What Do We Do Now?: The Welcome Question of a Cubs Fan

by Dan Masterton

The late, great Steve Goodman of “Go, Cubs, Go” fame wrote another classic song about the Chicago Cubs called “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request” (song | full lyrics). Amid a song full of delicious references to baseball and the Cubs alike, Steve describes a darkly hilarious funeral and farewell for the quintessential Cub fan, complete with bullpen pitchers as pall-bearers for the coffin’s procession around the diamond and umpires to call him out at each base. The chorus of the song delivers a forlorn and catchy query from a classic hopeless fan:

Do they still play the blues in Chicago
When baseball season rolls around?
When the snow melts away,
Do the Cubbies still play
In that ivy-colored burial ground?
When I was a boy, they were my pride and joy,
But now they only bring fatigue
To the home of the brave, the land of the free,
And the doormat of the National League.

The song excellently captures the simultaneous disappointment and joy of being a Cub fan. Steve rattles off a litany of calamities that on the one hand call to mind the frustrations and hair-pulling-out madness of Cubs lore, yet in their infamy, also comprise an oddly romanticized history. The “Lovable Losers” somehow sustained a passionate fan base despite serial failures, and as fans, we perpetuated a downright strange love affair with our history and reality.¹

The identity of a Cubs fan was so often epitomized in the moniker of “Wait ‘Til Next Year,” or as I liked to say during our most recent rebuild, “Wait ‘Til Year After Next Year.” The ideal was that hope springs eternal, and each February in Arizona for Spring Training brought a new combination of players and coaches who could tackle the legacy with a 0-0 start and every chance to break the cycle.

I firmly believe that there is something fundamentally spiritual about being a Cubs fan. Eddie Vedder spins quite the yarn in “Someday We’ll Go All the Way” (song | full lyrics). He says “he’s seen other teams / and it’s never the same” and describes being a Cubs fan, going to a game, and being at Wrigley Field as “a spiritual feeling if I ever knew.” The tradition, the ritual, the emotional investment, the communal participation, the colors and uniforms - it all carries that liturgical grain of salt that invites the spirit into something otherwise largely superficial.

The First Letter of Peter advises, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15-16). Growing up a Cubs fan helped teach me hope - and not just hope for a particular outcome, but hope that is loyalty, that is fidelity, that is commitment; hope that is not conditional upon achieving something by an ultimatum. It was about banding together with friends and family, with players and team, with neighbors and city. Cubs fandom involved hope that loved the journey even without an ETA on reaching a desired destination because we were all in this goofy ride together.

So, what the H do we do now that we’ve won?!

Celebration in the immediate aftermath of sweet victory.

Hope hasn’t been lost; it’s been fulfilled. What a blessing to embrace! Nothing we can ever describe or experience can approximate the beatific vision of eternal union with God. So we look to spirituality in our earthly life as a way to glimpse and experience the amazing joy that is possible through God. In basic terms, our theological virtues point our hearts toward faith, hope, and love, of which the greatest, ultimate virtue is love. So in this minuscule microcosm of a baseball team, we as fans have found this bit of our faith realized and this portion of our hope fulfilled - all that remains is baseball fan love.

So I think the what now is to practice that love well.

We should continue rooting for the Cubs together with great joy. This isn’t a time to be rude or brutish or self-serving. Gloating and lording one’s accomplishments over others can be edifying but does nothing truly positive.² Joy is about making space for and embracing that deep-seated goodness in your heart that is not fleeting in the same way as momentary pleasures. That lasting positivity is more a fundamental condition of good than an ephemeral emotion; this joy is what must be shared, over and above any boasting or bragging.³

We should retain charity and sympathy. We need look no further than the opposite dugout of Game 7 to see a team, a city, and a fan base that knows similar pain so well. We must remember what it feels like to have faith that remains strong yet unfulfilled and hope that has not yet been fully realized. On the whole, I was delighted by the charity of many of my White Sox fan friends, who buried the hatchet a bit to delight in the success of the Cubs, and especially in the joy of Cubs fans.⁴ I obviously would love the Cubs to win it all every year, but I also appreciate the joy of another fan base - like the 2005 White Sox - as they ride the wave of their own championship run.

The sight of that marquee never gets old.

Finally, we should focus on community. The joy of a common experience full of such euphoria and deep-seated feasting and celebration has been an amazing way to unite people. I’ve never seen so many hats and shirts all throughout my day as people wear their Cubs fandom and loyalty on their sleeve with great pride.⁵ I had a neat moment in the Austin airport over Thanksgiving break, when, while chowing down on airport BBQ lunch, a San Francisco Giants fan - a fan of a team we beat en route to the title - congratulated me (as I wore my championship hat) on our win and gushed about how much fun it was to watch the team and the city.

As we try to sustain our joy, our charity, and our community, I think a key consideration is retaining our positive energies. When it comes to sports - and even more broadly to life - I strongly dislike moments when people are simply against things. For example, I remember watching a Notre Dame football game with friends. As Notre Dame took a commanding lead in the second half, many turned their attention to a second TV, upon which USC - a big rival - was getting beat; rather than celebrate Notre Dame’s success, many of my friends became preoccupied with relishing USC’s struggles. Most of the time, I think our energies and focus are better spent in support and advocacy of people and things. Except in cases of very particular, narrow evils - and even then, really only for specific, limited moments - I think we are better off spiritually and socially being for positive concepts rather than fixating in opposition.

I think as Cub fans, our challenge now is to charitably sustain our joy in community, a striking challenge to be sure. And as new injuries, cold streaks, or other issues arise, resilience will be needed. Ideally, we can remember our fulfilled faith and realized hope in the 2016 Champs, and move forward with this sustained joy. Go, Cubs, go!

Eamus Catuli! means Let's Go Cubs!
The numbers to the right represent the number of years
after championships or Anno Catuli (Year of the Cubs).
Before the 2016 season, it read 08-71-108.
After the World Series, we rolled back this odometer to zero.

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1 See this goofy letter to the editor from my college newspaper that I wrote in Fall 2008 after the Cubs were swept out of the playoffs in the NLDS despite an amazing season and strong team to get a taste of our delirium.^↩

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2 I know, it’s weird how sports fans use “we” and “our” when they haven’t actually done anything themselves. I think it’s about the communal element of fandom and the great time and energy that hardcore fans invest in a team. I think it’s fine as long as it’s kept in perspective as something that is significant not ultimately important in the same way as God or family.^↩

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3 Insight from Rob (a fellow Cubs fan, no less): Any joy that requires comparison to others' failure is a bleak and broken joy. If perfect love drives out all fear, perfect joy drives out all spite.^↩

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4 I think I am in a minority among Chicago baseball fans in that I don’t root against or dislike the White Sox, except for those few days of the season when we are playing against them. They are in a different league, and we are not competing for the same thing. Plus, as Michael Wilbon says, I don’t root against a team that has Chicago across their chests.^↩

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5 I was already that guy who always has a hat or shirt on of one of my teams, and it’s been kind of fun to see so many others following suit in the wake of our championship. I basically live in my Cubs World Series champs hat and hoodie.^↩

Humility, Maturity, and Childlikeness

by Rob Goodale

I had the privilege last week of visiting a second-grade faith formation class at a Catholic parish in South Jersey. This was the first time I had been in a room full of seven year olds since I was one of them, and going into that room was actually kind of terrifying—I was acutely aware that I do not understand these tiny humans, what makes them tick, what matters to them.

