A Feud with Napkins

by Laura Flanagan

Among the myriad gripes that people seem to have with my generation (the ever-troublesome Millennials) is that we are killing industries by not participating in the consumption of various goods in the same way as our parents and grandparents. One of these supposedly dying industries is that of disposable paper napkins. You probably didn’t hear it here first, but yes, apparently Millennials are killing the napkin industry.

My family was on the cutting edge of this napkinless trend. My parents apparently acted like Millennials well before they raised any. They’re sort of hipster that way. In short, we did not have paper napkins growing up.

The solution employed by young adults today? It’s not complex. They use paper towels instead. This is indeed also what we did 20 years ago. If you had a real mess that needed cleaning, you got yourself a paper towel, but we did not by default grab a paper towel for use as a napkin for every meal. Why? Well, “paper towels are expensive.”



However, I have now married into a family with a strong tradition of napkin use, and my husband is adamant about the need for them within our household. I understand why he is attached to napkins. They are definitely convenient: I have found myself using them daily with a messy toddler. Napkins are less expensive and composed of less paper than paper towels, so we are being less wasteful than if we used paper towels with the same regularity… but I know that in the not-too-distant past I managed to use the “paper towel alternative” with much less regularity than I currently use the napkins.

The throwaway culture is not of Jesus. The other is my brother, beyond every barrier of nationality, social extraction or religion.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) February 15, 2017

I see my own internal struggle with napkin usage as emblematic of the “throwaway culture” to which Pope Francis frequently refers. We use them literally every day and literally throw them away, to the detriment of the environment.

It's the same reason I don't cover my food with wax paper or a paper towel to put it in the microwave (to my husband's mild chagrin). I'd rather clean the microwave (and am willing to let it be generally dirtier than others are comfortable with) than waste a sheet of something every time I choose to microwave some food.

At times, this nagging feeling seems borderline silly or frivolous. Are there not greater concerns about which to worry? Should I be investing this energy elsewhere? Despite this worry, I strongly dislike the moments when I realize I have become indifferent to the quantity of napkins I’ve recently used on a small face and hands. While one can take this martyr’s quote and easily leap straight to his context (the evils of genocide), I think St. Max¹ is still on point here:

The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. And this happens, although the praise of God should know no limits. Let us strive, therefore, to praise Him to the greatest extent of our powers.

A friend asked at a recent gathering if we thought “people” were going to “do anything” about climate change in the next couple years. I understand that she meant that the government and various industries were going to have to implement drastic changes in order to make a major impact in any environmental trends. However, I don’t want to just leave it to the “other.” Permanently changing one’s habits is notoriously challenging, and I’m under no illusions that altering or eliminating our household’s napkin consumption will decrease our environmental impact any more than negligibly. However, if I don’t feel compelled to change my lifestyle at all, why would any major industries think conservation is important enough to engage fully?

In a tiny, tiny way, I hope that considering the world each time I would be tempted to reach for a napkin improves my disposition toward charity in greater ways. I hope this exercise is an example of what Christ meant when he said, “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much,”² and maintains the “delicacy of respect and fraternity,” as Pope Francis exhorted the other day, in my care for our common home.

Ideal solutions are elusive: if I try to eliminate the paper altogether, I’d still have to research whether the water or heat involved in washing a more sustainable napkin option is actually more energy efficient and less wasteful of resources. However, if there is some small change we can make to value the world a bit more, I would like to make it. I would like to praise God in creation to the greatest extent of my powers. While all of us will continue to sin and fall short of the glory of God, we must try, in ways both napkin-sized and paper towel-sized.

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1 ...imilian Kolbe. Also, with respect to the context of his quote, I think the beauty of a true statement is that it should be applicable to situations large and small.^↩

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2 Luke 16:10^↩

Velociraptor Moments

by Dan Masterton

I am a big Jurassic Park fan. Like, I may not win a trivia night on the nitty-gritty of the franchise, but I love it for its over-the-top, paradigmatic blockbuster style. There are just certain flagship elements that carry a timeless weight for me. Some of my favorites?

I love the theme -- the delicate, orchestral lead-in all the way through the triumphant flourishes of fortissimo. Ah, I can see the wide, sweeping shots of those ancient animals roaming their earth again. And the haunting, slightly-broken-music-box remix of the theme in the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom TV teasers plus the expansive reprise in the full trailer only whet my appetite further.

I love the rippling surface of the water cup -- rather than announce the looming presence of the T-Rex with sudden ferocity, the characters instead feel a gentle rumbling that they see manifested in the stillness of a glass of water. It starts to ripple and the disturbance gradually builds in tension until they realize the T-Rex is right on top of them.

I love the velociraptors. While the T-Rex steals the show over and over again, these feisty raptors deliver skeezy villany with great oomph, despite not being your traditional human villain. And a pinnacle of their antagonism comes in a moment of personification, when they are potentially contained away from the fleeing humans “unless they figure out how to open doors.”



In that great moment of cinematic deliciousness, the camera gives us the perspective of our dear characters, as we watch from fleeting safety as a door handle starts to turn, then stutters, and then comes around enough to open the door. The claws, now visible through the cracked-open door, betray that the raptors are nigh, and the persistent little lizard-creatures shove the door open to resume wreaking havoc.

This is the velociraptor moment.

Up to this point, the movie’s characters imagined they were virtually safe, assuming (reasonably so) that these primitive creatures that lacked thumbs or primate brains could not break through a closed metal door to continue their hunt. Unfortunately for them, the raptors are “clever girls,” and find ways to adapt their predatory instincts to pursue these crafty humans. This moment, when they manage to turn a door handle and enter a room, brings the raptors to a new level of threat for the stranded humans.

