Wednesday Mornings at the Pantry

by Dan Masterton

Yesterday was the kind of "work day" that I look forward to: a day when I take students out for encounter-based service.

Almost every month for five straight school years, I've taken kids to East 71st Street, in the Manor Park neighborhood of Chicago's south side, where the good people of St. Columbanus Parish gather as a community. I first came to their 52-weeks-a-year Wednesday food pantry with no firm plan, having never connected with anyone by phone ahead of a service-learning immersion I was planning. I showed up with a van-load of teenagers, and four hours of teamwork later, a lasting relationship was forged.

Often, students are enticed by the chance to skip class, then as they head on the trip, lightly interested in helping others, and then as they do the work and meet the people, begging to not leave, or at least begging to come back to this place very soon. Something about the combination of a simple, repeatable task -- bagging a fixed quantity of a certain fruit or vegetable, shifting boxes and unloading items, offering double-tied plastic bags, etc. -- and brief but meaningful encounters with the parish volunteers and food pantry clients alike hooks the students who serve and makes a claim on their hearts.

Each time we go, a few seemingly simple things make me think. No matter how many times I see them, they catch my eye and ear over and over again.



Differences in philosophy. Some clients will definitely try to game the system. There's a bit of luck or chance in what you come away with, as quantities are more restricted in the early going of the two hours but clients can take more toward the end. However, some will try to pass through the line twice, something that the parish volunteers gently police. We had one man try to do this, and one of the ladies reminded him he's welcome back half an hour after closing to check for extra food, but right now he needed to step away.  On the other hand, some clients insist on taking only that which they know they'll use. Some will ask for a bag with fewer pieces of produce in it. Some will decline a particular fruit or vegetable that they don't eat. Some will ask what something is and ask for advice on how to prepare or cook it. There's quite the range of feelings and approaches toward this opportunity to shop for one's groceries.

"That looks bad." A volunteer offers a piece of produce, and a client judges it to be undesirable. I sometimes think, "Just take it. What's the big deal?" I'm the kind of person who doesn't need to pick a certain piece of pizza or get that particular slice of a cake, and I'll even eat something that fell on the ground. To me, it's not a big deal if I don't get the best looking piece of food. However, in this case, I'm not the one picking the food. And I will admit -- as would most of us -- that when it comes to produce, we discriminate thoroughly and select the one fruit or vegetable off the stand that looks just right, even by criteria that may be abstract or difficult to pin down. So shut up, Dan. Let them pick.

"Give me that bag." A volunteer offers a pre-bagged set of onions or apples or oranges out of a giant box, and a client prefers a different bag from the mountain of bags below. Again, I am tempted to not understand this. Again, I slow down and think. When talking about encounters with people who beg, I offer students four basic options: give money, give something (food, water, etc.), initiate conversation, and/or do nothing/ignore them. As we evaluate the options, we talk about how giving a specific item can feel like direct help toward a need, but we have to also acknowledge how it removes the choice from the person, which could slight their dignity (I ultimately recommend initiating conversation as a minimum and going from there). When choosing what to eat for lunch, most of us (excepting the uber-indecisive among us) would probably prefer having the open option to go where we please and eat whatever we want. So, too, I wager that most people in need would like to retain their autonomy in shopping. Plus, they don't know that the volunteers take the time to count out a specific amount of produce for each bag before tying it to ensure that all the bags are virtually the same.

Conversation is tricky. Serving with teens is fun because, for the most part, they are naturally social and conversational. Without much prompting, they find some comfort level and try to at least greet everyone. When I talk to the teens during and after, they always notice the variety in reception. Some clients don't respond -- they keep their head down or gesture wordlessly or look right through you. Maybe some people are ashamed to be there? Maybe they just want to get in and out? Maybe they're going through an especially rough patch and don't want to interact with people? Other clients respond -- they greet the kids back, thank them for helping, or even offer a blessing. A few clients, when asked how they're doing, will famously respond, "Oh, I'm blessed!" Then there are even others who create their own dialogue. They cruise through the lines as if they're the mayors of town, greeting other clients, welcoming volunteers like they're the hosts, and brightening the world step by step. The variety is neat, and it makes palpable the mutuality and reciprocity that encounter-based service invites. We come not to do something for them but to do something with them, and while we might think we're doing something for them, they're doing something for us, too.

