When I look back on my time at Williams and the process of discernment, what strikes me is how terrible I was at predicting how my life would unfold. During freshman year, I had a clear vision of where I would likely be in ten years: a brilliant young associate in a top law firm grinding out the hours but steadily climbing the ladder of success, married (to a beautiful and devout Catholic woman, of course) with a child or two, living a safe and happy life in an East Coast suburb with my own house and car, and regularly attending church on Sundays. That was my neat and orderly little vision of the future: a future of checked boxes. There wasn’t much room for risk or surprise. Years later, that list has gone out the window. I now find myself a professional academic, living and working in a foreign country where I own neither a home nor a car, married to a wonderfully wise, beautiful and devout woman who happens to be of a different faith, and yet living a far more fulfilling vocation than I ever imagined in college.
Since I was a young child, I saw my life as primarily a series of obligations: study hard, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, succeed in them, find a good job, go to church, pray, make your parents proud. I did not resent my responsibilities; on the contrary, I took pride in carrying a heavy workload because I was good at it and duly praised for it. Every added extracurricular activity, every paper written, every ka-chunk of the time clock that ended my shift as a dishwasher gave me the satisfaction that I was taking the “right” step. When someone asked what I wanted out of life, though, I would get flustered because my vision of what I wanted seemed embarrassingly prosaic. I always harbored a suspicion that life after college consisted primarily of increasingly complex and rigorous obligations. My goal, whether or not I admitted it to myself, was to meet those obligations. There was nothing wrong with this per se, but I had little in the way of a driving desire. While my classmates had dreams of ending poverty, curing epidemic diseases, writing the next great symphony or novel, founding new businesses, and other great aspirations, I just wanted to do what was expected of me and not make a misstep, to “get out unscathed”, as I was fond of telling myself. Inwardly, I pooh-poohed great aspirations as pie-in-the-sky fancies; the world just didn’t work like that for most people. Far better to be practical and down to earth than to have my head in the clouds.
Like my work, I also tended to understand my faith as a series of obligations to check off. I was a cradle Catholic and a dutiful CCD student, internalizing the obligations (yes, obligations!) to receive the sacraments, love your neighbor as yourself, serve others, attend Mass every weekend unless there was a grave reason, pray the Rosary, the Saint Jude Novena, and so on and so forth. Of course, I believed that God was merciful and all-loving. At times, I felt unconditionally loved and comforted by God. Nevertheless, I would often be plagued by guilt, fear, and the cynical thought that even when I did go to confession, I was liable to go right back and sin again (obstinacy in sin was a ticket to perdition, I glumly reminded myself). I recalled the story of Our Lady of Fatima—a story that I often heard from my devout grandmother, who had learned her faith from Portuguese missionaries in the 1930s. I remember reading about how Our Lady told Sister Lucia that a 14-year old friend who had died of illness would have to remain in Purgatory until the end of the world. If such was the fate of a 14-year old girl living in early twentieth-century Portugal, I thought, what chance did I have? Endless piles of penances and miles of “mea culpas” seemed to stretch before me. It was hard to derive joy from that conception of God.
“We are fired into life by a madness that comes from our incompleteness,” writes Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI in his book, Forgotten Among the Lilies: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears. The chasm that humanity experiences between itself and God, he continues, is expressed by a restless, even erotic, ache for communion with God that can never be fulfilled in this world. But, Rolheiser argues, we have confused this longing for God and the deepest aspirations of the human soul with a desire for worldly success and comfort. While desiring these things is not inherently bad, confusing them with our innate desire for God takes the “congenital and holy restlessness put in us by God to push us toward the infinite” and makes it into a “tamed and tame thing, domesticated, anesthetized and distracted,” leaving us wondering if that is all there is.
That is where I was headed. On one hand, I desired a safe and predictable life of checked boxes, but such a life would likely subordinate whatever passions I had to the responsibilities of the world. On the other hand, the source of those passions was a desire for communion with God. Yet, my relationship with God was driven primarily by fear. I went to Mass, received the sacraments, and even participated in the music ministry, and while I told myself that at least I was fulfilling my obligations, I had a hard time loving God. Until I could open myself to the idea that yes, God really did love me unconditionally and wanted me to be with Him, that He was more concerned with drawing me into His family than scrutinizing how closely I fulfilled the letter of every obligation, I would not be able to trust Him to lead me out of the constrained life I had planned for myself.
