I Writes the Applications

For those of you who I haven't been able to catch up with, I am moving back to Chicago this summer. My girlfriend, Katherine, is starting graduate school at DePaul's School of Nursing. I will be starting a part-time MA at Catholic Theological Union. As part of this transition, I have leave my wonderful job as a campus minister/theology teacher/coach out here in California and look for my next wonderful job in Chicagoland. As I assemble materials to submit to high schools, universities, and parishes, I have had to do some serious reflecting to articulate who I am, what I believe, what I love and am passionate about, etc.

Below I share with you my responses to some questions I've answered for job applications. Hopefully, some of my amateur insights resonate with you in some way...

Identify two to three skills or tools you view as essential to being an effective educator. Provide reasons to support your response.

Compassionate patience: As a theology teacher at a Catholic school, I find students to be skeptical and critical of me by default. They seem to have a generational inclination toward doubting the benevolence of organized religion. They cling stubbornly to the fallacy of relativism. They see people misusing, abusing, and otherwise poorly practicing their religions. I have to work with/against this. Deep down, I hope they will find resonance with the teachings of the Church and feel inclined toward Catholic faith. Realistically, I am just aiming to communicate Catholic values to them in a way they can understand; I frequently tell them, "I don't need you to agree with this, but I need you to understand it." Hoping for faith and working for faith/religious literacy in the midst of skepticism requires a lot of patience and great compassion. It does not mean I should let them think whatever they want. It means I must move gently, challenge their faulty understandings, their flimsy opinions, and their ungrounded objections with grace.

Relatability: I have to be credible. If students view me as being out of touch, as not understanding what they are going through as teenagers, as people living in this time and place, then I am discredited. If I dismiss them too readily or hastily, I am intolerant and heartless. I have to remain human, real; I cannot in any way become a cardboard cutout, a stuffed shirt just looking to execute a lesson and evaluate their academic performance in exchange for compensation. I have to show feeling, show my doubts, show my humor. I have to be in on the viral videos, the pop songs, and the trending hashtags - and not in a token way, because teenagers can detect phony-ness with incredible sensitivity. Ultimately, I must remain an adult while relating intimately to their status as teenagers. I love the challenge, and I am deeply consoled when students tell me I am like a loving big brother.

Given today's culture, what values are critical to teach our young men and women? Extrapolate on why these values are critical to teaching at a Catholic, Jesuit and college preparatory school and why they are important to you.


Faith: In an increasingly secular culture, we are told that it is ok to be spiritual-but-not-religious. This is a fallacy. People who lack religion lack community. Humans are inherently social creatures; we function better when we work together around meaningful causes that we share in common. Atheists, nontheists, and "nones" sometimes band together but do so loosely and often solely on social media. Religion is the social, communal force that enfleshes our beliefs and values, the things we think are so important, that fuel us to prioritize family and love in our lives. We need to encourage teens to retain faith, to take ownership of what they believe, to challenge and doubt and discern the faith of their parents and family and make it their own rather than disavow it. Teens can be incredible role models of faithfulness, spirituality, and religiosity. If we can show them its value, they can teach it to each other and help stem the tide of secularism and SBNR's.

Communication: As social media proliferate and we become more interconnected, the temptation increasingly becomes to downplay face-to-face interactions and keep our eyes glued to backlit electronic screens. The solution to this trend is not to liquidate social media; it is to teach ourselves and our young people how to use them well. Social media ought to be a supplemental means of communication. We should use Twitter and Facebook to increase our connectedness to each other so that we can have more to our relationships than ever before. The problem comes when social media become the primary means of communication and relegate phone calls and in-person contact to the sidelines. We need to reinforce the value and superiority of in-person conversation and highlight the reductiveness of communicating solely by texts, tweets, instagrams, and Facebook posts.

In Christ there is no Left or Right

Flying cross-country today, I read the spring issue of Notre Dame magazine basically cover to cover, for what I believe is the first time in my life. Among the highlights were a batch of fascinating profiles of current students by Tara Hunt, a reflection on the media's love of hating Notre Dame by my hero Matt Storin, and a lengthy investigation of the evaporation of the middle ground in American politics by the great Bob Schmuhl.

