whatever the reasonings are, it leads me personally to frustration, preoccupation, and intermittent identity crisis. When I'm frustrated with teaching, I wonder: am I being petty or close-minded toward my hybridized job? am I not open to a new direction? am I refusing a good invitation to grow? am I fighting the chance to serve a need?

It's frustrating because in a perfect world I would be open, embrace the growth, and respond to the need of the school and students. However, at my core, I don't want to feel guilty or selfish for wanting to be able to do the job I feel called to full-time. I don't think it's crazy to want to focus 100% of my time on dedicated campus ministry.

People talk with me and wonder if I just need to get to a bigger, stronger, higher-profile school where they can commit greater resources to such a position, thought that likely means sacrificing a bit by being at a school with less need and less diversity. I obviously don't know what the answers to all of these issues are, and I try to be humble, grateful, grounded, and reflective in the circumstances.

It's a bit exhausting. It's a constant moving target that requires consistently refocused aim and repeated reloading. I'm sure there are parallel challenges in other fields and professions, and I'm betting these questions will re-manifest themselves to me in every job I have.

In the meantime, I pray that God will continue to work through my enigmatic students, my wonderfully supportive co-workers, my talented administrators, and everyone else I serve with each day to continue honing and sharpening the focus of my vocation as I grow.

Solidarity, Solidarity; Solidarity Forever

Teenagers can be jerks.

They talk smack behind each other's backs. They lie to each other's faces. They enact social warfare on each other on social media.

They ignore deadlines. They break rules and criticize them upon punishment instead of challenging them beforehand. They disrespect and disobey authority figures. They give no care toward important things and worship leisure activity above all else.

Teenagers can really be jerks.

This is utterly inescapable working in a high school. And going through year four of my young career in high school ministry, I'm getting my heaping helping of this on a regular basis.

I've seen students argue with teachers. I've seen students cheat on homework and tests. I've seen students promise to take actions and totally blow them off.

It's enough to drive a minister, teacher, or administrator to a career change. But as the twistedly optimistic people who we are for even having tried to answer such a vocational call, we come back for more every day, ever the glutton for such turmoil.

The reason why that last glowing ember of that internal fire never fades to a sparkless, smoking rubble is that now and then - sometimes more rarely than others - a student or a group of students shows that they get it. What "it" is can change often, "it" can last just for a brief moment or few hours, "it" can be just a fleeting, superficial realization. But that glimpse of their getting "it" keeps us going.

I never see this more clearly and convincingly than when I get students doing solidarity-based, relationship-driven service. I learned early in my career, from some of the best mentors and colleagues I'll ever have, that solidarity in service makes all the difference.

There will always be parishes that need tables and chairs set up, organizations that need backrooms and storage spaces organized, streets and parks that need cleaning. But it is the organizations that partner students with marginalized people in need of interaction and those that serve with them that fuel the best realizations of getting "it" that I have seen, and help students make the strongest impact on society and in their own hearts.

A few months ago, in an action-packed three days, I had a back-to-back-to-back, a triple-header, of a Wednesday morning at the food pantry, a Thursday day-long Freshmen Retreat, and a Friday build day with Habitat for Humanity.

Students are never more industrious than when they have to bag fruits and vegetables in time for the herd of clients who are ready to roll in. They're never more generous than when there's a giant box of food in front of them and an endless line of hungry people who want them. They're never kinder than when their task for two hours is as simple as asking people how many of something they want and offering that quantity up to them for their boxes and carts. In my dozens of times working food pantries, I have never had students who wanted to leave when it was time to go, and I've never had students who didn't want to come back.

Coming off of that Freshmen Retreat, I missed a Friday in-service day for teachers in favor of chaperoning students to a Habitat for Humanity build site. Complementing some fundraising our parish and school had done for the Pope Francis Home Challenge and its matching fund pledge, we went down to contribute our time and talents in addition to our treasure. When you're standing in the skeleton of an unbuilt house, students don't disrespect each other, rip on each other, or lie to each other. instead, they're relying on one another to hold ladders, pass tools, or reinforce giant sets of heavy lumber. They work together; they encourage each other; they delight in the concreteness, the visual fruits, of their work. They learn from the volunteers who spend their full-time jobs building these houses, and they delight in learning about and meeting the families who come and go to invest their "sweat-equity" into their new house.