While I had a hard time loving God as such, I found it much easier to love the people around Him. The Newman Association gave me a community with whom I could pray and around whom I could be myself. At the encouragement of friends in the Newman Association, I attended Rosary sessions and began attending daily Mass, where I befriended some of my Williamstown neighbors who frequently attended. I also benefited greatly from a years-long correspondence with an extraordinarily patient priest who had once served as an assistant pastor in my hometown parish, as well as frequent conversations with my thesis advisor, who encouraged me to apply for Ph.D. programs in political science when it became apparent that the legal profession had no real appeal for me. Gradually, I began to believe that if the Holy Spirit is in each of us, then to love one another is to love and be loved by God as well. As I began to accept this idea, my fears of failing to meet my obligations fell away. Perhaps God was not the stern inspector I had suspected Him to be. Perhaps God was allowing—even encouraging—me to be happy doing that which actually made me happy, rather than that which was only supposed to make me happy.
In graduate school, I joined the Newman Association there and served as a music minister and member of the retreat team. As one of the few graduate students in a largely undergraduate fellowship, I gained a sense of perspective watching and helping younger students grapple with many of the same issues I did. I found myself enjoying my new role as a mentor. As a teaching assistant, I discovered that I was far more interested in working with students than I had ever been interested in law, and I realized that I might be on to something when I happily spent part of my summer developing my first course syllabi, when student after student came back to request recommendation letters, and when I began receiving multiple teaching awards. Standing in front of a blackboard or having coffee with a student was when I felt most alive. I was surprised by how joyful and unburdened I felt, and yet I sensed deep down inside that this, too, was God’s work.
Toward the end of my graduate school career, I traveled abroad to conduct research for my dissertation and unexpectedly met and fell in love with a local woman. Her own life had been indelibly defined by her determined search for God, leading her from Catholicism down numerous paths before arriving at Judaism. As we talked about our lives over countless meals at her mother’s restaurant, I could not help but be struck by the depth and earnestness of her search. So committed was she to seeking the truth that she had painstakingly raised funds to study Hebrew in Jerusalem—no easy task in a country where the cost of a ticket could equal several months’ salary. The experience had changed her. As she told me about her encounter with God in the pilgrims at the Western Wall and in the symphony of calls to prayers by Jews, Christians and Muslims, I could sense the fire within her. Here was someone who had put her trust in God and allowed Him to lead her wherever He willed. On top of that, she was smart, funny, kind, artistically talented, and stunningly beautiful. I was deeply smitten, but part of me held back. Was I not obligated to marry a Catholic? How would we raise our children? How would we sustain a long-distance relationship from halfway around the world? Would our differences drive a wedge between us? We confided to a rabbi who had become a friend to us. “Don’t let your faith traditions come between you,” he said. We resolved not to, yet without knowing where it would lead.
For six years, we maintained a long-distance relationship, sometimes going a full year without being able to see one another in person. Over that time, our love never wavered. We had two wedding celebrations—a private Jewish blessing and a Catholic thanksgiving service. Several years later, my wife and I are living together outside the United States. I am a professor, spending my days writing and teaching about international relations. On Friday evenings, we celebrate the Shabbat by lighting candles. On Saturday evenings, we recite the Havdalah, in which we commemorate the end of Shabbat with prayers, an overflowing cup of wine and the fragrance of cinnamon to remind us of God’s generosity. On Sundays, we attend Mass together at the local parish, where I sometimes serve as a lector. Every night, we pray together before bed, closing with both the Shema Yisrael and the Our Father. Strangely enough, although I cannot predict where my life will go next, I feel more certain than I ever did in college that good things will yet happen, and that I cause God to rejoice by trying to do the work that I love for the people I love, rather than by fearfully trying to meet every obligation, real or imagined.
My wife frequently reminds me that the Torah regards it as a commandment to be joyful always. “It is easy to be grim,” she says, “but far more difficult to remain joyful.” Although I sometimes find myself nursing old fears of missed obligations, I have come to see God as far kinder and more loving than I ever gave Him credit for. Whereas I once sought to confine my life to the safety of checkboxes, God instead let the ink seep out of those boxes and in doing so, gave me the freedom to imagine a different life. Like the overflowing cup during the Havdalah, He has filled my life to bursting with blessings that I dared not dream about, with the promise of far more and far better to come. How can I not rejoice in that?
Class of 2003
Quo Vadimus? 