My wife, Katherine, and I have witnessed a lot of velociraptor moments in this first year of our daughter, Lucy’s, life. While Lucy is not a dinosaur, her journey from being a tiny creature that only eats, sleeps, and poops to becoming one with a much wider and more diverse array of ability has come with many milestone moments. As she discovers and develops new skills, Katherine and I witness these velociraptor moments that signify how life for her and us will never be the same.

Above: At about 6 1/2 months, one of the first times
we caught Lucy standing up with help.
Below: after Lucy learned to roll over,
the exploration zone widely increased.

Once Lucy’s vision deepened beyond a few feet, we could no longer open the door a crack to peek at her without being caught.¹ Once Lucy could roll over, we could no longer leave her chilling on a blanket for a minute. Once Lucy could eat solids and understood how we eat, we could no longer depend solely on breastfeeding and bottles to feed her. Once Lucy could crawl and stand to “cruise,” ² we could no longer let her play unconfined. And any day now, once Lucy can walk, our whole lives are over. Just kidding, mostly.

Seeing her develop these new abilities is awe-inspiring and beautiful. Unlike the velociraptors, whose evolution is truly terrifying, Lucy’s velociraptor moments affirm that God made us fearfully and wonderfully, full of amazing potential and immense capability. Seeing her realize what she can do and then watching her execute those new things shows us of what right now seems like limitless potential.³ We love walking with her as she discovers herself and explores God’s world with us.

And these are the moments I wonder about for myself. I imagine my infancy and toddlerhood likely had a lot of similar moments, and I can recall major realizations in my youth, teenage, and young adult years. And I can see similar moments in my teenage students on our retreats and service outings. ⁴ But I don’t want the book of velociraptor moments to end for me, just because I have surpassed the ages of more intensive development.

This is why I try to read, and not just idly but to push myself toward long-form journalism pieces in my internet scrolling and honest-to-God bound-and-published books. This is why I find ways to jam in regular exercise, most recently in the form of a collapsible stationary bike that removes the excuse of “I can’t leave the house and leave Lucy to go run” from my arsenal. This is why I go to Mass every Sunday, and why I dove into the parish invite to join a small-group (Thursday morning bible study with retirees, y’all!).⁵ These things force me to keep reflecting and seeking growth.

Adults have most of the physical development complete; however, the mental, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development can continue indefinitely… if we choose to sustain it. For adult me, I know I am a better father, husband, brother, son, and friend when I am spiritually grounded. I love how the shape and structure of living my Catholic faith Eucharistically can and will pull me forward, closer to who God created me to be and closer to Him. I believe that my life in the Sacraments, my engagement in my parish and communities, and my openness to give and receive love among my family and friends fuels me onward. And it’s from all of this that my next velociraptor moments will come.

I already know how to open doors, so nothing hiding in that next room is safe from my advance. So what’s next?

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1 The first few weeks (even months) of caring for a new baby come with consistent insecurity about the child continuing to be alive. As the baby sleeps soundlessly (between cries), one is left to wonder if the baby continues to breath and live, so these peeks are necessary until the self-security builds.^↩

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2 Cruising is the technical term to describe an infant using stationary objects as support while they walk, i.e. couches, tables, chairs. Infants can cruise way before they can walk, and the practice helps them gain balance and coordination as they prepare to walk independently.^↩

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3 Virtually all parents gain some degree of an implicit bias toward their children’s abilities. No matter how humble a parent’s heart may be, parents always -- outwardly or privately -- hope (or even declare) that their children are advanced developmentally. Katherine and I are certainly guilty, so we choose to active mock this instinct by sarcastically lauding Lucy’s presumed “advanced” abilities.^↩

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4 For example, in leading service outings, my goal is to try to transition teens from “it feels good to serve” or “it opened my eyes to appreciate what I have” to get to a higher/deeper level of “it was powerful to encounter and connect with new people.” ^↩

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5 Our pastor made a wonderfully simple and realistic suggestion at the start of this year’s Lent: find one extra thing to do at church or go to at church this Lent. The parish is offering increased confessions, a Wednesday evening daily Mass, and special evening prayers on top of the usual stations of the cross observances and Holy Week liturgies. Cool stuff from Ascension Oak Park! ^↩

When a Neo-Nazi Wants to Be Your Congressman

by Tim Kirchoff

At the beginning of this month, I attended a screening and discussion of the film Selma held at a local Baptist church and co-sponsored by my home parish. The film had many moments that gave me pause, but what stuck with me most came from the discussion afterwards.

I have lived in this same town for most of my life, but most of the other participants had been living here for several decades longer, and could remember when the town had a well-deserved reputation for racism. One person recounted a story of a black plumber he’d hired who was afraid to go to the local hardware store to pick up the parts he needed to complete a job. Another reported that there had been a cross burning in front of a black family’s home as recently as 1990.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Chicago the most segregated city in America, and my home town is part of that sprawling metropolis. It wasn’t really surprising to hear that the town had a racist past, but the stories made it all seem that much more real.

An example of the pictures shared
on his official campaign website.

A few days later, the news broke that Arthur Jones, a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who lives the next town over from me, is the presumptive Republican nominee for the local Congressional race. My initial impulse was to ignore him: he stands no chance of winning in this heavily democratic district, and he is clearly just a perennial candidate who runs in the hope of getting attention for himself and his ideology.

But his presence is hard to ignore. This despicable man lives a proverbial stone’s throw away from me, and he has enough local support to get on the ballot.¹ Clearly, this area’s racist past is not entirely behind it. Although it has ceased to exercise meaningful political influence, explicit racism is not dead.

This sort of unambiguous evil ought to meet sharp opposition… but neo-Nazis and other advocates of white supremacy seem to thrive on attention regardless of whether it’s positive or negative, and that alone makes me hesitate to give it to them.