As a split ticket voter and an independent, I'm keenly aware of the middle ground, for I seek to stand on it in the political arena. My political science classes taught me about the "myth of the independent" - that the majority of self-titled independents that admit a "leaning" toward one party or the other basically vote like affiliates of that party. I am a true independent without a leaning, one who has too many differences with each party and one who finds his preferences split between the two sides. I seek to support those candidates who are to the middle of their parties' bases, who will articulate shades of grey and/or stick with a slate of stances that don't line up uniformly with the party platform.

Schmuhl wrote about how parties don't move an inch, insisting on holding their ground under the standard of their party. He spoke of the two most liberal Republicans and two most conservative Democrats leaving office by retirement or electoral defeat. He pointed out how consensus building is no longer a strength because those who work bipartisanly are labeled defectors and systematically eliminated by the party leaders.

The labels of Democrat an Republican no longer primarily function to identify the political preferences of voters. They are a wedge, an either/or, a red or blue, a finely demarcated Congressional district that entrenches the candidate of the majority party.

As an amateur theologian and committed minister, I often read stories like this through the lens of our lived faith, our challenge to live our Christian baptismal call in the modern context. Schmuhl's article roused my dislike of people's using the labels "liberal" and "conservative" to describe the Church, its leaders, and its members.

Words become labels so easily, charged up, connotatively loaded tools used to evoke a response, to create an image in the hearer's mind, to elicit emotions. Liberal and conservative describe ideology; they refer to the tilt of people or a group toward policy issues. These words work for politicians to some extent. They become charged up with connotation, but they are fitting because politicians, parties, and voters are in the business of ideology and policy. These words do not work for the Church, its groups, or its members; we are not in the business of ideology and policy.

America suffers from its loss of the moderate bloc; the Catholic Church suffers from pick-and-choose faith and excessive heterogeneity. We should seek diversity, but such a pursuit cannot be exclusive. Charismatic Catholics must recognize the validity of Tridentine Catholics; neither can scorn the other or look down on their brothers' and sisters' piety. The Church is not political. It is the social organ that Christ instituted so that all those who sought to be part of Him could join together in the one baptism to live, pray, and serve alongside each other in His name. There should not be liberal and conservative, Democrat or Republican within her embrace.

Sure, some of us are better gifted to work in solidarity with the poor while others' passions lead them to theological studies and professorial careers. Ultimately, all of us are called to respond to every call to love, whether from those in need on our streets or from the Scriptures and writings of theologians. We can always grow toward a fuller, broader faith, yet we must identify our gifts and passions and put them to work answering the call to love.

We should challenge one another both to take action and to embrace contemplation. However, we must resist calling those who attend Adoration regularly "conservative" while labeling those committed to social justice as "liberal." Such labels may serve to indicate political preferences in electoral races, but they are reductive in the way we use them and shouldn't be applied to our faith. I'd prefer "traditionalist" and "progressive," but even those gesture at an implicit claim that is extraneous to the issue.

No matter how we live our faith, we are all called to orthodoxy - to hear the teachings of the Church, as handed down by Christ to us through the apostles and bishops and their interpreting the deposit of faith for us, through the lived faith of the Church (Tradition), and through the Scriptures. Our Church should be the united Body of Christ, an assemblage of believers seeking to manifest their belonging to Someone (Christ!) and Something (the Church!) bigger than themselves, through prayer, community, and service.

Even when we find conscientious tension with the Church, we are called to embrace it. Even if we cannot fully understand or fully line up with the communicated guidance of our Church, we are called to dialogue with it. Even when we disagree, we are called to navigate the tensions.

The orthodoxy of our united community comes not in blind faith, in unthinking subscription to a bill of doctrines and teachings. True orthodoxy comes from our conscientious dialogue with the teaching of Christ's Church. When we use our reason and our will, we are most human. God gave us these gifts so that we might understand Nature and Truth and live in accordance with His will and develop a relationship with Him through Christ. Let us shake off temptations toward "left" or "right" and instead move directly to an orthodox faith in the Gospels, in the Church, and in Christ.