The experience was, on the whole, rather mundane. We stuck cross- and heart-shaped stickers on little cardboard boxes, and talked about what we would do with Jesus if he wanted to hang out at our house for the afternoon. All the while, I was trying to read body language and analyze the words of these children who said they wanted to eat cookies and play Legos with Jesus, searching for what they really wanted and really cared about.

As it turns out, most of them cared about eating cookies and playing Legos.

My experience with the second-graders in Jersey made me start thinking about what it means to be childlike, and why exactly that is a thing Jesus would ask of his disciples. For most of my life, I’ve been in a big ol’ hurry to grow up, become independent, get a job, make money, buy a house and a car, have a family and live the American dream… and here’s Jesus, telling me to be more like a child? What exactly are you on about here, sir? I don’t have time for silly riddles (or playing Legos), because I’m an adult and there are important things I must attend to, so please explain yourself, is what I would say to him.

So I did say it to him. I prayed about childhood, and started reading about childlikeness, curious to uncover more.

It seems that before we explore childlikeness further, we should first dispense with the pervasive misconceptions about adulthood. The most pervasive of these is the narrative of radical freedom and independence. Children especially seem susceptible to this misconception; they long to be grown-ups so they can “do whatever they want.”

Yet, the predominant thing I have discovered about adulthood is that freedom and independence are vastly overrated, and often end up looking like empty refrigerators and student loan payments.

The deeply-held desire to stand alone is not new; it is not unique to millennials or even to Americans. Our first parents succumbed to this desire: God created them, and the only condition of the honor of existing was that they remain dependent on Him, and yet that was more than they could bear.

The sin of Adam and Eve is not simply disobeying God. Rather, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge from a desire to “be like God,” they reject the goodness of what they actually are, and try to put on a false cloak of independence. The story describes the beginning of a drama of which we are merely the latest players, and generation after generation continues to see the donning of this false cloak of independence as the mark of a true adult.

We, like our parents before us (and like Simba), forget who we are, and seem afraid to remember. Caryll Houselander considers this forgetfulness: “If we are afraid to know ourselves for what we are, it is because we have not the least idea of what that is. It is because we have not the least idea of the miracle of life-giving love that we are.”¹

Blessed John Henry Newman recognized this problem, too, and he sought to explain the process by which we forget. He wrote, “The breath of the world has a peculiar power in what may be called rusting the soul. The mirror within [each person], instead of reflecting back the Son of God their Saviour, has become dim and discoloured… An evil crust is on them: they think with the world; they are full of the world's notions and modes of speaking; they appeal to the world, and have a sort of reverence for what the world will say.”²

Children, strangely enough, seem to have no trouble knowing who and what they are. The rusted crust of the world hasn’t gotten to them yet. Sofia Cavaletti observed that children are also capable of seeing the invisible, “almost as if it were more tangible and real than the immediate reality.”³ Their imagination runs wild, but there is never any falsehood about what is really important—even when what is really important cannot be seen. A child may spend the entire day sailing the high seas with the pirates of her backyard or slaying the dragon that guards the treasure buried in the living room blanket fort, but she knows that, sooner or later, her mother or father will send word that it’s time for dinner. To be childlike is to keep straight which cloaks to put on, and for how long.

Kids know what is important: snack, playtime, stories before bed. They seek these things, and deeply know, in a sense beyond articulation, that they are a means to the eternal good of friendship. They are not bored by monotony, as G.K. Chesterton recognizes: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”⁴ Children have an incredible way of seeing each day, each hour, as something entirely new, and even if the sun rises the same way it did the day before, there is still newness enough to celebrate.

Every kid is a mystic, constantly interacting with an unseen world. Moreover, a child’s imagination gives him true humility: he knows himself, and knows how fleeting the world is and how dependent he is on others. In this way, children paradoxically see things as they truly are, unencumbered by adult seriousness. This gives children a courage that seems to come from fairy tales: “Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. They're not frightened of being wrong.”⁵ Free from social paralysis that comes from fear of being wrong, children see, imagine, and explore the world in ways adults are no longer able to.

The burgeoning self-importance of adulthood demands that we make ourselves busy, preoccupied with things we can see and touch and count. The muscles of our innate mysticism atrophy. We are designed to ponder and contemplate the mystery of being, but we’re out of practice and out of shape. When Jesus tells us to be childlike, he’s not asking for immaturity or ignorance. A mature faith uses the intellect with which we were created to think well, ask good questions, and make sharp connections. But growth in spiritual maturity demands that we re-learn how to be mystics, knocking the rust off of ourselves and becoming reacquainted with who we really are—dependent, brazenly hope-filled wonderers.

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1 Houselander, “Becoming Like Little Children”^↩

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2 John Henry Newman, Sermon 22.^↩

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3 Sofia Cavaletti, The Religious Potential of the Child, pg 43^↩

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4 G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy^↩

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5 Sir Ken Robinson, “Do schools kill creativity?” (2006 TED Talk)^↩

Prayer as Peace

by Dan Masterton

“I’ll pray for you.”

“We’ll be thinking of you.”

“You’re in my thoughts and prayers.”

We often throw these words out there in big moments - times of grief, transition, challenge, opportunity, etc. People have surely used them in the wake of the recent attack in London. I think we’re usually motivated by the right things. We feel a very human sentiment to do something supportive and express positivity and love to another person.

I often wonder what exactly different people mean when they say these things. I think when you hear it from a news anchor, reporter, or interviewer, it’s certainly more genericized and less deeply rooted. I imagine that when it comes from someone who doesn’t believe or God or practice a religion, it’s more so a sharing of emotional reaction. And I hope when it comes from someone who believes in God, that it is an authentic and true intention to pray directly for someone or something, namely that God’s will be done for them.

I know that when I say “I’ll pray for you,” it involves stopping to say a short prayer - eyes closed, silently in my head and heart, in my car or at my desk - and writing their name on my family’s daily intentions board. I know that for one guy I met at a retreat, it meant stopping whatever he was doing and praying for the person right there and then, out loud; if it was fitting to offer prayers in conversation or for another person to ask for his prayers, then he endeavored to actualize that prayer in that moment.

I think that the beauty and, dare I say, the efficacy of prayer comes in its connection to the transcendent, supernatural reality of God. Whether one perceives God as the One Lord, as a higher power or energy force, or as something indescribable or unknowable, these expressions of well wishes, of hope, of support, of solidarity, of interpersonal love, find sustenance and magnitude when they flow through the boundless love of God, who reaches all people in all places.¹

As my wife moved through pregnancy and then labor and delivery, many people offered their prayers to us. Through Facebook, text messages, phone calls, and conversations, so many people sent their blessings to our family. I don’t know that one can ever fully acknowledge and identify the fullness of grace in the moment it is present, but I know that God’s grace embraced us during a crucial time. It was beautiful to see the power of prayer fueling my wife and our daughter through the difficulties of labor.

I think as Catholics, our piety can sometimes shy away from praying out loud with any kind of spontaneity. We are definitely more comfortable in the beauty of liturgical structure and with prayers and blessings that are more predictable and true to the form our our Tradition and its worship.² And here, I think the classic prayers, those tried and true words that we know my rote memory, become the words that lend description to the realities in our heart, especially when we may not know how to pray or what to say.

So as labor and delivery unfolded, it was beautiful to be in a Catholic hospital where no one needed to worry about wearing their faith on their sleeve.

Our nurse who was with us for the toughest middle stretch of my wife’s labor openly shared that she prays Hail Mary’s under her breath as difficult moments unfold for her patients, including in those hardest moments for my wife, Katherine.