Arthur Jones has no chance of winning even if the Democratic primary² goes to the far-left challenger over the pro-life incumbent, and the Republican Party apparently plans to make their rejection of Jones’ candidacy absolutely clear by pouring resources into a write-in candidate.

Nazi is a cultural shorthand for absolute evil, something that must be resisted at every turn. But as long as this sort of overt racism is a marginal force in politics and culture, I don’t think it’s necessary for me to spend any more energy to oppose them than I have in writing this blog post, unless Jones plans a rally to turn the district into the next Charlottesville (at which point I would feel obliged to join in the counter-protests) or his supporters start threatening minorities (which is more of a matter for law enforcement anyway).

This style of overt racism may have been a significant problem more recently than I thought, and it may persist as a marginal force well into the future, but in America today, Nazis are not the face of racism. Racism today is not the same as when Dr. King fought it. The problem is not explicit discrimination or overt racism, but subtler, systemic forms of racism—laws and institutions and biases that victimize minorities, often without directly or intentionally targeting them. And so although Nazis are almost literally begging for attention today, I don’t think the form of racism they represent is what I ought to spend my own time and energy trying to understand and fight against.

The subtler forms of racism are more worthy of attention, but they are also much harder for me to identify with certainty. Subtle racism, as suggested by the adjective, is not begging to be noticed. I wouldn't know where to begin looking for it in my city government, which unanimously enacted a Welcoming City³ ordinance last spring. If only in that way, my community seems to have come a long way in the last few decades. But if nothing else, the Selma viewing and subsequent discussion showed me that racism is always just a little bit closer than I want to believe it is.

The major change in the apparent culture of my hometown doesn't actually mean that it's free from the subtler forms of racism, nor does my capacity to notice and reject obvious forms of racism mean that I can pretend to be "woke." At this point in my life, I'm not prepared to recognize and combat systemic racism; the best I can do is listen to others as they communicate their own perspectives and experiences (as Erin Conway did in her previous blog post).

It's largely pointless to seek out confrontations with attention-seeking racists like Arthur Jones or Richard Spencer, and I have only the faintest idea where to begin in understanding and combating the subtler forms of racism that continue to have deleterious effects on minorities. In short, contemporary race issues leave me feeling frustrated, confused, and powerless-- but maybe that's the right place to start.

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1 Undoubtedly some people who sign his petitions just think that the incumbent should get a challenger and don’t ask questions or research his positions beforehand (how often does one actually think to ask someone gathering signatures to run for office, “Are you a Nazi?”), but the 91 people who gave him write-in votes in the 2016 general election must be aware of and probably agree with his despicable views.^↩

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2 I was already planning to take a Democratic ballot primarily for the sake of this race. For more than a year now, the Democratic Party has been in crisis as to whether it will give pro-life Democrats a place at the table, or whether the party is willing to further alienate pro-life voters at a time when the Republican Party looks less appealing than ever. It’s almost as if both sides of the aisle are conspiring to create an opening for a moderate 3rd party. ^↩

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3 Cable news would call it a sanctuary city law, but its advocates insisted on the term "welcoming city," since "sanctuary" carried negative connotations in their minds. ^↩

A Frank Conversation with The Carpenter’s Kid from Nazareth

by Rob Goodale

Dear sir: I don’t understand you, man.

I hear your words -- how you greet people, how you make them feel welcome. I hear how you know exactly what words every single person most desperately longs to hear. How you comfort. Reassure. Challenge. Provoke. Say yes. Say no. Make demands. Offer second chances… thirds, too, when necessary.

I watch the way you move -- with a quiet ferocity, a mission of a man, every step carefully measured and precisely placed. Every sinew and fiber of your being sings of your purpose, which is at turns perplexing and terrifying. Pointing to people and calling their names, asking strangers for help, fiddling around in the dirt. Not a moment or movement wasted. Every moment and movement wasted.

I watch the way you don’t move -- content to sit at the table longer than anyone else, waiting for things the rest of us cannot imagine. Remaining dumbfoundingly still, receiving each wandering, tear-filled eye. Hiding out of sight, just beyond the door, somewhere in between sleep and wakefulness, just in case a lonely wayfarer realizes they’re looking for you.

I feel the way the entire room gravitates toward you -- whether you thunder and shake with the tempestuous force of every storm literally ever all combined into one, or rest with a placid serenity that would make the glassy surface of a country pond at dawn blush for causing a scene.

I feel the way five minutes with you carries me six and half nautical miles farther than I have any business sailing in this weather.

I feel the piercing, blinding shame that screams through my heart as I see my reflection in your eyes and recognize, in a moment of unspoken understanding, that I have failed you every day of my life.

I feel the even more humiliating ache in my bones borne from the equally unspoken understanding that, in the end, you do not care about my failures, so long as I am not too proud to see them and greet them like friends who, in another life, used to be enemies; to let you take them and do unimaginable things with them, things that will surely sting a bit and which the neighbors may find horrifying.

I hear. I watch. I feel. And I do not understand a speck of it.

What are you doing? Where are you going?

And (this question burns ineffably in my soul)

May I come along?

Here. Now. Love.

by Jenny Klejeski

“Do whatever He tells you.” - John 2:5b

Mary made this simple request to the servers at the wedding in Cana. Her words feel very significant, particularly when taken on their own. In these words, I often hear a grand call, the emphasis falling on the word “whatever.” Whatever thing Jesus tells me to do, I must do; whatever sacrifices He calls me to make, I must make; whatever life He calls me to, I must live.

This is true. We owe God, literally, everything. And we should do whatever He tells us to do.

However, as I recently meditated on this episode in John’s Gospel, I thought about the recipients of this command and how perplexed they must have been. And, frankly, they were probably annoyed, too. Here, the waitstaff is facing an embarrassing catering crisis, and this woman gives a cryptic request without any explanation that they should do whatever her son tells them to do. Sure, lady.