The constant renewal for me has come more potently through the theology class I am now teaching. While my responsibilities in teaching middle school feel onerous, like a distraction from my gifts and talents, and like something I'm not especially well-suited to be doing, my Social Justice & Vocations course for our high school seniors has been a godsend.

Our school took the one-trimester course on social justice and the one-trimester course on vocations and hybridized them. Now, seniors take a one-trimester, double-period course that integrates these topics into a beautiful monster who I call "SoJuVo." One of the reasons for our double-period is that it falls at the end of the day to facilitate service outings and experiential learning.

So far, our students have done an urban immersion exercise (a scavenger hunt that simulates the challenges for homeless teens), visited and assisted with operations at a homeless shelter/services organization, created shadowbox art with infirm senior citizens, shared a games-afternoon with active seniors, and spent an activities period with mentally/psychologically challenged people, and we have more opportunities on the horizon (like a full day at the Habitat site).

The students are never better behaved and more respectful and generous than they are with these marginalized people and those who serve them. They are constantly smiling and laughing. They are asking questions and learning about their new friends. They are charitably and patiently playing games, forestalling their own obsessions with the rules of the games or the level of competition (or lack thereof) in favor of laughter and memories. They put their phones away and focus their attention on each other and their new buddies.

It's freakin' beautiful.

And every weekend, following the service outing from the week, students have to write a 1-2 page reflection. They have to report what they did. They have to analyze it from social, historical, and cultural angles. They have to relate it to a Catholic Social Teaching theme or an insight from Scripture. And they have to share how they feel and what action they want to take to respond to it all. And I get to read them, and praise them (well, the ones turned in on time; and the ones that take the time to do it carefully), and share them with the world (check out our SoJuVo blog here!).

As soon as our van and bus pull back into the parking lot - or even as soon as we climb back into our vehicles when we start to depart a service site - they're back on their phones. They're talking smack about each other. They're telling stories, sometimes so unsavorily that you which you could just shake them and tell them to stop.

But for that hour or two every week, part of their education, part of their required course-work, is to spend time with people who society too often ignores. They have to strip away their layers of cynicism and being too cool, and confront those who they otherwise might not want to think about. They get laid bare from their superficial obsessions and their immature preoccupations and have to simply be human, with other humans. How Christ-like.

These experiences are so crucial to their starting to get "it". They need to understand what it's like to confront and embrace the dignity and value of all people. They need to appreciate that we have to opt for and consider the poor and marginalized in every decision we make, especially as it relates to investing our time and treasure. And they have to live out Christ's call to solidarity, to being mindful of all people as our brothers and sisters, whether friend or stranger, whether fully functional or differently abled, whether stable or poor, whether prosperous or jobless, whether well-fed or hungry.

It's awesome to force their hand with this. It's something they want to do, but they won't take the time to do it for themselves. The grace of Catholic schools is that we can integrate these experiences into their education because we value education as something that must also be spiritually formative.

Teaching and practicing solidarity is crucial to their getting "it." Call me crazy (it's accurate), but it's what keeps me coming back for more.

Embrace the Pace

I grab my phone. I open the messages app. I find the person I want to text. And then I start typing.

And pretty often, as I start stitching the words together, the typos start flying. Sure, autocorrect does its best, but when you're texting your wife, your siblings, your close friends, you're not always typing things that autocorrect's understanding of the English language can handle. So then autocorrect miscorrects a not-word into something else, and we've reached the cusp of incomprehensibility.

So there I stand, gasping exasperatedly at the frustration of texting. So I backspace. I tap the red squiggly line. I retype. And eventually a five-second task snowballs into a minute-long debacle.

And I think to myself, if I just slowed down my typing a little then I'd probably make very few errors. I could be more efficient and direct and put my phone down faster. Instead, my fingers move more quickly than my brain (even as I type this, I misspell the word as "figners"), and mistakes cause me to backtrack and try again. I often think slowing down would help things a lot but rarely remember to do it.