Flipping the Script

Before diving into Humanae vitae with my students, I had them do a "four corners" activity. I put together a list of a handful of statements and ask them to take a stand - strongly disagree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. They have to choose a stance (or neutral/no opinion), write out a short explanation, and then stand in their corner of the room ready to talk when we have our discussion. Thus we started our unit of marriage, sexuality, and birth control.

As we discuss these issues, my goal is to elicit an explanation from them and challenge their principles. Even if they disagree with me and my understanding of morality, I want them to identify their reasoning so I can push them to articulate what underrides their opinions to make them more than shallow stances.

Toward the end, after talking about childless couples and simultaneously procreative and unitive sex, my students had to react to the statement, "Couples in exclusive, committed relationships should be allowed to use birth control." Naturally, I'm trying to see where their line is for birth control - some think it's for everyone, for just committed couples, for marriage alone, or not to be used at all. Ultimately, I'm hoping to make a coherent case for not using birth control, even if many students' instinct is to resist.

So as we unpacked the usual process of the birth control debate, I had a thought to reframe the issue. I love to put new parameters onto these discussions, to keep the focus on the crux of the issue that drives the discussion but to be refresh the context. It's a beautiful combination of professional BS'ing and providential Holy Spirit inspiration to draw on knowledge, wisdom, and much more and to have a moment like this in the midst of a classroom discussion. And keeping with the God who has a sense of humor, sometimes it falls completely flat.

In this case, I admitted to them that my next question might not work or make sense, but that I'd try it anyway and see. I asked my students, "What if we had technology that withheld the unitive part of sex - so no emotional, physical intimacy, no feeling the closeness of sex, no pleasure from the act - but maintained the procreative part of sex - so the act still resulted in conception and pregnancy?"

My "strongly agree and agree" students took a moment to react, taken aback a bit by the strangeness of the idea. They processed their reaction into words and rightly identified it as being wrong, backwards, even boring. They were uninterested in such a thing, viewing it as missing something. I followed up by saying that this is the reaction that I have to birth control.

Birth control eliminates an integral part of sex through the means of artificial, human-made, human-chosen actions. People who advocate for its use emphasize the pleasure and freedom while devaluing the procreative element of sex. The true value of sex, the fullness of our sexuality, is in upholding these parts together.

These students didn't want birth control to sustain procreation but eliminate union. Why then is it so much more ok to restrict procreation but retain union?

Humility in Sacrifice

This post was originally published on February 19, 2013 on the website of Notre Dame magazine. The original article can be accessed at http://magazine.nd.edu/news/37687-humility-in-resignation/

Resignations immediately evoke a fiercely negative connotation these days. Coaches and executives often resign when they break rules or laws. President Nixon resigned his presidency in the wake of ugly scandal. And in the Church, bishops have resigned their posts over mishandlings of clerical abuse in their dioceses.

However, sudden endings to high-profile positions shouldn’t necessarily arouse suspicion and negativity. Coaches often retire after winning a championship. Many presidents, even before the term-limit amendment, stepped away after two successful terms. And in the Church, bishops perennially retire from ministry because of old age, continuing ministry to their brothers and sisters but handing the leadership position on to the next generation.

Pope Benedict XVI, or Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he will soon be once again, has stepped away from the papacy game while still on top. Rather than max out his time at the helm, Benedict has embraced his limits and will give way to a worthy, fresh successor.

Benedict’s resignation is an incredible model of humility. Benedict wrote a simple letter to his brother cardinals that was released to the public — no cameras, no microphones, no reporters. The pope has accepted his advancing age and heeded advice from doctors to stop making transatlantic visits. He has recognized that the Church entrusted to him needs a leader who can more capably respond to the demands of Christ’s people.

He has confronted the reality of his lifetime appointment and freely chosen to admit his human frailty and not cling to power that he knew he could no longer fully exercise. Benedict has recognized that the grasping hand is never full, for it can never be open to receive, so he let go. He remains a leader, a pre-eminent theologian, scholar, author and a cardinal bishop to the Church, and Cardinal Ratzinger will serve Peter’s next successor in humility.