And then comes Jesus’ actual request: fill up 6 stone basins (20-30 gallons each) with water—an arduous task, even by today’s standards, to say nothing of their lack of running water. This is the point at which I would say, “ummm….I’m going to need to speak to my supervisor.”

Now, I don’t intend to take liberties with the Scripture. Perhaps all of the servers reverently and piously followed Jesus’ requests with no questions asked and with hands folded devoutly; the Gospel does not indicate any protests from those involved. On the other hand, at this point in the Gospels, Jesus hadn’t shown Himself to be anyone special. This was to be His first (recorded) miracle. And here He was requesting something that was tedious and probably seemed pointless.

Regardless of what the servants were actually thinking, we do know that they fulfilled Jesus’ request. They were obedient. And what came of it? A glorious sign of God’s presence in our midst—a sign of God’s reign.

There is a story of St. Teresa of Calcutta in which a Jesuit priest named John Kavanaugh visited her in the sisters’ Home for the Dying in Kalighat. He asked Mother Teresa to pray for him that he would have clarity to know what God wanted him to do. Her firm response was “no.” He was taken aback; it seemed to him that Mother Teresa had an abundance of clarity for God’s will in what she was doing. She said, “I have never had clarity. What I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”

When considering our vocations, we often want clarity. We want to know exactly what it is that God is calling us to. This likely comes from a very good intention to follow God. However, it is also linked to a desire, in our brokenness, to control. We want to know what is coming next. We want to see the plan. We want to know that we’re serving a purpose and going the right way. And when this is not clear to us, it is easy to feel discouraged, frustrated, and despondent. It may feel that we are missing our calling.

Caryll Houselander addresses this very fear: “Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us, Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.”

Through the mundane, the painful, the frustrating, the seemingly pointless, say yes anyway. Nothing is wasted if we love. It is from small obediences that God calls forth great abundance. Do not be afraid that you are missing your vocation or that you ought to be somewhere else. Trust that your vocation is wherever you are.

Rather than longing for the whatever that we want to be called to, let’s ask for the courage to listen for the still, small voice saying, “Here. Now. Love.”

He's Got Our Back

by Dan Masterton

While my parents and family taught me the heartbeat of Eucharistic life¹ and my daughter, Lucy, and wife, Katherine, draw me forward in sustaining it, my Eucharistic living was crystallized during my four years as part of the Notre Dame Folk Choir.

At the University of Notre Dame, we are blessed to have a beautiful basilica on our campus. Beside the golden dome, the towering architecture of our amazing church shoots high into the sky, co-anchoring the skyline of our campus with the gleaming icon of Mary. Our basilica depends upon a robust stable of ministers, including the basilica choirs. The Folk Choir’s chief purview was the 11:45 Mass, and ascending the spiral staircase up to the choir loft each Sunday inflamed my heart potently and with great ease.

Our choir was musically strong, but it was built on more than just tone, harmony, and dynamics. Members auditioned not just by singing but by demonstrating their faith and their inclination toward ministry. ² The choir was a community, a group that prayed together at every rehearsal, that dined together regularly, that facilitated friendships with deeper roots than dorm parties did. I always thought our fabric was well described by the title of a 1990s album the choir recorded: Prophets of Joy. When we toured, it was definitely neat to see new towns and cities, to go sightseeing, and to travel with friends, but what’s more, it was a way to canvass and take in the Church. I loved walking into new churches, seeing the parish halls, chatting with different locals, and especially visiting with the host families who would take us into their homes. Sharing Masses, concerts, workshops, and more with these local communities was a wonderful reciprocal blessing between our choir and these parishes.

It was being a part of this choir of faith-filled people that taught me huge lessons about ministry, chief among them that one’s ministerial efficacy is not based solely on one’s individual ability levels. Ministry instead is about giving of yourself, however you best can, as gift to another, and receiving them charitably in return. The truths at the heart of our community came out beautifully in our traditions, and it’s here that the depths of the Eucharist were further revealed to me.

Our signs of peace were notoriously thorough. Up in the close quarters of the loft, we’d inevitably hug our way well into the first notes of the Lamb of God, during which we were supposed to begin descending the stairs to go forward for communion.³ But even then we weren’t done.

The choir risers upstairs were bifurcated by the organ console and its many pipes, and each half a spiral staircase down to the nave. As each half of the choir emptied out of the its side’s narrow stairwell, the lines would move toward the center-back of the church, where the baptismal font resides. As we moved around the font toward the center aisle, we’d always briefly stop with the person from the opposite side and share one more sign of peace in front of the water before we continued forward into the communion line. Some might say that’s all quite gratuitous; I’d agree... and I loved it anyway.

As I walked forward, I’d scope out the pews, certainly locating family members who may have been in for the weekend and otherwise curiously scanning to see if there were any friends, dormmates, or other familiar backs-of-heads in the pews. Then, we’d inch forward, take our turns in receiving the Eucharist, and then round the corner to walk up the side aisle and toward our spiral stairs back upward. From our spot in the rear balcony of the church, we could never really see people’s faces. However, once we had received communion and turned to walk back, for a few seconds, we could look face to face at the faithful gathered for Mass.

By this point, I would usually be grinning quite cheesily. Contemplating the diversity of stories, sins, motivations, etc. that people carry to Mass has always enthralled my spirit, and as I peered toward the faces of the faithful there in the basilica, stacked tightly into the pews, my smile continued. From undergrads to families to visitors in the opposing school’s colors, ⁴ I loved this hodgepodge of people who gathered for Mass. After a few months of taking this holy stroll, I realized that my gratuitous grin not only reflected the love in my heart for this mess of people gathered together in Christ, but also directly proceeded from the Christ in the Eucharist. The very person of Jesus who I was consuming as I smiled was dwelling in me, present gracefully behind my grin.

