I’ve moved a lot over the past eight years: the District of Columbia to Syracuse to Bolivia to the Bronx to Syracuse to Maine to New York City to California to Oregon. The frenzied stretch between Syracuse and Maine was all thanks to the bopping around that comes with being a Jesuit novice, and a strong dislike of East Coast cities’ sensory overload prompted my move out West. My general transience has at long last come to an end, methinks: a couple months ago I moved into a first home.
My fiancee and I celebrated receiving the keys by fervently exchanging saliva on the living room floor in the absence of furniture. It occurred to me that this marked a change in basically everything: my nomadic existence was finally coming to an end. I vocalized to Sarah, lying on the hardwood floor as the gas fireplace blazed, “We’re gonna start a family here!” She laughed, and will probably be a tad frustrated with me for this public confession. Sorry, Sare-bear.
Although Sarah isn’t moving in until we get married in June (we are traditional, wholesome, Catholic folk, after all, though the aforementioned make-out sesh might lead some to assume otherwise), she’s begun to make her mark on the building, and I mine. We’re fighting little battles of taste and decor, making compromises. I have shed dustbunnies all over the bathroom floor, where they have collected en masse; I find them rather funny, and refuse to vacuum them for the time being. Sarah was putting my deodorant and hair crap1 and comb in the drawer whenever she came over, but recently acquiesced to having them live in what would otherwise be a makeup organizer. I hung a marvelous icon (a rendition of Andrei Rublev’s Troitska) from an artist friend in our dining room, and ordered a cute hand-embroidered sign from ETSY informing bathroom visitors, “Please don’t do cocaine in the bathroom.” Sarah has placed tiny myrtle trees on the kitchen counter, only one of which has died so far.
The Liturgical Heartbeat of the Past Decade
High school and college proved themselves to be stabilizing forces in my life. A miserable experience throughout elementary and middle school left me generally friendless. I started practicing legerdemain as a means of escaping the crushing loneliness that came with attending the school that “School of Rock” was filmed at.2 Contrary to my expectations, learning magic tricks did not make me any cooler in the eyes of my pubescent peers, who remained obsessed with sports and wrestling. I could never philosophically justify chasing balls around defined spaces, and therefore rendered myself an outcast from the inner circles of elite middle school cliques. My all-guys Jesuit high school, in total contrast, gave me a community of men who would eventually become college roommates, lifelong friends, and groomsmen. College offered a Catholic community to whom I will forever be indebted; although Georgetown is indeed ever so slightly more secular than Notre Dame, it had a supremely committed and vibrant group of papists. It was there that I attended daily Mass at 11:15pm with an eighty year-old Jesuit whom I had heard was rumored to be the inspiration for The Exorcist.3
Although my social circles shifted and my majors changed (biochemistry was simply too practical for my liking; I was looking for something a little bit more useless that would render me unemployable by the standards of free market capitalism), that nightly liturgy became the heartbeat of my collegiate experience. As he showered, a heart attack killed Fr. King the summer after my junior year, and I stowed away the cassock and surplice I had worn each night for two years, because I would never acolyte for him again. Thankfully, a few Jesuits took on a nightly 10pm Mass, and the forty year-old tradition of a late night liturgy lives on at Georgetown.
In retrospect, my entering the Jesuits was in large part an attempt to maintain some reality of these stabilizing forces: faith-sharing groups, liturgical routine, and counter-cultural Christian communities in which I had so firmly planted myself. Daily Mass became coupled to the Liturgy of the Hours, and time became sanctified. The heartbeat that so grounded my collegiate experience inhered and deepened, even growing stronger.
And so, when the fates and my disobedient nature and my novice master colluded to have me leave that world in which I felt so comfortable, a real sort of wandering began. The heartbeat faded, and the business of a teaching schedule rendered me unable to continue partaking in the Eucharist quite so regularly. My whole prayer life consequently dislocated itself, and to this day I have been unable to resume the practice of Examen-ing daily, or praying with Scripture regularly. Even more painful, I lost those folks with whom I studied, worked, worshiped, and labored.