I don’t write to attempt to shape the legacy of Benedict XVI but to shed light on his consistent message: In his papacy, our outgoing pope explained the temptations of moral relativism and emboldened the faithful to stick with the absolute Truth of Christ. In public addresses, liturgical homilies, writings and interviews, he preached tirelessly against relativism, calling it “a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

My own spiritual reflections often bring me to the fact that modern society chooses to accept and even enable sinful behaviors: We invent hangover pills to mitigate the effects of excessive drinking, divorce to give us an out from resolving marital problems, cosmetic surgeries as a faulty solution to self-image issues, birth control and abortions to enable our sexual promiscuity. Even as all of these social reactions illustrate the relativizing of morality, Benedict XVI called us to live in the light of the absolute Truth that is Jesus Christ.

On the eve of the conclave that elected him pope, Cardinal Ratzinger said, “Today, having a clear faith based on the creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is letting oneself be tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times.”

Benedict stuck with the unflinching Christian moral standard. While society attempts misguided moral compromise, Benedict encouraged us to stick to our standards, to call society to turn back evil rather than allow it to become the new status quo. What some may call stubbornness I see as righteousness. While some call the Church and its pope naïve or out-of-touch, I see a community and a Christian leader seeking the Kingdom of God by upholding absolute Truth rather than reducing morality into a buffet.

The articulator of this vision for the last eight years has recognized that Truth can be better furthered by a new leader. Benedict XVI has given himself to the people of Christ with the best effort that he had left to give, and now he offers his retirement as his last gesture of leadership. To the next pope, he gives the chair of St. Peter, the call to preach the Gospel at all times, and an incredible standard to follow of Christian humility.

Humility --> Greatness

Often in my life, I feel disappointment because I hold myself and those around me to high standards. I have high expectations of everything, as I seek the best out of it all. I want everyone and everything to live up to its/their potential. And I am affected, though usually just briefly, when it/they do not.

This morning at Mass, I had a moment. We had a visiting priest, a Jesuit, saying Mass. He did one of my liturgical no-no's by pre-homilizing the readings before the opening rites of the Mass. He added, too, that he was in for the Lenten retreat at the parish and promised a bigger plug in the homily - here we go, I thought... Not only do I prefer to let the readings stand for themselves then be reflected upon in the homily, I also am turned away from preachers who enter into self-promotion, especially during the Mass, longing to just reach the Eucharist and get past their jibber-jabber.

I enjoyed the readings - the offering to God in Deuteronomy, the consolation of Psalm 91, the temptations of Jesus in the desert. Then we reached the homily. Rather than unpack the connections between an offering to the Lord and the challenges by the devil in the desert, the priest launched into general story time. Granted this is a natural and suitable rhetorical strategy, but his canned narratives and jabs for humor distracted from the call to solidarity with Christ in the desert of Lent. So while three crosses stood behind the altar and our crucifix hung behind a purple sheet, Fr. What's-his-name went off wherever he wanted.

I could deal with that, and his eventual point was a good one, the best one maybe: God is Love. I happily digested it, but it became one of those homilies that could have ended five different times. So I receded into personal-prayer-land while he finished up. Eventually, he moved from the ambo to his presider's chair, and this is when I got steamed.

He told us, "Father wanted me to end Mass a few minutes early today to avoid a parking lot jam, so we'll just offer the Creed up to God and move right into the petitions. Trust me; He won't mind."

Ooooooooooooo no he didn't.

First of all, we simply don't skip the Creed on Sundays and feasts - at least give a brother the Apostles' Creed. Secondly, we have time for your rambling homily but not time to profess together the tenets of our faith!? Your stories outrank our shared prayer that reinforces our baptismal vows and grounds us in the center of our beliefs!?

With a little organization and a dose of humility, he could have easily tightened his homily, making just the same points, getting the same laughs, and creating a similar rapport with the parish yet still allow time for the rest of the Mass. I was internally fired up that one person could count his own speech as more important than the movements of the Mass.

This reality has been a growing frustration for me, and it deepens when I find myself being vain and the expense of humility, choosing improvisation or a bit of planning. Personally, I feel my attention to detail, my ability to plan ahead, and my foresight to be negatively affected by California/the Coachella Valley and working in a high school. The culture here is more laid back and last-minute, which does not translate to good planning or accountability. I'm not black-balling improvisation, but we improvise best when it comes from a decent basis of preparation.