But some Sundays, we had to stay upstairs for communion. Certain occasions packed the basilica even more than usual, and logistically, it was just too complicated and long to get the whole choir down and back for communion. So, a brave choir sacristan would take a loaded ciborium and wiggle his or her way through the tightly packed choir to serve everyone at their place.

Here's the basilica choir loft,
as pictured with our alumni choir who reassembled with our directors for our wedding in 2015.
It actually looks much different now, as they've installed a new organ and reconfigured the loft. 

The neat thing about this option was that, in addition to the basilica’s amazing high altar and tabernacle, we had a little tabernacle up in the choir loft. Tucked away behind the choir risers and sort of beneath and next to the massive organ installation was a smaller tabernacle that could reserve a small vessel, just enough to serve the number who packed the loft. This mini tabernacle was a feature I had noticed as I became familiar with the loft, but not one I thought much about initially.

Then, at the end of our choir tour freshmen year, the seniors all took their turns saying their farewells to the choir. While these speeches inevitably included funny war stories, inside jokes, and embarrassing jabs at our director, the farewells usually came with their share of wisdom and advice, too. A senior named John took his turn, and he dropped the wisest insight of the night.

John⁵ and I, like the rest of the taller choir members, were typically assigned spots in the back row or two of the risers so that the shorter members had a clear sightline to the director. Our director was quite specific about making sure our shoulders were perpendicular to the altar, especially since the risers were angled such that we’d naturally face toward our director.⁶ If we made sure to stand as he directed, our faces and voices all pointed forward, out over the congregation, toward the mics, and toward the altar.

Having spent lots of time in that back row of the risers, John highlighted the positioning we all took as he filled the risers, and brought up that little tabernacle. While all of us faced out toward the people and sanctuary, singing our hearts out, that tabernacle and its contents dwelled behind us. As we sang, John explained, Jesus had our backs.

It was such an insight. We often found ourselves quite tired from schoolwork, sick from our dorm-incubated colds and flu bugs, hoarse from football games and weekend adventures, ragged from the demands placed on the choir. But the team always pulled it together to do great music ministry at countless Masses, concerts, and workshops. And the simple geography of our choir loft emphasized the truth of our Eucharistic life as a community of faith: Jesus had our backs.

The Eucharist isn’t meant to be just an ephemeral moment of encounter when one reaches the end of an aisle in church. The Eucharist is the pulsing heartbeat of the life of faith. It becomes more palpable when its Blood can flow through all parts of life, when we allow our faith to suffuse our friendships, our hobbies, and our whole selves. By letting this community become my family and the place where I made my deepest friendship, my choir helped me build a Eucharistic life that made Christ the smile on my face and affirmed that Christ is the one pushing me forward. As we seek to humble our hearts and love better, living Eucharistically illuminates how Christ has our backs.

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1 Last week, while juggling Lucy from arm to arm, I gave a talk of Eucharistic reflections to some parishioners participating in a morning of faith formation. No matter how many credits I’ve accrued in theology, I always feel slightly inadequate to the more naked moments of catechesis. When a room of people looks forward with the seeming, even if not real, implication that the person speaking “has the answers,” I feel a bit intimidated. I know I have a lot to say to even the more difficult questions, but I don’t gravitate toward that platform and worry I’ll displease or mix up a curious question-asker. Put me in a retreat small-group or an off-the-cuff one-on-one, and I’m totally game. So I usually approach these kinds of engagements more in that vein, and seek to talk with groups in more intimate, personal terms than speakers who may be more inclined to what I might call “loud and crowd” settings or otherwise high-stakes contexts. With all due respect to the more polished theologians and those preachers who relish the big crowd, my remarks gravitated toward identifying the roots of my Eucharistic faith and peace.^↩

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2 This reality was a lifesaver for me. I am an above-average, more-than-amateur singer, but an accomplished soloist I am not. My imperfect musical ear and lack of technical know-how puts an upper limit on my abilities. I am at my best when standing in the midst of fifty other singers, with whom I am striving to blend and balance. My strength is in ministry, in sharing my faith and helping others to share theirs, and this part of my heart is what drew me to the choir and the choir to me. ^↩

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3 Practically speaking, it made the most sense. Our instrumentalists and a soloist would stay upstairs to lead the first communion song while we went forward for communion downstairs. The first song would typically be a simpler song with verses done by a soloist and a simple refrain that we could sing without sheet music as we traveled. Then, as we came back up, we’d reassemble and join in from upstairs again as the song continued. Usually, we were all back in place by the start of the second song, which could then a more typical choral song since we had our binders back and could see our director.^↩

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4 Our wonderful, gregarious, and sometimes dry-humored rector at the basilica would make the same announcements with the same wording before every Mass. But those six or seven Sundays a year that followed a home football game came with an extra joke was he welcomed our visitors: “And to anyone who’s still here from USC/Michigan/Navy/Purdue/Michigan St./insert team here… … welcome.” ^↩

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5 One particular memory from standing in the back, just in front of John: during the Our Father, he’d put his hand on my shoulder since to his right was just the wall of the organ. When we reached the “For the kingdom…” part, during which people often elevate their clasped hands, John would often pinch a portion of my shirt and lift it slightly off my shoulder. Classic. ^↩

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6 He even had a special hand gesture that looked sort of like the “hang loose” fingers with a wrist rotation that I was conditioned to know meant I needed to rotate my body slightly. ^↩

The God-Hole

by Dave Gregory

“What have been your experiences of the mysterium tremendum?” asked Bert, a fellow in our faith-sharing group of twenty- and thirty-somethings. We had been praying with Luke 5, where Jesus invites a few dudes to “catch” people after a miraculous haul -- a passage that seems to repeatedly come up in my life for a variety of reasons¹ -- and Peter’s reaction to Jesus became a focus of our lectio divina reflection.