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Even after almost five years, I don't know any of the clients' names, but I recognize a lot of their faces and styles. I think it'd be disingenuous to claim that I feel at home there or that I'm "one of them." But the regularity of spending Wednesday mornings with these parish volunteers and these community clients has a comfortable familiarity to it that feels like a relationship, even if unusually so. I appreciate the chance to spend time in their neighborhood and be a neighbor to all of them.

Filthy Catharsis

by Jenny Klejeski

Perhaps you are aware, if you’re inclined to follow such things, of the ongoing feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West (and, apparently between Taylor Swift and most people). I, because I am not inclined to follow such things, was unaware until a few weeks ago. My younger (and cooler) brother who helps me keep up with the better--or at least more interesting--parts of pop culture wanted me to watch the lyric video for Taylor Swift’s new song “Look What You Made Me Do.”

I’m not qualified to offer an in-depth commentary on the song or the story behind it, ¹ but it’s quite obviously a dark turn of style and content for Swift. She even coldly states in the song that the “Old Taylor” is dead and satirizes her past self as seeming naive and fake. The overall tone of the song is vindictive and sinister as she throws shade at just about everyone, including herself.

It’s not my purpose here to make a judgment about Swift or her music, per se. The reason I bring it up is because I was reminded of it during the Gospel reading at Mass a few Sundays ago.

Jesus says, "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” ²

It struck me that, though what Jesus commands is common sense, it is so incredibly countercultural. In an age of celebrity worship, it seems there is nothing people enjoy more than the schadenfreude they feel at someone’s downfall. If you are in the spotlight in any capacity--whether as an athlete, a politician, a religious leader, an actor, a musician--there will likely be little compassion if you slip up. And even if you don’t, someone will probably make up a story that you did.

While this tendency is not peculiar to our generation, ³ I would still argue that there has been an explosion of this type of content with the advent of television, and now social media, which provide us with entire structures dedicated to lurid busybodyness. Tabloids, reality shows, and social media outlets all stand to make money on our desire to know who’s cheating on whom, who just got checked into rehab, who’s got a kinky past, who came out as gay, etc., etc., etc.

It’s not unlike our compulsion to rubberneck at an accident scene. We find it difficult to look away when something bad is unfolding, but rarely do we stop to see if we can help.

Why do we do this? Why are people so obsessed with watching the ruin of other people?

I’m sure there are a number of psychological studies on such phenomena that could give us an insight, but I would like to posit that this propensity simply stems from a desire for catharsis. We live in a broken world with fractured relationships and fragile peace, and we often carry the weight of that within ourselves. We seek to relieve some of that pressure by blaming. Brene Brown has a short, entertaining video about blame in which she describes blame as “simply the discharging of discomfort and pain,” which has an “inverse relationship to accountability.” Basically, to blame gives us a sense of catharsis.



Even though we want to experience emotional catharsis, we are often not willing to deal with our own relationships or our own authentic emotions; rather we ogle the mistakes or misfortunes of others. There is a kind of voyeurism to it. We engage in a kind of unholy cultural scapegoating that distracts and numbs us, that offers us some sort of release, while disregarding the human dignity of the people involved. In some way, it’s unsurprising to me how pornography has become such an epidemic because, really, it’s just the same process applied to sexuality.

Our culture runs after license (what is mistakenly considered “freedom”) with a voracious appetite; the right to do whatever we want, whenever we want, with whomever we want is guarded at all costs. This culture, however, is also devoid of forgiveness. If you make a mistake with your “freedom,” it’s game over. Once your reputation is dead, there is no resurrection, except perhaps a kind of undead existence as you find ways to pull your enemies down with you.