This past week, my contribution to our all-school Ash Wednesday service - a short reflection on fasting - was formulated in the hour before and given extemporaneously, without notes, an outline, or anything typed out. My talk was fine; I received compliments on it. However, I was dissatisfied with my lack of preparation and am never content to be just good, to not strive for greatness.

This same vein of frustration bubbled up on the last retreat I directed, too. My student leaders were pretty solid in preparing their talks, deeply vulnerable in sharing tough stories, and incredibly poised yet real in their delivery. To a person, my faculty colleagues' talks were insightful, vulnerable, and honest. Yet, to a person, their talks were too long, disjointed at points, and put together in the last moments.

The reality is that the quality of their talks was totally there, but the talks were not as focused and directed as they could have been, which added unnecessary length. Unfortunately, the casualty of that extra length was small-group conversation time. A bit more time spent in preparations could have increased the quality, decreased the quantity, and allowed small groups the full allotted time they deserved to unpack what was shared well by these adults so that the small groups might reflect in community.

I've seen this also with musicians. I can't attest to this personally, as my guitar skills are rudimentary, but people I know who can sight-read are content to rely upon their spontaneous ability rather than practice. Instead of sitting down and spending quality time with a sheet of music, these somewhat accomplished musicians are content to plunk out some chords and throw in a passing note here and there rather than really play the song. Again, it comes out as good to the ears but falls way short of great. Such playing settles for decent rather than seeking to be awesome. Chalk it up to doing a lot decently rather a few things really well, to being spread a mile wide but only going an inch deep...

I had a colleague last week hit a wall in his teaching of Latin class - he usually sight-translates the texts of Latin stories to his classes but finally met something he couldn't convert on the fly. To his credit, he sat down, thought over it carefully, and took to the Internet, insistent upon finding an answer. A few minutes at a Google search and the scouring of message boards helped him unlock the mystery. The time he took nourished his intellectual side and inflamed his curiosity. He settled the grammar dispute and exuded a sense of gentle joy and accomplishment over taking some time to polish his craft.

I think we need to recommit to the greatness. Why are we so content to be just good? Why do basketball players settle for shooting 50% from the free-throw line and then just chuck 3's during shootarounds? Why do leave our cars crooked in the parking-lot, settling for being between the yellow lines rather than giving equal room to the cars on both sides of us? Why do we avoid desserts or pop for a week then binge on a dessert tray or refill our cup over and over with free refills? Why do we go to Mass three weeks in a row then take a few Sundays off?

What's stopping you from greatness in using your gifts from God? What stands in the way of your forming a closer relationship with Christ? Journey into the desert. Confront temptation. Take courage and stand up as Christ calls you to Him.

Ash Wednesday Reflection

This post was originally published on Ash Wednesday (February 13, 2013) on the website of Notre Dame magazine. The original article can be accessed at http://magazine.nd.edu/news/37516-diluted-lenten-sacrifices/

We often dilute our Lenten sacrifices, cheapening them from spiritually motivated self-denial to a retread of New Years’ resolutions, which usually fizzle by the time Lent rolls around. Domers are especially guilty of this, as we often wear our sacrifices on our sleeves. Bob Kessler ’09, author of ThingsNotreDameStudentsLike.com and a book of the same title, wrote, “While Notre Dame Students might give many reasons for making sacrifices during Lent, deep down they all know that the things they give up for Lent are meant as a way to show other people how Catholic they are and how much more religious they are than the typical student. All Notre Dame Students want to be the mostCatholic student, and Lenten sacrifice is just another way to accomplish this objective.”

I couldn’t help but feel a bit incriminated when I first read this. Not only had I seen this phenomenon but I also felt traces of it in myself. Do we make Lenten sacrifices to fulfill an empty religious obligation? To impress friends? To feel a vain sense of accomplishment? I questioned my own intentions and wondered, “Should our Lenten sacrifices be reduced to fodder for small-talk?”

We should be seeking deeper solidarity with Christ, and to help us do that, we must embrace Christian community and fellowship by humbly sharing our journey with God and with our brothers and sisters. Conversations with friends can help us better engage the challenges of sacrifice. Those exchanges should seek deeper understanding of the struggle, but as share, we have to resist temptations to boast or compare. We must share openly with others while also guarding against temptations to announce our righteousness from the rooftops.