“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” exclaims Peter when Jesus performs the somewhat trivial miracle of catching some fish. By “trivial,” I do not mean insignificant or unimportant, but it is a bit silly at first glance, is it not? It’s not as if Jesus morphs one substance into another (as with the wedding in Cana) or reanimates corpses (as with Lazarus) or heals bodies or drives out spooky demons. He’s just enhancing the natural world a little bit, drawing natural animals from a natural place where they naturally ought to be.

This fishy² occurrence unsettles Peter, whose spontaneous declaration simultaneously recognizes Jesus’ authority and his own unworthiness. We searched for the fruit contained within this statement, aided by Jesuit James Martin’s chapter “Gennesaret” in Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and Bert brought up Rudolph Otto’s³ insight that all things genuinely religious originate from an encounter with Mystery, which in turn prompted his question: where had we encountered Mystery? Which such encounters have sustained and fed our understanding of God?

I can point to a number of experiences in prayer and in ministry that reduced me to tears of joy or fear and trembling, wherein grace so overwhelms that I cannot help but celebrate and give thanks: making the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius over the course of thirty days in Gloucester changed the way I view and engage all things, and of course the adventure of teaching offers the typical rollercoaster of consolations and desolations.

This said, when desolation strikes, when the crushing inability to feel God’s presence dominates the lived day-to-day, how does one proceed?

The Hole that Is God

Over the past few months, I’ve felt a certain lack, or absence of God. I dunno if recent struggles have qualified as depression (caused by “first world problems,” I must admit), but I’ve thought about seeking out some therapy if the chaos of life continues to result in questioning my mental healthfulness. The best thing to cure me of a funk, I think, is to stick to routine, but the past number of weeks have been anything but routine. Thankfully, the madness of moving both myself and my parents has more or less subsided, and I think things are beginning to balance out.

My fiancée’s dad, Keith, recently discussed the notion that perhaps encountering God isn’t just about fullness and joy and completion, in light of the existential reality that human life isn’t all rainbows and glitter and butterflies. Keith referenced a sermon ⁴ he heard, about how God is the abyss: perhaps we are so focused on discovering God in that which is ostensibly and predictably meaningful that we freak out when the gaping and painful absence gapes a little bit more widely and becomes noticeably more painful. This got me thinking about the “God-hole,” as he put it.

To posit that the act of feeling abandonment is nothing less than feeling the reality of God...that presents a much trickier conundrum. The seeming impossibility consists in equating these two opposites, or at least identifying the Presence as dwelling within the absence.

The Hole⁵ Purpose

What does this God-hole do for us? Why did Saint John of the Cross write so beautifully about the dark night of the soul? Why did Mother Theresa’s journals reveal that for the majority of her ministry she felt the night so oppressively close in? Read any mystic or authentic theologian, and the same theme rears up over and over again, incessantly. Read Shusako Endo’s Silence or Karl Rahner’s Encounters with Silence, and you find authors and theologians struggling with the abyss.

Although I’ve engaged this absence before, I never realized that I’ve approached it mistakenly. When I ain’t feeling the love, I’ve stored up memories of engraced consolations -- in the words of Ignatius -- to hold on to, but the hole is a stark reminder of my own creatureliness. It forces an awareness of my own profound and total lack of self-sufficiency. It reminds that literally nothing I “have” -- neither the place or family I was born to, nor the friends I’ve made, nor my bodily health, nor my job, nor my romance -- remains under my control with any absolute certainty.

And so, the Suscipe of Ignatius becomes all the more real when directed at the God-hole:

Take, O Lord, and receive my liberty, my understanding, and my entire will. All that I have and call my own, You have given to me as untold gift. To You, Lord, I return it. Do with it according to Your will. Give me only your love and your grace, and I shall be rich enough and desire nothing more.

The confusion of the apparent paradox subsides: making this offering of self to the God-hole transforms it into a Presence. Nothing, mysteriously, becomes Something.

The Sinner and the Stumbling Block

The thought occurred to me last night that the words of Peter to Jesus in the Lukan call narrative, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” loosely echo and parallel the words of Jesus to Peter in Matthew 16: “Get behind me, Satan!” A note on translation here: Jesus isn’t calling Peter the devil, but using the Hebrew term satan, which means “obstacle” or “accuser”; if we read “Satan” as such, the words immediately following make a lot more sense, where Jesus directly calls Peter a stumbling block. Peter is apparently focusing too much on worldly things, understandably refusing the possibility that his dearest friend will be murdered. Refusal becomes the obstacle.

Naming my personal sinfulness and insufficiency opens up the path to cognizance of the sheer gratuitous nature of all that fills my life. Peter’s identification as a sinner on the banks of Gennesaret lead to discipleship, whereas his all-too-human refusal leads him to deny Jesus. When I am stuck in the rut of perceiving the God-hole solely as a hole, when my vision is so limited that I fail to understand it as the restlessness, the unquenchable longing and yearning for eschatological completion, it’s then that I become an obstacle and a stumbling block.

Like Peter, my focus hones in on my own “human concerns” rather than on the “concerns of God,” as Matthew quotes the Nazarene. Human concerns still possess legitimacy, but as I’m plummeting through the God-hole, grace becomes so proximate that it challenges my willingness to fall freely.