Cardinal Francis George once wrote, “The world permits everything and forgives nothing. God and the Church do not permit everything but forgive everything.”⁴ The truth offered by the Church, though, is one of true freedom. Not permission to do whatever we want, but a freedom that leads us to our real telos. And when we sin--as we all have--we are offered mercy, offered resurrection. Christ is the one Who gives us true cleansing, real healing, genuine catharsis. Rather than leering at the sins of others, and airing our grievances loudly, let us cast our cares upon Him Whose yoke is easy and burden light.

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1 In preparation for writing this post, I attempted to educate myself about the Swift-West vendetta via youtube and wanted to gouge my eyes out after about 4 minutes.^↩

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2 Matthew 18:15^↩

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3 In Confessions, Augustine describes a similar phenomenon, both in his love for the theatre (Bk 3, Ch 2), and in his friend Alypius’ love of gladiatorial games (Bk 6, Ch 8). He cautions against both things, concluding that they are both empty spectacles that cause us to experience negative emotions for no particular end.^↩

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4 There are a number of variations of this quotation floating around that make it difficult to verify, but the sentiment still stands.^↩

Like When One of Your Kids is Sick

by Dan Masterton

I wrote about the Preferential Option a few months ago. My central point was and is that Christ calls us to consider people who are poor, vulnerable, and/or marginalized in every decision we make individually, communally, and socially, and I talked about ways that we can concretely live out this call, especially as so many people are under attack with the actions of our current presidential administration. I invite you to read my post from April, which is kind of like volume one of what I want to share today. The things going on the past few weeks have further magnified the importance of this Catholic Social Teaching, and I wanted to share my reflections as so much bad news continues to wash over us, let alone those who it has more directly impacted.

Let me start by sharing an analogy that I use (and probably many other teachers) to teach the Preferential Option to students: consider a parent who has several children, one of whom is sick while the others are all well. What does the parent inevitably do with and for their sick child? They increase the amount of attention and care to the sick child -- doctor visits, picking up and administering medicine, giving the kid a pass on chores and responsibilities, staying home from work and school to rest, letting the kid sleep in, bringing treats and food to them in bed, etc.

Does this change in care and attention mean that the parent loves the children who are well any less? No, it simply means they have acknowledged the difficult situation of one of their children and endeavored to provide extra support until the child is well, like their siblings. Then, presumably, the parents can revert to giving generally equal care and attention to all children.

This is the heart of the Preferential Option. We must look at our world and society and acknowledge those people who are poor, vulnerable, or marginalized. We must then look at ourselves and our decisions and consider how our actions can incorporate people who may otherwise be forgotten or neglected.

Recently, President Trump decided to retract President Obama’s executive order that enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), effective in March 2018. These 800,000 people are undocumented because their parents brought them here outside the legal immigration system when they were children. While the jury is still out in the debate over those laws and what to do with people who have broken them, the children of these people must not be punished for it. Supporting and advocating for their right to apply for and receive work permits (for which they must pay $500 every two years) to study and earn a living here is a just, reasonable way to accommodate these people in America. Backing the young people who are covered by DACA is opting for the vulnerable.

Then, a preponderance of natural disasters struck our continent. As Hurricane Harvey battered the gulf coast of the US, Hurricane Irma (with Jose and Katia looming, too) followed by hammering the Caribbean islands and Florida coast, and an earthquake also devastated a region of Mexico, all this while wildfires blaze in the western US. Myriad people suffered as their homes and belongings were destroyed, and dozens of people died in the disasters. The best of the human spirit emerged as millions of dollars, truckloads and warehouses of supplies, and hours and days of volunteer time were poured into the relief efforts. Supporting those affected by these disasters is opting for the vulnerable.

Now surely there are differences between these things, as a legal, political battle and a natural disaster present unique problems each their own. However, the human element is the common thread, and arguably the most important one. Whether people are affected by their undocumented status due to their parents’ decisions and the laws on the books or people are affected by the winds, rains, and/or quake that hit their hometown, the focus must be on how these realities impact the people involved. This is the essence of the Preferential Option, and this is the prophetic nature of our social teaching. Our priority must be considering how our decisions and actions can respond to those who are vulnerable or marginalized. And this call directs us on how to love well, regardless of the circumstances.