Last year, while volunteering with the House of Brigid in Ireland, I attended the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. The theme of this international gathering of Catholics was “The Eucharist: Communion with Christ and with One Another.” Ultimately, our baptism calls us to be part of Someone and Something bigger than ourselves — Jesus Christ and His Church. True communion is intimacy with both God and with each other.

When we say “Amen” to the Eucharist, we affirm two things at once: We believe that the Body of Christ is Jesus Christ before us in transformed bread and wine and we believe the Body of Christ is our brothers and sisters joined with us in celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass. So whether our sacrifice is something mundane, like giving up Starbucks, or a deeper life-change, like no longer using sarcasm, we should walk the journey in solidarity with both Christ and with one another.

At Ash Wednesday Mass in the Basilica my senior year, my girlfriend and I were enlisted to bring up the gifts. I love to be involved in the Mass and quickly agreed. I picked up the sturdy wooden tray of gold ciboria filled with hosts, and Katherine took the pitcher of wine. As we returned to our pew, the profundity of offering the bread and wine for the Eucharistic sacrifice on this specific occasion began to hit me. When we sat back down, I said to her, “I can’t explain to you how cool it was that we brought up the gifts on Ash Wednesday.”

In the Mass, after the presentation of gifts, the priest invites us to join with him in the Eucharistic prayer: He says, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” Just as the priest invites the Holy Spirit to change ordinary bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, we must offer ourselves on the altar alongside those gifts. The lay people who serve as gift-bearers offer the bread and wine for the Eucharist as a visible sign of the invisible reality that we, as the people of Christ, are joining ourselves to Him in the sacrifice of the Mass. Gift-bearers sacramentally symbolize our offer of ourselves as a hopeful prayer that we may become what and Who we receive.

This Lent, let’s embrace the call to sacrifice in humility with Christ. May the temptations amid our sacrifices bring us to deeper intimacy with God’s ultimate sacrifice so that we may know forgiveness through intimacy with Christ. Let’s offer ourselves fully as we journey toward the glory of the Resurrection, in solidarity with one another and with Christ.

247365

I wrote the following reflection in the tail end of a 10-hour travel day, on my return from a quick weekend trip to surprise my girlfriend at Notre Dame for her birthday. I submit it to you unedited and unrevised, knowing it's a bit garbled and unrefined. I usually try to be attentive those edits and revisions, but for this post, I'll leave you the rough draft!

I am flying back from a wonderful weekend spent with my dear girlfriend. For the overwhelming majority of our relationship, we have been long-distance. While she is finishing college at Notre Dame, my post-grad path took me to Ireland for ten months before I moved to California to start my first job.

We've gone months without seeing each other many times. The distance seriously cramps our style in daily life, forcing us to contrive windows of time in which to talk on the phone or sit down to a video chat because we want to stay intimately involved in each other's lives. The distance also puts a lot of pressure on the rare time we do get to spend together, which causes her to miss me before I'm even gone and pushes me to want our time together to be as it would if we saw each other every day.

The low-light for me is the partings. I think my rock-bottom was walking 30 minutes in the dark, wheeling a suitcase in one hand while grasping her hand in the other, to leave her off at a 4am Dublin airport bus on Main Street in Wexford, Ireland. After a tearful goodbye and watching the bus take her away from me once again, I walked home in the cold under a drizzly rain, my eyes adding their own precipitation to the moment as I trudged back home in the night.

But today was different. Today involved no airport, no curb, no bus stop. We had just left Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on campus at Notre Dame, followed by the post-liturgy mingling that we Catholics love so much. We went to the Grotto, sat and talked for a few minutes, and knelt to say a prayer with hands joined. Then, we strolled under the rocky overhang. I grabbed our candle, and Katherine took a wooden stick. I placed it in a empty cylinder, and she lit the wick. Then we moved away from that sanctuary of hope, and God granted us the grace of a loving, trust-filled, calm, and collected goodbye.

Sometimes, tears intimidate me, and I shy away from people whose emotions are pouring forth in that way. Part of it is jealousy – I wish I could cry more easily, but for me, it takes a good surprise. The only time I'm perfectly content amid the tears is when they're joyful, and our partings are usually marked by those tears – hers as we part and mine after I've let her go.

