Transitional Faith

Visiting Duke this week was glorious.  I was able to see many of my friends and spend three straight days of non-stop catching up with people.  I was back in a community I spent years building, and it was so comfortable.  As much as I am really loving law school, I wouldn’t call it comfortable.

A lot of it’s just that I’m a horrendously bad transitioner.  It took three, if not four, years for me to finally feel established and comfortable at Duke.  Almost as soon as I felt comfortable, suddenly I’m in Boston, with a completely new set of people, communities, classes, and challenges.  Sure, new places are exciting, but I have to admit I really like having friends to come home to, people I can text when the thought crosses my mind, and can get a hug from when stress crops up. 

But even if I loved visiting for a break, deep down, I knew college isn’t where I’m supposed to be anymore.  I’m meant to be in law school.  See, faith doesn’t promise us comfort. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, proof of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1).  Sure, the “substance of things hoped for” might be nice, but if I’m hoping for a job to pay off my debts, I want an actual job—not its “substance” (whatever that is).

As nice as it would be, faith doesn’t promise us that job—that comfort.  Catholic mystics have taught that when you’re getting comfortable, God does something to unsettle you, to make you think and pray.  Get too comfortable, and our faith becomes tepid—lukewarm.  God has some pretty strong words against a tepid faith (Revelations 3:16).  God’s solution?  Remember St. Paul’s thorn (2 Corinthians 12:8)?  Despite his pleas for relief, God’s response is not comfort and bliss, but an assurance to faith—“My grace is enough.” 

As we enter the Year of Faith the Pope has called in honor of the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II, I hope we are able to separate comfort and faith.  I pray we are able to look at darkness and fear, and know that for God “darkness and light are but one” (Psalms 139:12).  That we never forget, the “visible came into being through the visible” (Hebrews 11:3), and that it is through darkness and discomfort—not comfort—that God’s grace enters our lives and changes our world.

“And we must unite inside her, or we'll crumble from within.”

(Spoiler alert: if you have neither read the Harry Potter series nor seen the movies, please immediately remedy that, and then come back and read this post.)

When I first got the news, I’ll admit I was a bit unsure of how to take it.  I had gone onto Pottermore, taken a JK Rowling-approved house-sorting quiz, and the results came up Slytherin. 

Sure, it seems utterly superfluous, but still—if only there had been a real sorting hat!  I could have pulled a Potter and begged, “Anything but Slytherin, anything but Slytherin!” The hat would have hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, if you’re sure, better be GRIFFYNDOR!”  and all of you would have been so proud to be friends with me.  After all, choosing not to be a Slytherin is a Potter-endorsed way to show how we carefully gather all the information and give others the benefit of the doubt before passing judgment.

Wait—he begged not to be in Slytherin based on a single rumor he heard from a person he just met? 

Oh. 

Well if Potter neglected to charitably portray his rival house throughout his story, allow a new member of the House try to rectify matters.

The Ravenclaw Eagle

The way I understand it, each house is characterized by certain traits.  Ravenclaw is marked by intelligence and ambition.  If we Catholicize Ravenclaw, I think St. Thomas Aquinas would have found his home here. This Dominican Scholastic theologian was dedicated to reasoning his way to uncovering the mysteries of God, and attempted a summation and defense of all the Church’s teaching in his never-completed Summa Theologica.

The Hufflepuff Badger

Hufflepuff is marked by compassion and loyalty, and I think that if she found herself in Potter’s world, Mother Theresa would have joined this one.  The tiny nun dedicated her life to service of the poor and emptied herself past the point it hurt in service to them, even when no longer feeling the comfort of Christ’s immediate presence.

The Gryffindor Lion

 It’s no mistake I said the hat would have sorted me into Gryffindor if I had permitted myself a snap judgment against my house.  When I finished 8^th grade, one of my artistically-inclined best friends drew each of our friend group a fantastical creature (we are admitted fantasy-addicts).  For me, she chose a Griffin: partially characterizing it in her letter of explanation as “brave, stubborn, compassionate, and obsessed with truth to a fault [i.e. idealistic].”  I think St. Joan of Arc was a Gryffindor at heart.  A peasant from Domrémy, she takes directions she hears from Sts. Michael, Margaret, and Catherine all the way to the French prince, convincing him to give her an army and eventually breaking the English siege of Orléans in her conspicuous white armor—persevering in her beliefs even through being burned at the stake for heresy after being captured.  