Young people who are undocumented by no fault or decision of their own deserve the chance to live and work without fear of deportation and discrimination; we must opt for these people by voicing support for the program, supporting lawmakers who advocate for it, and encouraging openness to those in business and education who will consider them as employees and students. People who have been impacted by natural disasters deserve help in rebuilding their lives without having to worry about whether or not they can afford everything that’s necessary to regain stability; we must opt for them by offering donations of money and supplies and supporting governmental efforts to facilitate the recovery.

To me, these are not identical issues, but at my heart and in my faith, the rationale and response come from the same place. We must opt for those who are vulnerable or marginalized by making decisions that explicitly include them. This call cohesively informs a just response to so many different kinds of challenges that we may face. I pray that our preferential opting for immigration reform, recovery and relief work, and so much else will steadily clear the margins of our society and move us toward community that can better include everyone.

Why I Write in Books

by Rob Goodale

My mother is a grade-school librarian. Mom, I am sorry for what I’m about to do.

Contrary to what my mother and every other self-respecting and responsible librarian across the globe teaches to young people, everyone should be writing in their books.

A quick note to appease those tasked with preserving and shepherding books to the youths: fear not. Nobody should write in a book that came from a library; I am not a monster. Whenever possible, you should buy books, especially if it’s a book you love. If you don’t own a particular book, do not write in it unless you have the express written consent of Major League Baseball, or the owner of the book.

But wait, you say, confused. Why would I write on the screen of my e-reader? Dear friend, I daresay you know how I will respond: get yourself a real book.

E-readers are fine, if a bit over-fancy, and I will admit that they are quite helpful when traveling, but there is no substitute for the feel -- and, crucially, the smell -- of a well-loved book in your hands. I am also of the opinion that there is no finer interior decoration in the world than a well-stocked bookshelf, and it would look kind of dumb if said bookshelf were completely empty except for a sad, lonely Kindle lying forlorn on the second shelf.

Now that you’ve procured for yourself a real, honest-to-God book with real life paper pages, the next and second-most important thing to acquire is, of course, a pencil. Some might favor the indelible mark of an inkpen. I find this a bit too serious for my tastes; a pen will work if you’re in a pinch, but when you don’t quite get the words right in your margin scribbles on the first try, or when a significant jostling turns your underline into a strikethrough, it’s nice to be able to erase and try again.



After that, it’s really about offering a sort of running commentary, sometimes using words. Be an active reader: when you find nuggets of grace or pithy barbs of brilliance, underline them; if they are exceptionally long, or if your hand is exceptionally unsteady, use brackets. If a passage makes you think of some other book or something your friend once said in his patented off-the-cuff way of saying astoundingly radiant things, then say so in the margins. Should you be reading what my friend Sean would call “one of those put it down and stare out the window in contemplation for a while books,” then make a little mark of your choosing, put the book down, and stare out the window in contemplation for a while. When the author uses a word you don’t understand, look up a definition and write it; if he or she puts words together in an unintelligible sequence, draw a confused-face emoji (or, for the old fashioned among you like Jenny K, a question mark).

It is all a sort of offering -- perhaps only to your future self when you come back around to your familiar old friends again. Far sweeter than that, though, is when you pass the book off to another. Your brackets and your margin doodles and your stars and exclamation points all become shared experiences of wonder and wisdom and grace, which is just the best.

Imagine the experience of walking through the halls of Hogwarts for the first time, or discovering a secret passageway into another world in the back of a mysterious wardrobe, or hearing the Vagrant Preacher from Nazareth reveal for the first time that he is, in fact, the Messiah, and that those who wish to follow him must carry their own cross. Then imagine sharing these experiences with others through the magic of tiny scrawling in the margins of books. I do believe you will begin to get the picture.

Seeing Helps Believing

by Dan Masterton

You ever have a story that you’re just itching to tell? You bring it to the fore of your memory. You run through the details to get everything straight. You rehearse some of the punch lines to get the wording just right.

Then, the moment comes. You get the attention of the group. You lay out the context. You start to unload this great tale.