Today, she didn't cry while I hugged and kissed her goodbye; I didn't cry after I left. A deeper peace has struck us in the grace of communion with each other and with Christ. We know the end of distance dating is near, and those frustrations and exhaustion will soon evaporate.

His will is our peace, and for the two of us, that is so true. As I settled into the peace on my drive to O'Hare, I realized the nature of my desire for our distance to dissolve. I have grown most tired of how, mostly by necessity, she has come to be compartmentalized in my life. Because of the 3-hour time difference and the varying demands of our days, we usually have to schedule our conversations. This often leads to a lack spontaneity and causes me to be more stale than I usually am.

I told Katherine that I'm tired of being “on” for those minutes or hours each day; I just want to be there for her pervasively, ubiquitously. I don't wanna perk up when the video chat rings and power down after I hang up. I'm excited – pumped up – for that gradually nearer time when I can see her anytime and any day and be there for her at the drop of a hat.

And in the context of how committed we are to our relationship including God – to treating our relationship like a triangle whose sides we are trying to shrink so as to bring the three of us closer together – it hit me. This is the nature of our faith. This is what Christ calls us to do. This is unceasing prayer. This is the constancy of the gaze and the intensity of the glimpse coinciding.

The weakness of relationships – whether romantic, friendly, or spiritual – often stems from inconsistency. We only give a crap when it benefits us, when it's convenient to us. The modern social trends and social media influence us to seek a maximum number of acquaintance relationships and to seek quantity in parties and “hang outs” rather than vulnerable conversations between two hearts. We aren't seeking to support each other with the supreme loyalty of unconditional love; we endorse a relativist live-and-let-live approach while responding to others with the “maybe” answer or saying “let me know and we'll see” or “depends who's going” because we shy away from vulnerability and self-gift. Instead, we seek the most “fun” and the highest profiles.

I don't want myself to be so prone to those traps. I need to be attentive to my well-being but vet my intentions, too – am I physically/mentally/emotionally drained and exhausted or just lazy? Am I legitimately skeptical of how expensive something is or hiding behind cheapness? I want to give an enthusiastic yes to friends who reach out to me. I want to respond their invitation with my presence and openness and discern how our relationship can grow from it.

We need to look at our social lives and vet our motivations, to be honest with ourselves and with others. And we owe the same to God. Why didn't you go to Church last Sunday? Were you actually too busy or do you just dislike Mass? Do you have no time to pray or go to Mass or do you simply not prioritize your spiritual life? Do you not volunteer because you can't find something that works or because you don't understand the importance of solidarity?

We need to be honest with God. In our reflections, we need to ask: am I giving God a chance to permeate my life? Can my faith really nourish me if it's collecting dust in the attic of my mind and heart? The classic retreat cliché applies here – you only get out of it what you put into it, whether it's Mass, prayer, Scripture study, faith-sharing conversation, or whatever. If you just go to a building for an hour a week out of obligation, you doing something, but it surely can't provide much.

An hour a week at the gym doing weights and cardio doesn't increase your endurance or sculpt your muscles much. An hour a week learning and practicing a musical instrument barely gets you playing the basics. An hour a week for a 15-year-old learning to drive might delay their getting a license until college. Heck, an hour a week of watching a TV series barely gets you hooked on the characters – how easily will we pass hours a week racing through a TV show start-to-finish!?

If we God permeate our lives the way the internet does, we'd be in better shape. We are so proficient at troubleshooting smartphones yet so inept at recognizing God in our lives. What will your entry point be? Can you download an app for Bible study or prayer? (Catholics check out Laudate) Can you pick a reset button, something in life that will move you to think of God? Can you choose a spiritual mantra to run through your head throughout the day?

I have to live with the reality of being 2,000 miles away from my girlfriend for at least a few more months. It will be a continued challenge, causing intermittent frustration and giving me countless opportunities to grow in love until the day when we can be near each other and drop the compartmental boundaries that limit the manner in which we can support and uphold each other.

What about you though? God is all around us. Christ is with you and in you. What are you waiting for? How will you welcome Him into your days, hours, minutes, and seconds? What will you do? When will you start?