The Pilgrimage of Real Life
Catholic and social communities simply don’t make themselves readily available in the real world. Once the Jesuits and I parted ways, I wouldn’t so automatically be given a tribe to call my own. Adulthood began to sink in, and I could no longer delay the inevitable loneliness that arrives with a one-bedroom apartment. Although religious life does certainly provide an unconventionally difficult and disciplined lifestyle, it did provide me with many of those things that imbue a human life with meaning: labor, relationships, ritual, so on and so forth. At the time, I largely took them for granted, because I had no alternative comparison as a 22 year-old.
For a few months I lived with my parents as I applied for teaching positions, attended a Dominican parish in downtown Manhattan, and dipped my toes in the waters of New York City’s rapidly expanding young adult crowd: a “Love and Responsibility” weekly summer series consumed one evening each week and hundreds of young adults converged at St. Patrick’s cathedral for Mass and drinks monthly. Many of these young adult New York transplants hungered for a significant other; these groups were, I thought at the time, little more than a middle school mixer with liturgical and religious pretenses.
July came, along with a job offer in California. Uprooted from all I ever knew, I moved to a desert, only to find that those who tend to move to the desert attend desert churches: old people4 in their final years of life. After three years of dissatisfied hopping between three different parishes (I know, I’m the worst), a couple friends and I started a young adult thing, which took off with a group of approximately ten regular attendees from a region of 400,000.
Thankfully, being a schoolteacher, I found myself in the midst of other schoolteachers. School became our church: each classroom a chapel, each student a tabernacle, each shared meal a eucharist of sorts.
Aching for Third Places
I spent my first number of months in the great Northwest without many friends outside of Sarah’s. The folks I teach alongside tend to be older, with families of their own, and they are unable to welcome a newcomer into their circles given these already planted roots. Sarah and I hunted for a young adult community and found one at the oldest church in Portland: a small Argentinian collection of missionary priests dedicated to the New Evangelization has developed a thriving young adult scene. We made connections, hit it off with some folks, and now meet regularly with seven other individuals to break bread and discuss theological treatises and our faith lives. In addition to this, I find myself in an ecumenical men’s group coordinated by charismatic Catholics. I’ve even gone so far as to pick up the hobby of my teenage years, joining a local group of magicians for monthly meetings; I observe elderly men doing (relatively bad) magic tricks at a Christian retirement home, only to be mocked and teased by their audience of other (mostly) aging magicians. It’s adorable.
Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning -- arguably the most impactful book I’ve ever read -- that three sources of meaning define human existence: labor, relationships, and suffering. The former two obviously form the essential bits of the meaning-making process, the multi-valent orbits of families and romances and friendships and colleagues that all revolve around those beliefs and rituals we most value.
I’ve found that in order to maintain my sanity, I need “third places,” or spaces to dwell in between work and home. It’s about more than finding hobbies, it’s about indulging in leisure for the sake of leisure in and of itself.5 I have to remind myself what Fr. James Schall, S.J. taught me in his first lecture for “Elements of Political Theory”: the Greek word skole means “leisure”. We go to school so that we might get a job, and we labor to make money, and hopefully we make enough money to do things we love with people we love when we’re not working. Proper learning, that which consists of the liberation of mind and heart through an exploration of the liberal arts, culminates in third spaces.
1 My possession of hair product is her fault though. I would have happily kept a buzzed head, but she wanted me to more closely resemble late 2000 Seth Rogen, rather than early 2000s Seth Rogen.↩
2 This “Country Day School” whose full name I shall refrain from disclosing here was located 12 miles outside of my neighborhood in Queens, and my parents forced my attendance given the dearth of more solid educational offerings in our immediate vicinity. At least I got to learn Latin.
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3 Although this was untrue, Fr. Thomas Mulvihill King, S.J. did celebrate an annual memorial Mass for the son of William Peter Blatty, the book’s author, and one particular scene from the movie was filmed in King’s bedroom: Jesuit Damien Karras, intoxicated, collapses on Fr. King’s actual bed, and you can see Fr. King’s actual Teilhard de Chardin poster on the wall.↩
4 Nothing wrong with old people, mind you. I just bemoaned the disheartening lack of diversity.
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