The Slytherin Snake

Slytherin is complex, and you probably have a knee-jerk reaction to hate and fear it, so bear with me while I give my house a bit of discussion. My admittance letter from Prefect Gemma Farley focused on how fiercely loyal Slytherins are to each other.  And of course they’re ambitious, but that means they’re reaching for some ideal.  It must be admitted Slytherins don’t always choose the best ideals—in the case of Tom Riddle it was power and eternal life.  However, Salazar Slytherin sought the seeds of greatness in his students, and there are many ways to be great—those that are holy, and those that aren’t.

I think most all of us at Duke have ambition.  Otherwise, instead of selfishly taking up all of our time working for good grades and doing all the extracurriculars and SATs, SAT II’s, etc. in high school, we’d have been in soup kitchens actually helping people.  And, sure ambition out of hand can easily lead to Voldemorts, but that’s why which why the Church gives us the litany of humility: perhaps the most important  and difficult prayer for any student at Duke.  But ambition isn’t intrinsically prideful or against God, so long as we keep in mind what Sam Wells had to say in my first blog post. Would it be wrong to have the ambition to become a saint—something we’re all called to do.

I think St. Ignatius would be a Slytherin (and his Feast day is conveniently on my—and Potter’s and Longbottom’s—birthday). His Autobiography tells us how he was from an aristocratic family who read of Jesus and the saints when convalescing from a war injury, which transformed his ambitions from having a glorious military career and successfully wooing a pretty lady to doing great deeds for God.  He transformed this ambition ad majorem Dei gloriam to the Order he founded: the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), who, with their fourth vow of obedience to the Pope (i.e. House loyalty), spread throughout the world.  It eventually became so influential that the threatened monarchs of Europe pressured the Pope to have the Order suppressed, though even this did not last forever.

All four paradigms represented by Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryfindor, and Slytherin have their place in the Church–each has its representative saint, after all.  However, each paradigm has its own pitfalls—after all, even Peter “was given a thorn in [his] flesh.”   Individual service is necessary, but as the Church’s social teachings instruct us—ministering to the poor without also planning for institutional change will leave the poor with plenty of warm fuzzies, but those that will fade with the dawn of a new day and the return of the same problems.  The Summa is perhaps one of the greatest single intellectual masterpieces of all of Christendom...that almost no one bothers to read anymore, and which most Catholics would have trouble applying to their life.  Fighting for the Church has been blessed by Popes for millennia, but without exploring the wider consequences of war and without careful considerations of all sides of the issue, we have the Crusades.  And what can go wrong with ambition dedicated to an ideal within an environment of loyalty and obedience, if it is untempered by love and compassion?  Why, welcome, most esteemed High Inquisitor.

It takes all types to make a Church.  We are all one Body, and each one of us complements the others in serving Christ our head.  In doing this, we must remember last words of the sorting hat we hear in the series, as he finishes describing the differences of the houses:

“And we must unite inside her,
or we'll crumble from within.”

For, “the whole body, being fitted together and held together by what every joint supplies causes the growth of the body for building up of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16).

Who is Like Unto God?

One week ago today, I stood in the Wallace Wade football stadium surrounded by almost 5,000 other Duke students.  After being called “intellectually sparkling” and “completely cool” by the Dean of Trinity School of Arts and Sciences in a parting blow in the competition between Trinity and the Pratt School of Engineering, President Brodhead pronounced the ceremonial words that officially designated me a graduate of Duke University. After a fleeting question as to why I hadn’t listed philosophy as my first major instead of economics—I could have had a BA degree rather than one that’s just BS—I realized that I was officially done with Duke.  Ready or not, my undergraduate career was over and it was time to embark on a new adventure at law school.  Of course, first there’s the summer after undergrad—a nostalgic time when we drudge up memories and piece them together into “life lessons” we use to justify the fact that all that knowledge we paid for night after night in the library is rapidly receding from our heads.  This is the first of those nostalgic moments.

A traditional picture of St. Michael defeating the Serpent.

When I received the sacrament of Reconciliation my Junior year in High School, most Catholics take on the name of a saint as a Confirmation name.  Because “Shane” is notably absent from the list of the canonized, I chose “Michael,” after St. Michael the Archangel.  St. Michael is best known as the general of the heavenly host—foretold in Revelation to defeat Satan and throw him into the fiery lake. That I chose a fighter comes as no surprise—fighting comes so much more naturally to me than Benedictine contemplation (as the students in my House Course who had to try to convince me to join the Benedictine order rapidly discovered).  I spent this past year fighting DSG in an attempt to allow religious student groups the freedom to determine their own organizational structure, excessive alcohol use in my Fraternity, and that “Catholic” and “LGBT” are not contradictory on the Blue Devils United blog.  Perhaps I should have taken St. Jude as my confirmation name.