Our nurse midwife, as the pains of Katherine’s labor peaked, sat on the bed beside Katherine and held her as she prayed over her. With that physical touch of love, she prayed extemporaneously toward a Hail Mary and asked Mary’s intercession. It was one mother asking prayer of another mother for a new mother.³

As we neared the birth of our daughter, my mother-in-law leaned over her daughter and echoed those some prayers quietly.

As I sat beside Katherine just as our daughter was being born, I whispered a gentle Glory Be into her ear. Thinking of the solemn yet heartfelt monks who so earnestly frame their lives in that prayer,⁴ I instinctively felt that everything in this amazing moment with its wild emotions must also be for the glory of God.

Our daughter, Lucy Karen Masterton, was born just before Saturday turned to Sunday, and we spent our Sunday in the hospital room enjoying our first hours with our daughter. In the afternoon, I called the chaplain to ask for communion, and the kind old priest visited us with the Eucharist and offered a first blessing to Lucy.

Lucy Karen Masterton
born March 18, 2017 - 8 lbs. 15 oz., 20 inches

Sometimes, we don’t know how we do things or how we are able to get through things. Personally, there are frequent moments when my wife, my friends, and my co-workers often wonder how I am always able to stay so calm. My prayer life isn’t exemplary, and I don’t claim any excellence in that department. I also won’t say that prayer is a cause-and-effect tool; praying for something doesn’t make it happen. However, prayer - whether our own or that of those who pray for us and with us - is the way by which we more deeply understand the will of God and come to praise Him rightly. And that truth is foundational to who I am, how I think, how I decide, and how I act; it’s how I stay grounded, patient, and peaceful.

So to all of you who have been praying for us:

First, please don’t stop. Please continue to pray for us, especially that we may continue to strive to do God’s will in answering our calls as wife and husband and mother and father.

Secondly, thank you. You have fueled our family in the growth of love and the building of the Kingdom.

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1 I especially relished this transcendent reality in college, when I had friends all around the world. I remember praying at Adoration for friends on multiple continents in several different countries and finding deep consolation in the boundless reach of God’s love to everyone everywhere.^↩

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2 This is a gift I have witnessed in friends who are evangelical Christians. They quite comfortably pray out loud, spontaneously, and passionately. Sometimes, the prayers can feel a bit rambly, but the heartfelt passion of it is beautiful. Also, the word “Lord” becomes like “umm” sometimes, and it creates this unique cadence to praying out loud.^↩

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3 Additionally, both this nurse midwife and another midwife who were both with us are named Mary.^↩

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4 In college, my choir went on retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani, where we prayed and sang the Liturgy of the Hours with the monks. Their constant use of the Glory Be becomes the heartbeat to the communal prayer.^↩

Reflections from a Six-and-a-Half Foot Tall White Male Teacher Working in a Predominantly Minority School

by Dave Gregory

An Implicit Racist Discovers Grey Hairs

Last week, I found my first grey hair. And then I think I found a couple more, but I can’t really be sure because the lighting in my bathroom might have deceived my eyes. Or perhaps, following the thought of Blaise Pascal, I consumed some rotting morsel or there’s a demon in my bathroom attempting to foment a greater awareness of my own mortality within me.

Either way, I know this much: my fourth year of teaching has proven somewhat rough. I’ve grown used to developing curricula from scratch over the course of a year. At this point, non-stop lesson planning is par for the course. I’ve taught freshpeople who entered high school a couple years behind reading and writing level. I know that the work of a teacher serving first-year high schoolers does not so much require high-powered content, but rather attention to acclimating students into a high school environment.

This past summer, I relocated to Portland, Oregon (the whitest large American city¹) to teach at a school belonging to the Cristo Rey Network, a nationwide network of Catholic high schools dedicated to serving students from socio-economic backgrounds who normally do not attend college. We are the single most diverse school in Portland, and according to Niche.com, the fourth most diverse private school in the country; unlike many predominantly minority schools, our black and Hispanic student populations are about equal. In my second interview, my principal asked me, “So Dave, what would you do if a student stands up in class and calls you a racist?” I discovered in September that he asked that question because it happens all the time here.

Throughout June and July, I found myself worrying that race would be a huge barrier, an obstacle that would impede relationships with my students. I took an implicit bias test on race from the Implicit Project based out of Harvard, which -- as I fearfully suspected -- did indeed reveal that I perceive individuals through a racially-biased lens. “Ugh,” I thought, “but I grew up in Queens, almost the only white dude on a block filled with houses belonging to a variety of races and ethnicities. A lot of my high school friends were Hispanic. Aren’t I better than this?”

Apparently not, Gregory. You’re still an implicit racist.

Teachers of color, and especially male teachers of color, are a rarity in the world of American education. I am not one of those rarities.

Some Anecdotes, in Reverse Chronological Order

This morning, as I was walking out of 7-Eleven with a coffee in hand, two of my students approached me, running. The African American kid pushed my shoulder, “Yo, Mr. Gregory, give us a dollar or we’re gonna jump you.” I laughed, “Sorry dudes, I don’t have any cash,” to which my Mexican student retorted, “Yeah, but you’ve got a credit card.” We chuckled, and continued on our paths.

Last week, one of my brightest and most motivated students asked me, “So, apart from your white male privilege, how did you get into Georgetown?” This kid and I have a pretty solid rapport, and I’m glad that he has the honesty and boldness to ask such a question, but there was no doubt an edge to his inquiry. He knew that I have inherited a real legacy with my white maleness, and he knew that this same legacy is stacked against him, even centuries after slavery had theoretically came to an end. Caught off guard, I didn’t know what else to say, save for, “Well, for one, I do not for one second deny my white privilege. Second, know that I worked my ass off every step of the way. Third, know that I will do everything in my power to help you get in as well.” Yeesh, I just wanted to hug him, but that would have been weird.

The same student told me a couple days before this exchange that I needed to leave this school -- not because he didn’t “like” me, but because he felt that he and his peers were undeserving (this sounds so silly to write, but it’s true) of my presence. Trust me, I don’t intend to lift myself up as a white savior, ² or as a super duper pedagogue. I am not here to save these kids. Jesus already has that offer on the table. Nonetheless, this question is asked on the regular, at least once every other week, even by upperclassmen I do not teach: “Why are you here?” These students of color perceive me as a white savior, and have been enculturated to believe that they are undeserving of teachers who actually give a shit about them. I don’t offer this to lift up my own ego.

Three weeks ago, during our Black Heritage Assembly, four students presented a spoken word poem. Along with the entire audience, I found myself riveted. One performer proclaimed, “I have been taught by the world to believe that my body is not enough [...] but the truth is, I am dripping with melanin and honey.” Tears came to my eyes. I approached one of these four during lunch, and asked where they got the piece from. “Oh, we wrote it,” came the response. My jaw dropped. Teenagers continue to astound me with a brilliance and insight I am simply incapable of.

I also get asked regularly, “Are you leaving us next year?” The same students who think I should go also don’t want me to leave. I’ve met any number of white students who come from broken homes, who have been abandoned by alcoholic parents, and/or who come from mediocre middle schools. Suffering is by no means constricted to people of given races or ethnicities or socio-economic backgrounds, and neither is stability. Students who have known abandonment, both those who are white and those who are of color, will ask such questions. A theology position opened up at another Portland Catholic school, one with way more folks who lack melanin as I do, and one with way more resources. I gave it a thought here and there, but I can’t leave this place because I need these particular students to hold a mirror up to me.

When Trump was elected, our principal called a spontaneous faculty meeting before school began; several (white) faculty members quite literally wept out of shock, having gone to bed before results were called. The atmosphere surrounding our students, however, did not consist of shock. A cloud of grim resignation hung over their heads; they’re used to this sort of thing. Racism, no longer implicit, would now become institutionalized within governmental rhetoric to an even greater degree. Ever since the inauguration, students have increasingly reported slurs being launched their way, virulently rocketed at them from passing cars, lobbed at them from passers-by on the streets.