But you sense something is awry. Your audience is not riveted. Why isn’t everyone on the edges of their metaphorical seats? Why are mouths not agape at the gravitas of this yarn I’m spinning? How come cell phone videos aren’t recording this impeccably orated story as it unfolds live?!

So you trudge onward to the end of the story, hoping the tide will turn but knowing it probably won’t. And then you reach the end, and exasperated and disappointed you seek to extract some bit of pitiful ovation by ruefully declaring, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”

It’s the great admission of storytelling defeat. Craft your delivery as you might, something about the story just didn’t translate to hearers when it was told in retrospect. For whatever reason, the impact of what you experienced was best felt live, and became diluted by the distance of time and space. The story couldn’t recapture enough of the moment.

This feeling comes up often between my wife, Katherine, and I as we catch each other up on our days at work.

I might talk about a lesson I taught, a conversation I had with a colleague or a student, or a liturgy we celebrated. And Katherine, having been a student, having attended Catholic school, and even having seen me with my students at sporting events or other school activities, can imagine the scene a bit and follow along pretty easily.

Katherine works as an oncology nurse. She may talk about a new admission she received, a conversation she had with a patient and/or their family, or even a medical intervention she implemented or advocated for. I’ve picked up a fair deal of lingo as she’s shared these stories, and I’ve been a patient in clinics and hospitals before. But there’s an upper limit on what I can imagine or how closely I can follow along.

While teachers can bring a friend or family member along into their work world now and then, nurses are limited (and you can substitute other professions accordingly). Due to HIPAA laws for privacy and confidentiality, sterility precautions in hospitals, safety and security measures, and a host of other things, there is a firm and clear asymptote on how much I can really know and visualize as she narrates her nights back to me.

At a certain point, my follow-up questions and her eloquent wit max out. And sometimes this prompts her to say, “I wish you could just see me in action.” And I do, too. I know she’s proficient, adept, intelligent, compassionate, and so much more as she works. I know she’s living out a concrete vocation, answering a carefully discerned call to combine her intellectual gifts toward science and medicine with her innate ability to care for others. At some point in her stories, you just had to be there. And I cannot be.

I think of good ol’ cliched “doubting Thomas,” to whom Jesus declares, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29). I don’t really discredit Thomas for how he handles the situation, and I think his honesty and passion are admirable. I agree with Jesus that such a leap of faith is valuable and spiritually important. Yet I know as a human -- and as a teacher who has learned about multiple intelligences and different types of learning -- that seeing something can deepen one’s understanding and processing in a unique way.

Over Labor Day weekend, Katherine and I took our baby daughter, Lucy, down to Dallas to visit Katherine’s family. Lucy is five months old, and her neck and body control is to a point where she can sit up sturdily and independently for a good while. So with warm Texas weather and a backyard pool at our disposal, we decided to try Lucy’s first swim. I picked up some pool diapers, and we loaded Lucy up into her swimsuit and summer hat for a first dip. It was so fun to help her wade in bit by bit, to tow her around in circles, and to float her on her tummy and back. It was even funnier to teach her how to splash, as she is not coordinated enough yet to splash without getting water on her own face.

Later that day (and again later that night, and yesterday, and this morning, and so on), I opened the videos that Lucy’s Uncle Matt took for us on my phone. While I enjoyed seeing Lucy’s facial expressions and clumsy bodily maneuvers again, while I relished the smiles and laughter of Katherine in the water beside Lucy, I couldn’t help but notice myself.

I am the dad in the water. I’m the one holding her up as she floats. I’m the one supporting her while she splashes. I am Lucy’s dad.

As the son of a father who brought a handheld camera to all family events, I grew up watching and rewatching home videos, shot dutifully and gratuitously by my dad. The retrospect and reminiscence and nostalgia is deliciously palpable when we sit down to watch. We found great consolation recently when dad unearthed the first video he shot of me after I came home from the hospital -- my mom is sitting relaxedly on the couch, my older brother climbing on, over, and around her as she gently holds me and talks casually to my dad. It’s amazing. I love my parents, and there’s these beautiful recorded sights that remind me how they love me.