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1 I know I’ve written about this before, but this was in the context of another faith-sharing group. I know. Two faith-sharing groups. I need people to keep me on the straight and narrow. ^↩

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2 AHAHAHAHA GET IT?!^↩

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3 A philosopher of religion and theologian whose life bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Otto posited that all religion begins with religious experience, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the earliest humans and every human thereafter experiences the numinous, the awe of that unknown which is beyond. C.S. Lewis has a lovely description of this concept in The Problem of Pain, wherein he articulates fear of the mysterium tremendum as being more like fear of a ghost than fear of a tiger. Fear of the former provokes spiritual awe, whereas fear of the latter consists of concern for bodily safety. ^↩

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4 A pastor by the name of Christian Piatt has written a fair bit on this, and although I’ve never read his work in any depth, this is the dude whom Keith referenced.^↩

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5 Excuse the second pun, please. I’m just in a mood.^↩

Where do I go from here? A White Woman Wrestles with Race, Part 1

by Erin M. Conway

Disclaimer: ¹ This piece is not intended to be an exhaustive conversation on race or an authoritative guide on how to solve the racial tensions that exist in our society; in fact I don’t believe either of those things is possible. Race is a challenging topic on which I certainly do not consider myself to be an expert. What I offer here is an attempt to work through some of the thoughts and emotions that have recently been on my heart. As a white woman, I can offer you only the perspective of a white woman with a particular set of experiences.² I hope, like Saint Ignatius, you enter into this reading presuming my good intention even if my words or understanding fall short.

Where is God at work in my life?
How have I responded to God’s presence in my life?
How am I being called to respond now?

These three questions frame the Ignatian examen, a reflective prayer created by Saint Ignatius that challenges us to discern God’s presence in our lives and in doing so, ask how next to embrace and live out our call. When I taught at Xavier College Prep in Palm Desert, CA,³ the entire student body paused for three minutes each day after lunch to silently reflect on these questions. And while this intentional conscious practice of the examen has not carried over into my life beyond Xavier, the questions are always floating in the back of my mind, permanently coloring the way I think about my life and the world.

It is this subconscious absorption of the examen that motivates my post today. I hope to walk through my recent series of muddled thoughts on race, privilege, and kinship through the lens of the examen’s first and last questions.

Where is God at work in my life?

In Ignatian Spirituality, emotions are important indicators of God’s presence. The encounters I will share below are ones that have left an emotional footprint on my heart. They continue to push to the front of my consciousness, unwilling to be forgotten, and as such, my faith compels me to believe they should not be ignored.

Recently, I’ve felt inundated by a series of images, writings, and conversations that have challenged me to imagine what it might be like to be black in America. Being a white teacher in a classroom of primarily black students means that bumping up against the reality of a life that is not mine is a daily occurrence. And of course, the proximity of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Black History Month to one another on the calendar makes conversations about race more prevalent this time of year, but it’s certainly possible to walk through these moments without allowing yourself to truly be affected by them.

I cannot (and will not) discuss every single one of these moments below in detail, but I do want to highlight a handful of encounters that haven’t been so easy to push aside. Something about these moments invites me to sit with them, to further discern what God is saying to me.

Encounter #1: The Sunday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my best friend texted me a link to an article about graphic designer Daniel Rarela who created a series of “memes” in honor of the holiday. In an effort to prevent what he called the “whitewashing” of MLK, Rarela superimposed quotes from MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail over a variety of images -- some dating back to the Civil Rights Era, some from more recent #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations. His intention, he explained, was to “shatter the false image of a Martin Luther King who everyone loved, who never got arrested, was universally popular and made zero privileged people uncomfortable enough to want to kill him.”

 

I hung Rarela’s images around my classroom the next day and invited my students to finish the sentence “Right now I feel…” after they had time to silently engage with the photos. As they so often do, my high school seniors turned the tables on me, asking me how I felt after viewing the images. I explained that I felt challenged in particular by MLK’s condemnation of the white moderate, who (as can be seen in the image) “prefers a negative peace (the absence of tension) to a positive peace (the presence of justice).” I shared with my students my very real fear that although I like to think of myself as one of the “good white people,” deep down I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if I’m doing enough. I don’t know if I’m going about it in the right way. I don’t know if my desire to be liked by others leads me to seek the absence of tension rather than the presence of justice.

Encounter #2: After weeks of keeping it in my Netflix queue, I finally decided to watch Dear White People… And while I could write page after page on my reactions to the show, there was one particular moment that affected me on an visceral level. The show, for those who are unfamiliar, follows members of the black student unions at fictional Ivy League school Winchester University as they try to decide how to respond to a blackface party on campus. In the closing minutes of “Chapter V”, Reggie, a recognized leader in the campus’s black community, finds himself in a disagreement with his white friend who said the word “n****” while singing along to a song at a party. The disagreement escalates and spreads beyond the two students until the cops are called. Upon arrival, they immediately zero in on Reggie, asking him if he is a student at the university, and even after both he and several other students (at least one of them white) confirm his enrollment, the officer asks him to show him his student ID. When Reggie refuses, the officer pulls his gun.

This moment, the visible fear that encompasses every fiber of his being, the look on Reggie’s face as he stares into the barrel of the officer’s gun, knowing his life could end in an instant, is something I cannot shake. And I can’t erase the image of a weeping Reggie with his back to his dorm room door, broken and scared, his life forever changed. I have never known this fear. I will never know this fear, but I know that many others do and will.

Encounter #3: The Friday following Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I accompanied our entire senior class to a talk given by Nikole Hannah-Jones, MacArthur fellow and investigative reporter for The New York Times Magazine. Hannah-Jones has written extensively on the racial segregation that exists in our public school system today and how this segregation damages all students, but black and brown students in particular. The longer black (and brown) students remain in segregated schools, the further they fall behind their white peers academically. Intentional racial integration of schools, Hannah-Jones argues, is the only thing that has been proven to decrease the disturbing racial achievement gap that exists in our country. As evidence for this, she cites the fact that when mandated school integration was at its peak in 1988, the racial achievement gap in the United States was at its lowest point ever. As schools have rapidly resegregated, the achievement gap has followed suit - white students continue to pull ahead, black and brown students to fall behind. ⁴ The reason for this is simple, Hannah-Jones says. Being around white kids gets you what white kids get: more experienced teachers, higher teacher retention rates, more funding, a wider array of class choices, more field trips and extra-curricular activities, the list goes on and on.

