Best of the Rest(less Hearts)

Six months into our new format, this team has produced a ton of great reflections on theology, ministry, spirituality, and life as a young adult Catholic. It's been great to see so much new engagement on our posts and pages as so many of you click, like, and share with us in our online community. Today, I thought it'd be fun to highlight particularly excellent posts from the last six months, as I share my favorite post from each member of our writing team. Take a stroll down memory lane and click back to these great pieces by our phenomenal authors:

Erin Conway - Good Enough, I'm Ready: Me and the Other Francis

And finally, before Xavier left for Asia he was never “briefed” on what was ahead of him, he simply agreed to the mission, trusting that what he knew was “good enough.” As I reflect on my own life as a missionary of sorts, I realize that I too was never truly “briefed” before any of my transitions. Although I knew I’d be teaching seventh grade English when I moved to Baltimore and had walked the hallways of my school, I truly had no idea what “being a teacher” really meant. Similarly, when I moved to Palm Desert, I’d never seen the school, the town, or any of the individuals I’d be working with for what would be the next three years. And most recently, when I returned home to Cleveland, I once again found myself accepting a job I hadn’t initially applied for at I school I’d never seen.

Going through college, I always enjoyed grilling people about their selected majors and career/vocation aspirations. So often, seemingly unrelated fields came into clear focus as faithful people explained what they felt called to do with their lives. Erin's reflection here reminds me of those conversations. Millennials are unlikely to stick to one narrowly defined career for their whole adult life, unlikely to soldier on unflinchingly with one company for decades and decades, unlikely to anchor down in one location from one's early 20s onward. And while there's something to be said for the consistency of our parents' and grandparents' trajectories, new pros and cons emerge and loom large as we strike out into our adult lives. I arrived in Palm Desert at the same time as Erin, and we worked together at a school that is an earnest petri dish for vocational discernment. Her reflection shows how one can take what could easily become nomadic uncertainty and utilize its dynamism to surge forward toward clearer and more fully realized vocation. And that's just what she is doing.

Laura Flanagan - Simon of Cyrene

This is our cross, and we will carry it somehow, as we were compelled like Simon to take it up. The Lord himself also carries it, though -- as he emptied himself to do. Simon suffers with Christ; Christ suffers with him. Christ suffers with us. And yes, good will come. Through that kenosis of Christ, we have the gift of baptism. In taking advantage of that totally unearned grace, our tiny girl can now be a tiny saint. I see the fruits of Margaret’s sainthood already, most amusingly in the jealousy of her older sister, who currently insists that she too is a saint. I’m content if her saintly sister is her “aspirational peer.”

In working with young people on retreat leadership formation, they are so tempted to define their leadership by the disclosure of trauma and measure its success by the quantity of tears induced. It's a serious wrestling match to draw them into deeper contemplation that describes the dramatic moments in sparse detail and shifts greater focus to the revelations about self, others, and God that become clear from our lived experience. Laura's maturity and groundedness has been strong as long as I've known her, and her faithful insight even endured through unspeakable tragedy. Here, she humbly found resonance in Simon of Cyrene, who is pressed into duty on the road to Golgotha. Laura's words bring consolation to parents, families, and anyone who seeks to understand the cross in their Christian life. May our little friend Margaret pray for us.

Jenny Klejeski - Here. Now. Love.

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.

Jenny's posts often sound like what I imagine homilies at Mass could and should be. In her own pastoral way, Jenny weaves an easy tapestry of biblical insight, lived faith, and spiritual implications. When I imagine the middle schoolers in her classroom, I think not of the zoo-ish behavior of pre-teens but of a group of young people uniquely engaged to think more deeply. This post, especially, captures that image. While our temptation is to give in to the excuses that the modern, busy life presents, the better, simpler option is to love before we let something else get in the way. The ability to love instantly and generously before we erect a barrier points the way toward better relationship and fuller vocation. The trust Jenny draws from the examples of St. Mother Teresa and Mary gives us the ideal toward which we should strive.

Dave Gregory - The God-Hole

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.

While I sometimes feel tempted to talk about successes and strides in authoring my own posts (something my struggle with humility tries to temper), I've admired how everyone on the team comes at their writing with fairly gritty realness. These six folks are not pulling punches and pretending about sunny lives of faith, though I do think everyone is committed and optimistic in the proper way. Dave, especially, invites that sort of visceral reality into his work. Talking about the God-hole, Dave embraces the valleys and shadows, things he rightly connects to the lives of St. John of the Cross and St. Mother Teresa, showing how sainthood isn't all smooth sailing and immaculate living. Ultimately, his post talks about how seeing God even in the dark interludes can actually deepen and strengthen trust, such that one's whole life comes into the Light differently.

Tim Kirchoff - My Experience of Spiritual Imposter Syndrome

Before I knew it, I had dismissed as vanity every attempt I had ever made to follow God’s will and concluded that any subsequent effort I could make would be equally vain. The only thing that could make my efforts meaningful was an encounter with Christ, something I could not provide for myself—and something which did not seem to be forthcoming on God’s end, either.

Working with non-denominational Christian students, I have seen first-hand how some of their faith language and piety differs, usually in respectful ways that celebrate the diversity of ways to give praise to God. One of the positive influences from this tradition of Christianity is the emphasis on a relationship with Jesus Christ, something that Catholicism often struggles with. On the one hand, it's something I'm always thinking about facilitating better for my students, but on the other hand, seems like a tough-to-define concept that perhaps is more of an aspirational goal as my young people grow deeper in faith, often starting from next to nothing. Tim's reflection brings this struggle into focus (no pun intended) within our own tradition. His memoir discusses how this emphasis in an interview process frustrated his own faith and invited him to zoom out on his relationship with Christ. I found myself nodding along with him a lot, as I felt his piety and faithfulness oddly blackballed by particular lines of questioning. Tim's fidelity and ecclesial awareness give his reflection an authentic depth.

Rob Goodale - The Trouble with Milking the Clock

The trouble with the conservative clock setting, though, is that you end up wasting a heckuva lot of time. It’s also really tough to switch back and forth between milking the clock and trying to score efficiently -- both in real life and in video games. Once you’ve adopted the time-wasting mentality, it’s pretty easy to get stuck there.

I can always count on my old friend, Rob, to bring in sports somehow, which he knows is a clear way to my heart. I have long joked that our generation will make better football coaches because we grew up playing football video games and calling timeouts strategically to either come back late in a close game (if we challenged ourselves) or to stretch out the end and score even more points (if we just played for gaudy stats). In a delightful way, Rob pivots from playing video games, with these gamer ideals in mind, to the rest of life. We often think that our bad habits are easily compartmentalized such that they surely can't and won't influence the other parts of our lives that need to stay on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, humans are broken, flawed, silly creatures, and this is all but inevitable. Rob's reflection reminds me of one of my favorite things to tell young people, especially about social justice and owning their faith as teens: If not you, who? If not now, when?