However, a lecture I received on my last full day as a Duke undergrad made me reconsider what it means to have Michael as my namesake.  The outgoing Dean of the Chapel, Samuel Wells, gave this sermon at the Baccalaureate service for graduating Dukies.  I highly recommend that every single person stops reading this blog and go listen to it; you will get so much more out of Dean Wells than anything I could possibly write.

His sermon made me take another look at my Confirmation name.  See, “Michael” means something very particular—“Who is like unto God?”  For all the fact that he is the leader of the army of God himself—actually tasked with defeating evil—his name is not a holy warrior’s name. There is no “The Great” attached to it that is the signatory title of conquerors (eg Alexander, Saladin, Catherine).  Instead, he is, at his very essence, humility.  “Who is like unto God?”

I can hear your reaction now, “Christian humility?  How innovative!  How world-changing! $200,000 and a guy in a fancy red robe and you tell us that Christians are supposed to be humble?  We’ve never heard that one before.”  Yes, we Christians bandy around the term “humility” quite liberally, but in practice it often means demurring when someone complements you.  I’m guilty of this; I’ll admit I am horrible at taking complements. However, Dean Wells’ sermon presents another way to look at humility: rather than trying to solve others’ problems, we should be present with them through their problems.  In this Dean Wells introduced an alternative Christian—or even human—vocation that is countercultural to the one that we are taught to internalize at school.  Directly after Dean Wells spoke, President Brodhead rose and gave the Presidential Commissioning to the graduating class:  essentially, “we gave you the tools, now fix the world.”

Being with people may not seem like humility at first.  But, consider what it means to “be present with another.” Well first, you must first be.  When we merely “be,” we are as God sees us—stripped of our resumes, grades, or any other past accomplishments.  God said, “I am who I am,” not, “I am what I do.”  But that’s really scary to us, because to be who we are is to be broken—fallen.  God sees me as I actually am, and sometimes that’s not a Shane I like to be reminded of.

Next, you must be present.  Not in that embarrassing moment when you went up to hug that person on the quad you swore was someone else (should have listened to Matthew 5:34).  Not in that test you have in three days.  Not three dorms over where your latest crush is.  You simply trust in God, and do as do the birds in the sky and the wild flowers in the field.

Finally, you must do all of this with another.  Now, if you’re anything like me, being truly present with myself is hard enough. Remember the lack of Benedictine contemplation?  To let someone see my entire self: shame and fears along with the joy, to let them see how utterly dependent I am on God (while stubbornly trying not to be), is truly a humbling experience.  It makes hollow even the deepest lies we refuse to let go of ourselves and as the truth sets us free, we participate in the Body of Christ.  For even our deepest secret is not our own—“So we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another ( Romans 12:5 ).

But isn’t the above so antithetical to the standard Duke student?  To the effortless perfection we’re supposed to exemplify?  I think back to my Duke experience, and so much of it was finding a problem (/position), setting out to solve it (/applying for the position), and finally duly noting it on my resume, of course glossing over the not-quite-so-successful parts.  However, what were the truly powerful moments? Were they the exhilarations of triumph, when I won a fight? When I got the job?  Or was it when I stopped trying to “fix” my friends’ problem, descended to Earth, and spent time truly with them—in communion with them? 

Few of us will ever have a divine intervention where St. Michael appears wreathed in heavenly light, and, with his flaming sword laws low our clearly Hell-sent competitor (as nice as that might seem in my all-too-frequent less-holy moments).   In fact, most of us will never experience St. Michael in his vocation as heavenly general at all.  But each of us will meet St. Michael.  Perhaps as is fitting for a commander of armies, St. Michael is also the angel of death.  He will be with us as we leave behind all of the comforts we find in this world—friends, loved ones, Diet Coke—as we go on to the next.  In that moment, he can’t protect us anymore, or fix our problems—our battle will be over and our names either in the Book of Life, or not.  But he will be with us as we go face to face with Christ: God’s present to the end.

Take a moment and think about this, the general of God’s army—an archangel whose responsibilities include carrying out the final destruction of evil—will take time to be present with each one of us before we face judgment.  I can’t even find time for family when my greatest battle is a paper for the next day.  I only hope that I will live up to my confirmation namesake, and, even as I fight the battles that are no doubt in my future, remember that it is love that saves, and it is only in å gift of self that that we humans truly find ourselves. 

A gift of self that can only be truly genuine when it is completed with the cry, “who is like unto God?”