I’m that guy for Lucy. And for Katherine. And for whatever additional children we may be blessed with. I am dad. I already knew that; I know that. But stepping outside myself and seeing myself do this dad milestone with my daughter on the video took my heart and mind to a whole ‘nother level.

Maybe you had to be there? I’m glad I was, and I pray I always will be… poor Lucy… poor Katherine!

The Prayer of a Somewhat Newly Engaged Schmuck

by Dave Gregory

My Intimate Love, Source of all I hope and dread,

In some sense, every prayer I’ve ever prayed has led me to this one. And this prayer will lead to every prayer I will pray from here on in.

First of all, forgive me for posting a prayer on a blog. I know it’s in direct violation of the commandment to pray in secret, but whatever. Some prayers need to blathered into the public sphere. Second, forgive my affections for long titles to these things, and pardon my floral verbosity. Just because this one’s more thought through, doesn’t mean it ain’t real.

You know I’m not a big believer in petitionary prayer. I know you know that I regard asking you for things, or for graces, or for healings as a bit, well, trite. On the other hand, I do believe that sincere petition does deepen my capacity to love those I pray for, or even to love myself a little bit more… or get in touch with my brokenness and desperation, which I so often forget and am loathe to confess. I still get all judgy when I hear people pray for things, or ask for healings, or really any sort of material aid. In my hubris, I like to think I’ve become holy enough that I don’t need to petition. How silly that is. Still though, Interstellar was right, methinks: love is the one thing that transcends space and time, and my whole religious imagination is built on this belief, which sometimes teeters too often into the realm of mere intellectual assent and meaningless consolation. All that said, I still need to petition every so often...

Now that a ring and engagement photos have made this relationship a bit more real, I need to ask for some stuff. Because I’ve got some fears, and I’ve come to know that fear is always the tail of the Enemy, but I also know that naming and bringing these fears to light weakens that tail’s grip wound around my throat.

I fear that all the ridiculousness of wedding planning will distract us from the real work at hand. I cannot help but be scared that the process of buying, buying, and more buying, this descent into consumerism, will draw our attentions more to ourselves than to those around us. This liturgy, and the subsequent party, aren’t so much about us, as they are a celebration of your love and the loves that have given us who we are. Grant us the grace to remember that.

I fear that I’ll be so exhausted from that weekend that I’ll need weeks to recover. I fear that I might get a bit too sloppy and start gyrating around columns, as I did at one high school friend’s wedding. I fear that my penchant for serenading former college roommates and groomsmen with Taylor Swift (like, the good old stuff) will weird my new family out.

I fear that living with another person, that sharing the same bed with my future wife, might be too much for me. Or, better yet, for her. I’ve become so used to sleeping alone for three decades that imagining anything other than solitude fills me with terror. Garris ¹ used to tell me, when we shared a hotel bed during various trips, that I kick in my sleep. I hope that Sarah’s able to rest in such close proximity to my flailing limbs; she thinks a queen bed will suffice, though I remain unsure. I fear that Sarah will come to find my sleep apnea machine so terribly unsexy that sharing a bed with it becomes a thing of blandness. I mean, it’s hard to spoon someone with plastic headgear strapped around my furry noggin. I hope that she’s able to come to grips with that all-too-human necessity, and won’t resent my inability to nuzzle my head into her neck during cold winter nights. The fear of sharing a bathroom with a girl, as immature as that sounds, also weirds me the eff out.

I fear that changing baby diapers smeared with crap will make me dry heave. And that emptying a Diaper Genie will make me vomit. I fear that one day I too will need diapers, and won’t know who to turn to. I fear that whoever does so will do so without compassion, and that I will wither.