As Hannah-Jones described the the struggles and deficits that primarily black and brown schools face, I couldn’t help but notice that the school she was describing sounded an awful lot like Saint Martin (where I currently teach). I was struck by the uneasy feeling that although we believe as a staff that we are offering our black students (and others) a better educational option than their local public schools, our classroom demographics aren’t much different. We are not offering our students an integrated learning environment. I struggled once again with MLK’s notion of the white moderate - are we doing enough? Are we seeking justice in the most effective ways?

Encounter #4: I experienced this final moment just a few days ago when I watched the most recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy. This is not a normal part of my weekly routine (I’m not sure I’ve watched a full episode of Grey’s since Season 1), but again, I believe this was God at work in my life. For those who didn’t see the episode, the staff at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital are charged with treating a young black boy named Eric who was shot by police trying to enter his own home. Having lost his house keys, police spot 12 year-old Eric climbing through a window of his own home and when he reaches for his cell phone, they shoot him. And while this story line in and of itself is horrifying and speaks volumes about the fear America carries of young black men, the scene that brought me to tears was one that followed. Faced with the reality of Eric’s fate, Dr. Miranda Bailey and her husband Ben decide they must have “the talk” with their 13 year-old son Tuck. This talk is not the one most of us received as teenagers.

In the scene that follows (you can watch it here), a frightened Tuck repeats the following words back to his parents while his hands sit on the back of his head: “I am William George Bailey Johnson. I am 13 years old and I have nothing to harm you.” The scene continues as Bailey and Ben say to their son, “If your white friends are saying things and mouthing off, know that you cannot.” In this moment, my reaction was once again visceral. The stark difference of what it means to grow up white and not black in America was on full display. Never have my parents sat me down and told me what to do if I am pulled over or detained by police. Never have I considered the possibility that any run in with police (of which I’ve had none) wouldn’t end with me using the fact that I’m a young, pretty white woman to my advantage. Never once have I thought that I could end up dead. This is a reality that is not mine. But this is the world that many of the young men and women than I love live in each and every day.

All of these intensely emotional encounters have lead me to the next question of the examen:

How am I called to respond now?

But before I wrestle this final question of the examen, let me give some context.

I am a 30 year-old white woman who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, a town I jokingly call “the whitest suburb in the state of Ohio” but which does, in all actuality, fall into the category of “super zipcode.”⁵ When I left Hudson at age 18, I attended the University of Notre Dame, a school that, although it provided me with a myriad of life changing experiences for which I will always be grateful, cannot boast to have placed me into classrooms with students whose lives before they arrived in South Bend were much different from my own.

My life has undoubtedly been one of privilege and quite honestly, one of unconscious segregation. Before I began teaching at age 22, I would be hard pressed to describe many meaningful encounters with black men or women. I am deeply aware that I can’t ever pretend that I know what it is like to be black in America.

What I can (and want) to say, however, is that I carry a deep love for the black young men and women I’ve taught over the years both in Baltimore and now in Cleveland. What I do know is that teaching these young men and women has forced me to examine my perception of the world and confront my own privilege. What I do know is that teaching black young men and women has irrevocably changed me for the better: it has expanded my compassion and has forced me to think critically about how “real” my reality is.

So where do I go from here? How am I being called to respond?

I can no longer stay silent. I feel called to use what I’ve learned about my own privilege to help others see theirs. I feel called to use this same privilege to project the voices of my students into places their voices don’t normally reach. Their witness has transformed me and I pray it will do the same for others.

In Between the World and Me (a must read for any and every one), author Ta-Naheisi Coates writes that “the fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts.”

I don’t share this quote to perpetuate the myth of the white savior.⁶ Although we (white Americans) may be responsible for creating the need for liberation, I do not to any degree believe that white Americans alone can “fix” our culture’s brokenness when it comes to race. I share Coates’s quote here because I believe it speaks to the notion of kinship that lies at the heart of the Catholic faith. He challenges all of us - white, black, brown, etc. - to see each and every human being as our brother or sister, to acknowledge our unavoidable kinship and to work together to create the world God had in mind when she created us.⁷

To me this quote affirms my belief that white Americans cannot pretend that conversations about race are not about us. White Americans cannot pretend that the so-called “problem of race” is out of our hands. We have to have this conversation. We have to enter in to the messiness of this world. Our nation can’t move forward without it.

I plan, in the next few weeks, to start this conversation. I hope you’ll join me.

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1 It should be acknowledged right off the bat, that I’ve borrowed this title from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?^↩

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2 I am indebted to my fellow Restless Heart, Dave Gregory, for writing about his particular experiences first. You can check out his thoughts here.^↩

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3 For more on that, check out my first Restless Hearts post.^↩

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4 For further reading on this topic, check out the Hannah-Jones article “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.”^↩

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5 This metric, created by the American Enterprise Institute, ranks zip codes based on their per capita income and college graduation rates. Those termed “Super Zips” fall in the 95th to 99th percentile. Basically this means that I grew up in one of the most elite suburbs in the country (translation: white).^↩

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6 The best, and most challenging, description I’ve read about the white savior complex can be found here. ^↩

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7 For more on kinship and why it matters, check out the greatest book of all time (in this writer’s opinion): Tattoos on the Heart by Father Greg Boyle, SJ.^↩