In my first month, I grappled with the single most difficult student I’ve ever had. He disrupted class, yelling across the room, rarely turned in work, and when he did, threw a fit that I took off points for lateness. I brought him outside to speak with him, and he refused to make eye contact, or even respond, hunched over on the bench; other teachers had similar conversations. Something, however, as the months wore on, clicked, he realized that his performance in school is entirely a matter of his own freedom. He’s now an A student, turns in everything on time, helps others when working in class, and contributes meaningfully to class discussions.

My second week here, when my students groaned at the announcement of a quiz, I jokingly shouted (I’m kind of loud and obnoxious in the classroom, but this is how I engage and hold the attention of teenagers), “You like that, teenagers?!” A kid immediately yelled back, in mock horror, “You just call us the n-word?” We burst into hysterics. My fears surrounding racial barriers dissipated. We were joking about our race in the second week of school. A couple days later, the same African American student came up to me after class, pointing his finger at another black classmate, “Mr. Gregory, Jon³ just called me the ‘n-word.’ The one with the hard ‘r,’ not even the soft one.” He was testing me, and all I could do was laugh. I didn’t know -- and still don’t -- to what degree I can tell kids to not use that word. It’s an ugly word in my mind, but I cannot really erase their culture, because to do so might very well be another instantiation of whiteness overpowering blackness.

The Reality of the Situation

I am an embodied (and very furry, almost comically so) symbol of white male patriarchy, in the midst of brown and black bodies. This much, I cannot deny. I wish it wasn’t the case. But it is the unavoidable reality. I’ve learned that my students are not so much “underserved” as they are actively oppressed and marginalized by the “filthy, rotten system.” I’m grateful that we dive into the Hebrew Bible together, a text that grew out of an oppressed and marginalized people. Next month I’m going to try to teach the prophetic literature through the lens of early hip hop, so wish me luck.

I go home on many days, exhausted and dying for a nap. I rinse my face, sigh, and look into the bathroom mirror, noticing the bags under my eyes. Some days I feel hopeless, thoughts running through my mind: “This kid absolutely refuses to stop talking, even after I call his name three times, and that kid still doesn’t know how to format a paper or write a complete sentence. Are these students dooming themselves to a future without opportunity?” Then again, I am the son of two white lawyers, one a professor and the other a former prosecutor. I have done very little, in reality, to deserve all the opportunity that has been gifted to me. I entered high school already disciplined, already knowing how to write a complete sentence. Should I stop mourning this? Am I able to? Is “mourning” even the right response, or is it yet another symptom of my inheritance? Is this mourning pure narcissism, preventing me from undertaking transformative work? I honestly have no idea, but I suspect dwelling on it would be a luxury of my own racial privilege.

On the upside of things, several dozen students filter through my classroom during most lunches, Snapchatting and real chatting happily away. Some days, a couple of kids⁴ used to follow me⁵ as I locked my classroom an hour after the final bell rung, and escorted me to my car (my own little bodyguards), only to have a few more minutes of conversation before they trotted along to the bus stop. These are the seeds of solidarity in its most basic form, that of elemental human interaction.

Bonds of trust and friendship deepen and grow more palpable as the months pass. A greater percentage of my kids turn in their homework, of higher quality than it once was. In the muck and mire of the quotidian, all this remains largely invisible. Nonetheless, I have to stake my life on it.

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1 For an absolutely fascinating history of Oregon’s and Portland’s racist history and present that might make you flip your lid, read this Atlantic piece.^↩

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2 Anyone who has been to the developing world, or worked with oppressed communities, has probably known this sort of complex; I, as a white person, believe I am helping a certain person or group by offering my charity. This perpetuates a dangerous narrative by refusing to acknowledge that true justice comes through empowerment. The white savior complex can manifest in some pretty brutal and insensitive ways, and even subtle ones, as evidenced by my first draft of this piece.^↩

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3 Name changed for confidentiality’s sake.^↩

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4 No joke, one of their names literally translates to “way of God”.^↩

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5 Last month, I moved to an apartment within walking distance of school, and this once regular interaction no longer occurs.^↩

A Better Part

by Dan Masterton

As they continued their journey,
he entered a village
where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary
[who] sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.
Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?
Tell her to help me.”
The Lord said to her in reply,
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.
There is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.”
-Luke 10:38-42

My wife and I did not live together before we were married. In fact, we went through quite the geographical evolution.

We started dating while in college at the University of Notre Dame, where we saw each other frequently and where our dorms were but an 8-minute, half-mile walk apart. When I graduated, I moved overseas to Ireland, for a year of volunteer ministry in Wexford, Ireland; we now had an ocean, a five-hour time difference, and 3,637 miles between us. After my year in Ireland, I took a job in southern California at a high school while Katherine was a senior at Notre Dame, shrinking the time zone gap to three hours (the other way) and the crow-fly distance to 1,728 miles.

Finally, when Katherine graduated, we both headed to Chicago. Our apartments were now just a half mile away, and we definitely enjoyed and appreciated the proximity and convenience that we had gone without for so long. We could see each other semi-daily, cook together, lounge around together, and do the druthers and mundanity of daily life together.¹

After I proposed and we inched ever closer to our wedding, it was clear to us that we didn’t want to live together before marriage. We valued the learning moments of communicating and deciding how to meet up, what to do, and how to spend time together, and we appreciated the continued opportunity to grow up, mature, and solidify our adult habits and disciplines as individuals. On weekends and when traveling, we would share a bed, but we were intentional about that nighttime privilege being about the intimacy and closeness of literally sleeping together, and nothing else.

So we ran into a problem when her lease ran out on June 1, and our wedding wasn’t until July 18. Suddenly, our plan to move into my apartment around the time of the wedding wasn’t so cut and dry. So here’s how it unfolded… My roommate had moved out early to snag a new apartment with his brother and cousin, so I had an extra room, which he would be on the hook for. My best friend, who had been sleeping on our couch occasionally and job-hunting, now had a job and wanted to sublet from us for a bit to get himself started. So, I vacated my bedroom for Katherine, packed a small amount of luggage, and moved myself 20 minutes south to a dorm room in the residence tower at my graduate school for one month.² I’d cover June in the dorm and then crash on an air mattress for two weeks in my best friend’s new apartment, for which he took the lease on July 1.³

It was definitely odd doing my work commute to and from a different place. It was a bit odd to go “home” to hang out, cook, eat, etc. and then leave at the end of the night and drive down to an empty, strange dorm room - it was definitely frustrating to look for parking around there! It somehow just worked to let my best friend and fiancee share my apartment, and it wasn’t odd to reserve that total and complete combination of our lives - our finances, our daily schedules, our furniture and stuff - until we had vowed before God and the Church that we intended that totally and completely with the full good of our hearts for the rest of our lives.

For us, there was deep value in reserving the privileges of marriage for marriage, and in intentionally talking about and practicing in constrained doses the trappings of that impending family life. I think the progression of our relationship helped prepare us in a grounded way to openly, calmly, and humbly handle the disputes and challenges that arise within an ever deepening and serious relationship.

I have to say, I have not always thought this way. Among the many spirited discussions I had on my Camino pilgrimage with friends, I combatively wondered about why cohabitation is frowned upon. We concluded that, especially socially, there’s deep value in sustaining the fullness of one’s individual life - from social life to personal habits to adult responsibility - and having something personal to bring into the joint relationship, leading toward the full combination in marriage.