Such an adjustment is much more easily said than done. I need to look no further than the day-to-day of my job, where I am regularly rushing tasks, choosing quantity over quality because of the pressure of what all has to get done - rushing a lesson plan to get it outlined and plugged into our school-wide template files rather than taking the time to measure it out carefully with excellent organization; rushing through student Mass ministries assignments and missing conflicts that cause me to assign students who won't be present to do their jobs; starting spontaneous conversations with colleague-friends when I am en route somewhere and not having the patience and relaxed attitude to let the conversation wrap up naturally before moving to the door and forcing it to end.

I feel like this is one of those ideals that hangs over me at work, at home, with grad school, and surely will loom over attempting fatherhood and family. Quality vs. quantity. Doing a lot vs. doing a few things well. Enjoying many things vs. savoring a favorite few.

It's a constant goal, an ongoing aspiration, yet one that's rarely achieved and realized. It will be something to try to continually consider even if never accomplish. But hey, as an idealist and optimist with silly-high expectations for most of my life, it fits the bill.

I was finally getting out for a run yesterday, after kicking that can down and down the road as after-school meetings and too cold of temperatures (if I had a race to train for, maybe I'd be heartier; for now, I don't run if it dips under 25º!) left me with easy excuses to not lace up and get outside.

After I got dressed - tights and long-sleeve, thumb-holed pullover included - I grabbed my phone to line up the podcast I'd listen to while running my 5k. I scrolled to Serial from WBEZ/NPR and found the newest episode ready for consumption - and next to it, also a 2min podcast update. So I clicked to download my new episode for the run but also played the 2min update off the external speakers of the phone while I tied my shoes.

As the familiar voice of Sarah Koenig started talking, I sat down to slip on my running shoes and tie them up. With my attention split between listening and tying my shoes, I missed the knot-loop as my hands rushed through the action of crossing the bows. Then I started over and missed again. I had to stop, drop the laces, take a beat, and then resume my attempts more slowly.

As I eventually succeeded at tying my shoes (hooray!), I learned from the podcast update that the reporters and producers were finding more and more intriguing content related to their season-long storytelling on an American POW. They decided that instead of throwing it all together to add an extra episode to the season, they would stretch out the rollout season and give themselves more time to finish it. Sarah said that if it was worth doing, they felt it was worth doing right, worth doing well. So new episodes would now come out every two weeks while the staff worked to create the right amount of episodes for the season and do so in the best way.

The coincidence of these things was not lost on me as I stretched out and prepared to get my lazy butt out and running. Here was a profound and exemplary case of people embracing quality and proper pace to do something better, to do it right instead of fast.

May God grant us the ability to embrace a pace that keeps our hearts open to loving well and receiving love well from others. Here's to being able to get things done fast when we need to, but also to being able to slow down to get things done right.

This Option Isn't Optional, Dude.

Coming off of winter break, I planned a simple activity to ease my eighth-grade students back into school on the first period of the first day back. We started with our usual journal, and this time I asked them to do a double-journal - first, reflect on your favorite gift from Christmas; then, reflect on your favorite memory from break. I was hoping they'd get some of their materialistic-ness out of their systems and then move to a different level by thinking about people and spending time together.

Man, did they struggle.

They wrote some of the more unimaginative and forced five-sentence paragraphs I've seen. Many of them were very rote and face-value, with all but a few kids struggling to acknowledge the people who gave them the gifts, who knew their personalities, who made an effort to bring them a nice treat at the holiday.

So after that discussion didn't go so great, I transitioned into the real point of the exercise: writing a thank you note to someone who they had mentioned in their journals. I passed out paper and had markers ready for them to create their cards.

Man, did they struggle.

Except for a few who took time write to a heartfelt note, most couldn't get themselves to pick someone and write a few lines of gratitude. A few who got writing wrote the terse, inauthentic things you'd expect while others left mostly blank pages. Some of this was attributable to the return-to-school malaise, but that couldn't explain all of it. I think there's something cultural and/or generational getting in the way here.