I fear that I’ll get bored. I mean, I will get bored. And lonely. I don’t know how or why this will happen, but I know it’s built into my DNA, this regrettable inevitability. Marriage is no guarantee against loneliness, after all. I’ve learned how to turn loneliness into solitude, I think. But loneliness while living with Sarah might be a different beast entirely. I fear that the monotony of existence will bring resentment, that sex will become so routine as to become undesirable. I fear that so many years of believing I would be celibate have conditioned me to not really want sex so terribly often, or that the biological need for sex will deepen a sense of loneliness when our desires for intimacy are not in sync. Despite this, I pray that sex itself becomes an act of prayer, a liturgy of sweat and silliness, such that any and all sense of self becomes simultaneously forgotten and deepened. I ask for the grace to undertake infinite acts of generosity that I cannot foresee, even when I find myself disinclined to do so. Give me the courage to overcome my navel-gazing idiocy, the disposition to revel when revelling is called for.

I fear that all the hair I shed, and the consequent dust bunnies that tend to collect in corners, will frustrate Sarah. I fear that when I tape them to her sleeping body that she won’t appreciate the joke. I think she will. At least, I hope she’ll laugh more than when I gave her a couple hundred Disney villain stamps for our save-the-dates.

My hopes and thanksgivings remain nebulous, and impossible to articulate, for they are not based so much on lived experience, but upon ideals that I don’t want to dissolve. Forgive me for sounding cliche here, but I cannot muster the words for anything else.

Help us to make our marriage about something more than ourselves. May we recognize our labor as ministry, as something that restores justice and equity and joy to our world, even in the most minute of ways: with children, with friends, with colleagues, among those we serve. May we evangelize, not in the sense of drawing converts into our Church, but in the sense of invisibly bringing Christ to the world and the world to Christ. Grant us the grace to witness Heaven and earth kiss, and to rejoice when we behold such sacramental moments.

Grant us the grace to approach our vows, standing before the altar, in the midst of a cloud of witnesses, mindful that we counter a culture that believes such vows are built on fleeting emotionality. Help us to live the covenantal promise each moment, even and especially when emotions run cooler. And when our existences become bathed in the lukewarmth of the quotidian, grant us the patience to enjoy our immersion into the perfectly ordinary. To discover real joy in it, even.

May we find sainthoods that are quiet and undramatic. Our engagement photo session, terribly unrealistic, the product of fabricated perfection, does not really paint any sort of accurate picture of what our relationship actually consists of. Rarely do we traipse around the wilderness in formal clothing, and rarely do I imbibe four shots of rye whiskey in immediate succession before getting my picture taken (forgive my consumption). But the real work of our mutual redemption will be, I suspect, infinitely distant from such culturally-expected machinations. Nobody else will see it. I hope it is all the more joyful, for we won’t be trying to be something we’re not.

Sarah and I become the keys to unlock one another’s salvation with this matrimonial bond. When one of us dies, may the other look back on his or her existence with nothing but gratitude, firm in the conviction that the relationship has entered a new stage and has not ceased with the termination of a heartbeat.

When that moment comes (for it will be the moment we’ve been living for), may memories rise up from the depths, our hearts aching with recollections of whiskies and ridiculousness and puppies and dinner parties and road trips and lazy days and our children and our honeymoon and our first night as a married couple and our save-the-dates and our engagement and our first kiss and our first date and our first letter and our first OKCupid messages. May she or I feel the other’s gaze, when death arrives, and may that gaze burn. May we continue to pray for one another when that impenetrable veil hides the glorified from the not-yet-glorified. May that presence, forged over decades, still be felt.

For now, I find myself filled with thanksgiving, as has been the case for the past two years. I wish I could write an epic poem as Dante did, for Sarah is my Beatrice, the luminescent mirror of your love. Then again, I suppose Dante wrote the Commedia so that the rest us don’t have to. Nevertheless, I imagine that some hellish and purgatorial flames await, but I pray that I can keep her in my sight, drawing me ever closer to you.

Thank you for giving me someone so unfathomably beautiful that my fifteen year-old self could never have dreamt of someone more perfect. Thank you for gifting me with someone who puts up with all my nonsense and vulnerabilities, and even my vulgarities. Thank you for letting me love you through all these years, for all that has resulted from that love has led me to Sarah. I am undeserving, and may my life be a prayer of gratitude in response.

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1 Editor's note from Dan: Garris is the name of Dave's mother. For those who have not met her, she's amazing. For those who have, Dave's simply saying "Garris" suffices... as you were... ^↩