It’s interesting to point out that, as best as I can tell, there is no specific articulation in Church teaching saying that cohabitation is in and of itself explicitly wrong. The Catechism covers the breadth of marriage but does not directly forbid cohabitation. Various guides that I found certainly dissuade couples from living together, but they point out that cohabitation is not a canonical impediment to marriage. Rather, the teaching is a secondary application that follows from the primary immorality of premarital sex; the Church instructs us not to put ourselves in a position where the temptation to sin is significantly heightened, i.e. living with and sharing a bed with someone with whom you would be romantically and sexually involved.⁴

There are certainly appeals to living together before marriage - splitting the rent and bills, gaining ease in seeing each other, testing out the routines of daily life, learning the home habits of your significant other, etc. Each of these has a kernel of truth and healthy interest in them, but my impression is that cohabiting just adds an extra, unnecessary step in the development of a relationship that doesn’t need to be there.

For those that work with young people, perhaps you’ve heard of “talking”? It’s a new step in which two people who are romantically interested in each other communicate with each other, flirt, and maybe even hook up to explore the possibilities. This comes before dating and relationship-defining. The problem is that no group of young people has ever been able to explain why this step exists, what the parameters of it are, or, most importantly, whether or not it is exclusive (a much debated topic!).⁵ As a result, this new step creates new drama and new uncertainty that adds to an already harrowing social issue. It reminds me of the idea of a “promise ring” from past generations, which serious boyfriends would give to their girlfriend as a pledge of their future engagement and wedding; this idea of being engaged to be engaged doesn’t really make sense to me either.⁶

I don’t mean to poo-poo cohabitation altogether, but I think the corrective that is needed is greater caution and fuller awareness of the murkiness of this “step.” Younger couples, especially those in college or fresh out of it, would do better to live apart, sustain their own independent lives, and build their adulthood in parallel as they move toward the deeper waters of their serious relationship. However, I have to admit that with older adults, either by age or by maturity, there is a more comfortable context with which they can enter into this.

For adults that have established careers, stable finances, years of experience living on their own or with adult roommates, I think it’s possible to consider cohabitation responsibly. I think it needs to come with serious, extended discernment. I think it needs to come only with serious consideration of marriage and the intent to continue that discernment earnestly. And I think it comes best in the context of premarital counseling, where a couple continues to openly and intentionally reflect upon the growth of their relationship toward the intention of marriage.

Overall, I pray that people would approach their relationships and the deepening magnitude of them with greater caution and thoughtfulness. I feel that Mary and Martha, the great pair from Scripture, give us a gentle insight here. Mary is comfortable to sit at the feet of her friend and listen while Martha is preoccupied with the logistics of hosting and busies herself with tasks. Martha comes to Jesus to appeal for help with her “burdens,” and Jesus feels her busy-ness is anxiety and worry while Mary’s calm listening is “the better part.”

We would be well suited to recognize the times when action is needed, especially in a relationship, when a change is welcome, when logistics and structure can support us. We would also do well to recognize the times when action can wait and when we’d be better off slowing down, resting more easily, and listening more attentively. Most of the time, relationships would benefit from restrained urgency, from diligent dialogue, and from intentional discernment. I don’t know that cohabitation is a fundamentally, inherently sinful option, and there seems to be some limited contexts in which it can work. However, I do believe that living apart and dedicating a couple’s intentionality to the wider relationship and to individual growth that can be shared as the two move toward marriage is indeed the better part.

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1 We would see each other every 2-3 months during our years apart, and we made sure to do some cool, neat things together in those travels. However, we often missed most the simple joy of doing nothing together. We even pioneered the idea of “solidarity Skype,” where we would video chat for an extended period of time but not necessarily converse. We would do our own things, but relish this version of simply hanging out remotely.^↩

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2 Props to my grad school, Catholic Theological Union, for having the flexibility and understanding to let me be resident for just a month. It isn’t abnormal for summer students to come in and out for short periods, and I appreciated their hospitality to me, especially for the week when I was there for class anyway and my school commute shrunk to 2 minutes!^↩

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3 There was something deeply challenging that really steeled me during those six weeks. For all the pain-in-the-butt of going back and forth and driving and moving around, I felt like it was a welcome final test to my single manhood that helped me acknowledge the full reality of becoming a husband and eventually a father. Maybe I’m a bit masochistic then.^↩

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4 On a similar but different note, I did once live with a close female friend, and I don’t think there was anything morally wrong about that. We are good friends without any romantic subtext, and we were very functional and happy as roommates.^↩

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5 The kids fully admit that it’s an ambiguous, nebulous concept, yet they perpetuate it anyway. It’s the great teenage enigma of hating but loving drama.^↩

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6 I remember an arc in the great That 70’s Show involving Eric’s idea to give Donna a promise ring. For a show heavily based on smoking weed in your parents’ basement and trying to have sex with each other, it was actually a fairly wholesome and intelligent show.^↩

Spirituality and Realism

by Rob Goodale

Last week, my colleague (and spiritual Backer sherpa ¹) Dan Masterton wrote about the challenge of teaching teenagers about the Catholic moral life. In his piece, he described the inherent tension between holding onto concrete moral ideals, and being honest about living in a context that entices us to abandon those ideals. It was quite good; you should go read it.

Today, I’d like to pick up where he left off, but take things in a slightly different direction: what should we realistically expect of ourselves in the spiritual life?

Let’s start by defining our terms. Amazingly, there seem to be many practicing Catholics for whom spirituality is a dirty word; it carries the connotation of “faith without rules,” entrenched in false opposition with religion, which is seemingly more difficult and therefore better. This is not how I wish to use this word.

Instead, I want to talk about spirituality the way James Martin does in his book, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, which includes perhaps the best simple definition I’ve come across: “spirituality is a way of living in relationship with God.”

If spirituality is a way of living in relationship with God, then our ideal for the spiritual life is perfect union with God. If this sounds impossible, that’s because it is. Jesus even tells the disciples as much after the Rich Young Man goes away sad. Where things get interesting is in the rest of what Jesus tells them: “for God, all things are possible.”²

Elsewhere in the same gospel, the evangelist records one of Christ’s most confounding demands: “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”³ It is tempting to explain this command away as a metaphor, or a naive thought that would be really nice but isn’t possible because the world is sad and sinful, as Dan described last week.

But Jesus’ command to be perfect is not, to steal a line from C.S. Lewis, “idealistic gas.”⁴ It’s as relevant now as it ever has been. He really did mean what He said, and we shall indeed one day be capable of obeying that command. The hope which is integral to Christianity is not wishy-washy optimism or a head-in-the-sand mantra of “everything will be all right.” The theological virtue of hope is a specific and steadfast vision of someday becoming a perfect creature who is perfectly in union with the perfect Creator.

The problem is, we tend to want to achieve this perfection on our own – especially during Lent. It is very tempting to strive for perfection in the spiritual life in the same way I would in the classroom or the gym⁵: by busting my ass, working as hard as I can to be better than the person next to me. If I do this, however, Lent becomes about me – my sacrifice, my piety, my relationship with my God.

The conventional way of the western world – working harder than everyone else – doesn’t work when it comes to perfection in the spiritual life. To be sure, the process of sanctification is one of tedious repetition. But rather than pulling myself up by my own bootstraps, growth in the spiritual life is about creating space within myself. To wit: the Son of God chooses to enter the world when a woman makes room for Him. Mary can’t make herself the Mother of God, any more than I can make myself a saint.

The process of sanctification requires my permission, and my cooperation, but it is ultimately something that is done to me. This passivity shouldn’t be confused for apathy – it is indeed hard work. But this hard work is antithetical to the work I do in pursuit of perfection in other parts of my life.