It's certainly not uncommon for people to struggle with showing or receiving gratitude. Many of us, me included, tend to get awkward or dismissive of gratefulness, so maybe that leads people to not show the gratitude as much in the first place? It's hard to diagnose the problem all the way.

Personally, I always struggle at Christmas because I am constantly trying to remain a minimalist and keep my materialism low. I don't want more stuff. But there are people who want to get gifts for me, and they want to know what I want or need. I am always torn over how to handle this because I want to stick to my guns, but I don't want to be rude or insulting to my friends and family. Add to all of this that I'm one of those people who's "hard to shop for" as well. I'm quite the handful.

So I try to find some simple things that have hints of need but qualify usually more as wants, or at least as non-necessities. For example, I asked for some running tights to keep to the running routine in Winter (at least when it's above 25º outside), and I ended up getting two pairs of tights plus some pullovers and some other running clothes. Also, the gift cards and checks (my birthday falls on 12/26, making this even more complex but also leading to the frequent overshadowing of my birthday (fine by me!)) that roll in are a nice help.

On the whole, I just can't shake the feeling of excess - all these things make me anxious and evoke a kind of ingratitude, not unlike what I faced from my students. Again, I try to be gracious but struggle. I catalogue the gift cards and work them into the budget. I try on the clothes, pull the tags, and add them to my closet. I go out and pick up a few fun or needed things with the gift cards - chief among them this year were supplies to redo our bedroom closet organization (an eventual success!) and some books to take advantage of the winter break.

But I remain preoccupied.

Fresh off of teaching the Preferential Option for the Poor and Marginalized to my seniors, I have the words fresh in my head - consider the marginalized in every decision I make, individually, communally, and socially. How was the way the holiday went considerate of the marginalized? How had my giving and receiving honored this call?

My wife and I had kicked in extra to the collection at our parish. We had mutually agreed to skip gifts and instead plan a long weekend in the new year, to make a memory rather than get more things. But I hadn't made the effort to put together a food package for the hungry, to go and serve with a group in need, or to buy gifts especially for a group that might go without. I had written personal notes to go with my gifts to co-workers, and I had scaled back my wants for gifts coming to me; however, I still feel like that's not enough.

I like to look for the small signs in day-to-day life, always trying to be attentive to the small voice of God rather than expecting the burning bush to appear.

Heading into travels during break, I indulged in my gift cards to a bookstore and picked up a couple new reads. Usually, I try to get books from the library or to buy them used via Amazon. In this case, I paid the up-charge for the convenience of the new book I could get right away. The very first time I sat down with my new book, I cracked open a can of pop to drink as I read. As the seal broke and the bits flew out, I got pop on the edges of my new book. As the little red stains appeared on the pages, I smiled.

While out of town, I went out for a run and donned my nice, new pullover - a perfect fit in my favorite color and nicer than any I'd ever bought for myself. As I looped back from a lap around a local lake, I hopped on to the sidewalk that led me back home. Along the houses' front lawns were chain link fences. As I cruised along, I was swerving around bush branches and cracks and potholes in the sidewalk, and I snagged my sleeve on the top of a fence. I turned to inspect my elbow, and along my bicep was a healthy hole. As I saw the damage to my brand new pullover, I smiled.

Just now, I added an event to my Google calendar. Two months before Christmas at the end of this year, I now have a reminder to myself to figure this all out ahead of time. Instead of weathering the rush of needing ideas for friends, family, and co-workers for gifts that inevitably distract from the best goals of the season, I want to get out ahead of that all next year. As I work on ideas for these people, I want to have a real plan for myself, too - a plan that honors the preferential option that I teach, that I believe in, and that I could always be living out more fully in my faith life. I want to be able to approach it in a way that honors that belief while also being respectful to the people who want to support me.

Thank you to those of you who took care of me over this past Christmas, birthday, and new year celebrations. I am grateful for your patience with me and the sticks that are up my butt. I promise that I am always trying to figure them out more and more and hope you know that my apparent ingratitude or stodginess comes from a good place. I promise I'll keep working on it. It's even on my calendar.