It is hard to know what perfection in the spiritual life looks like. Familiarity with the Communion of Saints begins to give us some idea, but the central message of the saints on sainthood is that no two saints are alike. Each has his or her own way. There is, in the words of Michael Himes, “no absolute route to perfect holiness.” Himes writes, “no one should simply follow another person’s pattern for holiness. What one can and should do is take encouragement from others to find one’s own pattern… God has already given the world a Francis of Assisi; it does not need a second, inadequate version.”⁶

Last week, Dan described realism as an invitation to grace. I think another word for that invitation is humility. True humility isn’t smarmy self-deprecation, nor does it mean ignoring my own needs, or trying to make myself seem less than I really am. True humility is marked by an awareness of what is real: I am neither God, nor my neighbor; I am me, and this is good.

And this is why realism is actually an integral part of becoming holy. I have to be real about who and what I am--a sinner, but not an evil being. I must discover myself in order to discover my route to holiness. We are made holy by grace, which in the words of Anne Lamott, “meets us where we are and doesn’t leave us where it finds us.” ⁷ If I am to cooperate with this grace, which meets me where I am, I have to know where I am. I cannot cooperate with the grace that meets me in the midst of the mundane struggle of humanity if I do not first become aware of that mundane struggle.

Humility is being honest about where grace is most needed in my life. If I cease to be consumed by my desire to be holy on my own terms, then I can begin to welcome the love of God into my inner life, transforming me from within into someone who is capable of loving as Christ loves.

In case this is all too abstract for you, here are two (very different) concrete prayer practices that I’ve found to be ruthlessly helpful ⁸ in my own attempt to discard ambition and create space in my life for God.

The first is the Litany of Humility. You should definitely click on that link to read the whole thing, but the part that drills me to the core is this: “that others may become holier than I, provided I become as holy as I should: Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.” There is enough to unpack in that sentence that you could fill an entire book, but essentially it reminds me that holiness is not competitive because God is not competitive. It ought to please me to be exactly who God wants me to be, even if that isn’t what I want or winds up seeming unimportant in the eyes of the world compared to my neighbor. As one Notre Dame priest famously says in his classic southern drawl, “the eleventh commandment is thou shalt not compare.”

The other is this excerpt of an essay by Blessed John Henry Newman. Newman offers what he describes as a “short road to holiness” by observing that “if we wish to be perfect, we have nothing more to do than to perform the ordinary duties of the day well.” As a favor to his practically-minded friends, he then identifies ten simple practices that any man or woman of any age or ability is capable of doing. They include things like getting out of bed “at the time of rising,” eating and drinking to God’s glory, and examining yourself daily. These tasks are so simple that it is almost frustrating, because I have no excuse not to do them.

Realism is important in the spiritual life, not just so that we can be honest about where we most need grace, but also so we can be honest about how simple it is to begin inviting God into our inner lives, and stop making excuses about how dark and twisty the world seems. So let’s be real about it: God isn’t interested in spiritual superheroes. God wants saints.

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1 Dan was two years ahead of me at Notre Dame, which means he graduated before I turned 21. His favorite bar, the Linebacker Lounge, quickly became my favorite bar after I came of age, but we didn’t get the chance to share in the glorious experience of the Backer until long after that, when his wife and I graduated.^↩

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2 Matthew 19:26 (NABRE)^↩

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3 Matthew 5:48 (NABRE)^↩

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4 This is from Mere Christianity, which you should definitely check out if you haven’t come across it yet. You can read the passage I’m referring to here.^↩

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5 Lolz @ “striving for perfection in the gym.” Not exactly a thing I’m known for.^↩

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6 This is from Doing the Truth In Love, which is excellent.^↩

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7 I don’t actually know where Lamott wrote this, but it’s one of those quotes I heard in a talk once and immediately latched onto.^↩

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8 When describing these to students, I often use the phrase, “it kicks my butt, in a spiritual way.” Hence, the help they provide is ruthless.^↩

Morality and Realism

by Dan Masterton

I teach an odd theology course to high school seniors that hybridizes social justice and vocations. It is called Social Justice and Vocations. ¹ It takes two formerly one-credit, one-term courses and combines them into a wild yet delightfully congruous double-period, one-term course. In addition to using the double period for semi-weekly field trips, experiential learning, and guest speakers and panels, our content units consider Catholic Social Teaching and its themes, community and discipleship, and then each of the three major states of life: religious or ordained life, single life, and married life.

Our last unit covers The Call to Marriage and Family Life, and there, we engage with the sexual ethic of Church teaching, especially relating to Paul VI’s Humanae vitae. I point out, with Paul’s help, that the Church does not think sex is evil or bad but rather “noble and worthy,” that the Church suggests not that healthy sexuality is easy but rather that it requires “heroic effort,” and that artificial birth control may indeed be immoral but is morally acceptable when used therapeutically to treat the reproductive system.

As we dig into artificial birth control, natural family planning, homosexuality, same sex unions, and the broader sexual ethic of the simultaneous procreative and unitive significance of sex, we use the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Health and Human Services (HHS) Mandate as a means of engaging with a social case study. As we consider the laws of the land, the politics at play, and the differences between a house of worship, a faith-based institution, and a private for-profit company run by people of faith, I try to explain how artificial birth control – except when used therapeutically – cannot be considered a matter of reproductive health but of sexual liberty.²

As students engage with the Church teaching – with varying levels of charity, empathy, and disdain – there has consistently been, across my five years of ministry with young people, one major element to their argument in favor of artificial birth control and its access and use: people are going to have sex when they want and with whom they want.

Many of the young people with whom I’ve worked quite naturally accept this premise, or maybe more accurately, put it forward as a necessary, required premise upon which sexual ethics must be founded. From their point of view, any sexual ethic that doesn’t accept that initial premise is unrealistic and impractical. They largely don’t view abstinence and chastity as a legitimate alternative because most people simply aren’t going to practice it.³

So it brought me to an interesting question - what is the role of realism in morality? In the face of what we as Catholics believe to be absolute truth, according to God’s self-revelation in Scripture and Tradition, how much should practicality and what is realistic affect our morality?

Well, the initial answer is fairly easy in my estimation: not at all. Our sexual ethics as Catholics are our understanding of what God has revealed to us about how He created the world, how He created men and women, and how He ordained sex as a simultaneously procreative and unitive gift. So, we are called to live chastely, to respect our sexuality in a way that fits our state of life - for single and religious or ordained people, by sustaining celibacy, and for married people, by responsibly sustaining a sexual relationship with one’s spouse.

So in this world of absolute truth, realism is not a source or shaper of morality. We have objective truth, and we must strive to live it out. Yet, in this same world, people readily and comfortably practice sexuality in a way that totally diverges from our sexual ethic. I think the grace of realism, then, is that it can and should inform our pastoral response, definitely in response to sexual ethics but I think also in a way that is applicable to pastoral ministry as a whole.



Not unlike how our Church shifted from understanding itself as a community of saints to seeing itself as a community sinners, we have to engage with one another from a realistic point of view. I recently heard a professional speaker talk about Theology of the Body, and he began by admitting that he and his then-girlfriend/now-wife were sexually active when they first dated in graduate school but gradually came to embrace and practice chastity, first by striving to abstain from sex for the remainder of their unmarried relationship and then through healthy marital sexuality. When I teach about birth control, I acknowledge and explain the different types of contraceptives and abortifacients and acknowledge their effectiveness in preventing pregnancy. When we discuss infertility, I go step-by-step through in vitro fertilization and show a video demonstrating the science and process. We have to incorporate, acknowledge, and respond directly to the social norms and realities that “social realism” posits to us.

I don’t think we should then create a combative, debate-style atmosphere. Debate is best avoided in catechetical contexts because it has winners and losers who are rewarded for rhetorical finesse. In my class, dialogue and understanding are my goals, even if the Church gets the last word, and I always tell my kids, “I don’t need you to agree totally with this, but I need you to understand it.”⁴

I think, then, that confronting social norms head-on creates a fuller, richer context for consummate apologetics. By admitting our sexual temptations and indiscretions, we can understand where we fall short and need grace. By knowing the options that people consider, we can empathize with people’s decision-making processes and understand how to give witness to them. By laying out the processes for seemingly attractive options, we can identify the places where moral trouble is nigh.

Spiritually, I think great grace is possible if this approach can bring greater humility to all involved. Those who understand, espouse, and believe Church teaching need to appreciate that they probably had and have the blessings of strong formation and sturdy community, and thus be patient and respectful to others in listening to their perspective and giving the benefit of the doubt. Those who criticize or disagree with Church teaching can hopefully be charitable in hearing out the Church's teaching, from its foundational premises to its specific applications, and try to appreciate the internal logic in our theology.

In terms of spiritual growth and conversion, rather than striving for right versus wrong and winning over losing, perhaps such a dialogue of humility could move both sides and each individual to an examination of conscience. My students showed me that their majority advocacy for artificial birth control access wasn't solely motivated by sexual liberty but my the medical applications of it as a therapeutic treatment for issues like endometriosis. Perhaps people on both sides could admit to things that obscure their charity, righteousness, and fidelity. I think true encounters of dialogue become nurseries of reconciliation, both for those who connect with one another in discovering or strengthening relationships and for each individual who can find ways to grow that they can bring before God.

Realism cannot change our morality or soften our stance for what is true and right, but realism can and ought to ground our pastoral exchanges and prompt better teaching and dialogue. Perhaps the invitation of realism is simply one of grace. While I’m not about to suggest that the realism-based critiques from my students and others who criticize the Church will change Church teaching or change my mind – just as any one conversation or encounter with me won't change the minds of those who diverge from Church teaching – it is a way for others and myself who are apologizers for our faith to slow our pace and to recognize the perspectives of our brothers and sisters across society.

It calls to my mind The Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3-7): when realism creates this opportunity for pastoral encounter, each of us – from any side of a dialogue – gain a chance to see that just as much as we are one of the ninety-nine sheep who stays with the shepherd, so, too, are we the one that strays away.

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1 I call it “SoJuVo” for short. My students write processing reflections on our service outings, the best of which post on our class blog: Acting Justly, Loving Tenderly, Serving One Another. ^↩

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2 I explained this distinction at greater length as part of my Theology on Tap talk last summer, and I posted the full text on the blog. The part with this topic can be found here.^↩

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3 Good insight from Rob in his pastoral experience: “In my experience, this is not just an objective claim--it's something many see as an inalienable right: ‘it's my body, and I can do whatever I want with it as long as I'm not obviously hurting somebody else.’ Therefore, a sexual ethic that doesn't accept this premise is seen not only as unrealistic and impractical, but as oppressive and sinister.”^↩

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4 Each of my schools has had a student population that is barely majority Catholic, and even then, largely unchurched and uncatechized. Instead of building teens toward owned faith that develops from their childhood foundation, they approach this first exposure to faith and theology combatively and even treat it as an imposition. As a result, I strive simply to have them understand the teachings and theology. I then hope that the remainder of their theology coursework, their activity in campus ministry, and the pastoral ministers and catechists that encounter them in the future can continue planting and sowing.^↩

The Imposing Silence of the Cross

by Jenny Klejeski

In the 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky offers a sobering diagnosis of the societal and political ills of his native Russia at the time: namely, that the people had forsaken religion in favor of post-Enlightenment nihilism. In his estimation, when people abandon belief in good and evil, the world becomes divided simply into those who dare and those who do not dare; in Nietzschean terms, it is the strong versus the weak. Religion, in this worldview, is a crutch for the weak.

A portrait of Dostoevsky.

It doesn’t take a genius to draw parallels between Dostoevsky’s Russia and our own modern world. Moral relativism is an American pastime as favored as baseball, and there is no shortage of Hitchenses, Mahers, and Dawkinses prophesying the impending end of religion, which will usher in the glorious age of Reason and Science. As Jesse Ventura so bluntly put it, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.” Our modern culture, much like Dostoevsky’s, has long perceived religion as a set of ideals preached by idealists who are out of touch with human suffering.

So what’s a Christian to do? How do we preach Christ to a world that doesn’t want to listen?

This, too, is the question that Dostoevsky seeks to answer. The great conundrum faced by many characters throughout the book is that having love for the general mass of humanity can be logically reconciled, but personal charity makes no sense, and is even abhorrent. According to one character, “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

Dostoevsky’s prescription is a Christianity that continually returns to its namesake, a religious practice that, in true imitation of Christ, loves all people. And this love must not be abstract social charity, but rather a personal and intimate love of neighbor. It is a Christianity that does not seek to exercise power over the other, that is radically able to separate sin from sinner and fiercely love the latter, that regards each person as an ineffable mystery inherently worthy of love.

This Christianity is, of course, no small undertaking. It is much more comfortable to love humanity in general than concretely. It is much more comfortable to see Christ present in life’s more obviously beautiful moments than in the darker places of the human experience. It is much more comfortable to sustain a check-the-box approach to our faith life.

Last week I gave a talk to some adults in my parish about the Stations of the Cross. In reflecting on and speaking about this devotion, I realized what a bizarre practice it must seem in the eyes of the world. On Friday nights we get together to commemorate the final hours of this betrayed, condemned, tortured man. We solemnly celebrate this historical event, not as a mistake to learn from, but as something to be emulated.

The fact that we do this speaks to the powerful insight that in the Incarnation, Christ forever changes what it means to be human. He takes the things of this world and transforms them through love. Take, for example, crucifixion, which since its invention, has been a powerful symbol. In the ancient world, it meant intimidation, fear, and worldly power. It wasn’t for nothing that people would be crucified along public streets. It sent a message: this is what happens if you are an enemy of Rome. When we look at a cross, however, we see the opposite. We see a sign of hope, freedom, and a love that drives out all fear. We see, too, what is asked of us.

The cross is uncomfortable.

Flannery O’Connor, in her discerning way, remarks, “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” The cross is the uncomfortable, beautiful, terrifying center of our faith. Our faith tells us that we are supposed to be like Christ on the cross, that we must identify ourselves with this wrongly condemned, marginalized, abandoned, hated man.

It is at the foot of the cross, I believe, that we can begin to undertake the programme of love that our world so desperately longs for and, I also believe, is able to receive. The cross is not a place of religious argument or proselytizing. It is not a place of abstract love, but is intensely concrete. The cross does not seek to explain away the mystery of human suffering, nor does it affirm suffering as a good of itself. There is an imposing silence of the cross. It is this silent self-gift that we must imitate.

Beyond Ourselves

by Dan Masterton

Last Friday, the school where I work announced that it was closing our high school.

For now, it will unfold as a phasing out of the high school portion of the parish’s school ministry. We will not admit any incoming freshmen; we will facilitate transfers for our eleven rising sophomores; our sixty rising upperclassmen have a month to declare their intent to stay or transfer, with the plan to continue serving those two classes through their graduation. Then, the high school will close for good in Spring 2019.

Our shrinking high school was in a unique position - though the high school is small and struggling, the parish and wider school are both wonderfully healthy. Enrollment in our early childhood, elementary, and middle schools is stable and strong, and our parish is a sizable faith community with bustling activity and steady parishioner support. So, the decision to close our school was going to have to come from within.

The leadership of our parish and school are committed to thoughtful self-examination and undertake strategic planning every few years to keep things moving forward.¹ So last year, an outside consulting group came in and began a year-long process of focus groups, surveys, and data aggregation and analysis, all leading up to a thorough report and recommendation to our pastor and head of school. That process came to a head this month, and last Friday the decision became public, first to faculty and staff, then to students, and finally to all families and parishioners.

The timing was interesting for me personally. On Thursday night, I received notification of a 7:10am all-staff meeting for that Friday morning, but it so happened that I was scheduled to depart school at 7am with seniors from my theology class for a day of service at a south side Habitat for Humanity site.² So, off we went without knowing what was happening back on campus, and we did our day's work at the construction site. That afternoon, my chaperones and I learned the news through the email blast message, and then we all learned formally upon our return to campus through special conversations from our admins who graciously stayed around to talk with us face-to-face.

As I finished reading the email message on the build site that afternoon, I walked out of a half-finished garage and back up the rear stairs to reenter the house in which I was working. Before I went back in, I happened to look off to the side, toward the street and over the foundation of a yet unbuilt house. There, at the street curb, was parked our school van, complete with our logo, phone number, and website on the peeling van-wrap that advertises our school. It was quite the visual contrast to see in the foreground this freshly poured foundation beside an almost-completed house with the background of this empty street where our little well-traveled van resided.³



The decision wasn’t entirely surprising. Enrollment had declined steadily. With the appeal of selective enrollment and other strong public high schools in the city, even our relative bargain price of under $11,000/year and substantial scholarship possibilities struggled to move the needle in the marketplace opposite those options that come virtually free of added cost. And as families increasingly looked elsewhere and our own middle school students were admitted to these other high schools, we became a second, third, or further backup choice. It impacted our academic, behavior, and accountability standards and the overall vitality and health of the high school. So, the decision came down to phase out our high school.

And to me, that last part, is ok.

It’s only my second year at this school, so I come with a different perspective than an alumnus or a co-worker who’s been here many years and invested so much or a school family that’s sent several kids through our halls. But I could see that our standards were dropping, the community buy-in was fading, the culture was losing responsibility and accountability. We have reached a point where, despite our best efforts and intentions and energies, we are so strapped for resources and staff and especially for attention and energy that we are no longer able to responsibly prepare our students for college. So for us, phasing out our high school ministry is the responsible thing to do.⁴

The focus of our parish, its families, and its students is already dedicated passionately to our parish vitality and our prekindergarten-8th grade excellence, and the state of things in those areas reflects that. Similarly, the struggles of our high school reflect the way that our community is no longer invested in that ministry, so it is time to move on from it.⁵

To me, there is no shame in admitting that the context of our community has evolved away from high school and more deeply into other areas. The grace comes in realizing that resources would be better dedicated to other ministries and directing them to those areas accordingly. If we were in a situation where our high school students would have no other place to go, where our closing would ruin things for them, then it’d be a different story. Our high school carried unique, definite appeal for its close-knit community, diversity, and intensely attentive faculty/staff. Though this cannot be copied elsewhere, the city does have enough strong public schools, other strong Catholic schools, and plenty of options - plus the option of finishing high school here before the official closing in two years - so that families can continue giving their children a great place to grow and learn. It’s unfortunate that their high school years may no longer be on our campus, but there is peace in admitting and acknowledging this, in acting on it accordingly, and in being as responsible to our students as we can be.

Every so often, when I’d read about schools closing or parishes being consolidated, I would have a moment of sadness for the community that has lost its home, but I would pretty quickly move on to positive feelings. Now resources can be better applied. Now priests can be more sensibly allocated. Now parish budgets can support lay professionals, make space for new outreach and charity, and work together to support one great school and RE program instead of several passable ones. The moment of grief over the what was lost for a community was quickly overshadowed by the light of new possibility as those people engaged with their new normal.

So now, it’s definitely weird to be on the inside. The news stories that popped up in my feeds were about my school, the one where I worked. The email in my inbox was about my students, my co-workers, my job. My first reaction was definitely sadness; this potential decision that we had conjectured as possible was now decided and a publicly announced reality. But quickly, I settled into the reality: this was the right decision.⁶ Our community would lose its long held and dearly beloved tradition of its high school, but it would gain the flexibility and latitude to pour the fullness of its time, talent, and treasure, of all its great resources, into what are thriving ministries in the early childhood, elementary, and middle schools. Thinking of the image from our construction site, the community was now free to move on from that well-traveled and loved but beat up old van to the stability, security, and efficacy of these new constructions that will be great homes for so many years; now they can take that foundation and lay the floorboards, and frame the walls and roof, and furnish the rooms beautifully.

I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to say this moment is like a death. However, it felt like that older person who is trying to be too active for their age - still working when they can hardly move at a reasonable pace, still driving when their vision is going, still resisting hearing aids even though they cannot sustain conversation, still fighting medication routines and regular checkups. It felt like the moment when they finally admit that they could use that help, and in embracing it, find fuller comfort and greater happiness in life by doing so.

Renew My Church will not be an easy process for the people of God. Feelings will be hurt. Emotions will be high. There will be axes to grind. But amid the volatility and change, we have to accept the invitation to humility and remember how we are fundamentally called to be part of Someone and Something bigger than ourselves.

We come to our communities with finite money and finite time to give, but we come together for a purpose and a reason with no limits. If we are able to see beyond the boundaries of ourselves and our communities to what is best and needed by the wider Church, we will all - individually, communally, and socially - be better off for it. We must invest honestly and forthrightly in the dialogue to make sure we are heard. And in doing so, we must trust the Spirit and the leadership of our Church, of which Christ must be the Head, to move us ever closer toward our eschatological purpose of our Church to realize in its fullness the Kingdom of God.

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1 This is a definite strength of our parish and school, and I’m grateful for being a part of it. I was part of faculty focus groups and specialized focus groups, and I got to participate in our School Improvement Leadership Team. I am deeply grateful to have experience in the behind-the-scenes process of self-evaluation that our school undertakes.^↩

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2 There was never going to be a perfect day for such significant and challenging news to be shared, so while it was tough to be off-campus for all this news, I understand it was just coincidentally challenging timing. And my students and colleagues got to do amazing stuff for these home constructions in a fruitful day of service.^↩

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3 I cannot imagine ministry and service without these kinds of vehicles. There’s something about the beat-up van and the goofy mini-bus that just make Campus Ministry outings feel like the family road trips that they are called to be.^↩

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4 High school education is so important, and frankly, the reason I am a Campus Minister is because of the immense and lasting impact of my high school formation. However, we have reached a smallness that makes it nearly impossible to sustain any kind of curricular, extracurricular, athletic, or ministerial programming, and the lack of accountability when their is no competition for any participation or privileges makes it profoundly difficult to sustain things.^↩

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5 In sort of a weird twist of fate, the school became a victim of its own success. The PreK-8 program prepared students so well for high school that they got into selective public and elite Catholic high schools at amazing rates and (quite blamelessly) chose them over staying with us. In some ways, we went from being college prep to high school prep, and in the future PreK-8 only era, the school can do that with even greater intensity than it already does.^↩

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6 Great note from our resident Jesuit, Dave: “When Ignatius was asked what he would do if the Pope decided to dissolve the Society, he said that he would need 15 minutes to compose himself before moving on. Indifference is a tricky thing, indeed.”^↩