Pilgrim's Prologue

This week, I’m in Cleveland, where I was promoted to the rank of Knight Commander in the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre after four years as a member. I trace the order’s roots to the First Crusade and Godfrey de Bouillon, its original mission of protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land, and its 1847 refounding under Pope Pius IX. Today the order exists to support the Church’s daily life and ministry across the Latin Patriarchate, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Cyprus, work that is charitable and pastoral, not merely financial. I’ll share Cardinal Fernando Filoni’s moving image of returning to his late parents’ house, still there but no longer filled with the sounds and smells of home, as a way of understanding Christians’ responsibility toward Jerusalem, the Mother Church. And we close with reflections on the Jerusalem Cross and the five wounds of Christ, and pray the prayer to Our Lady, Queen of Palestine, for peace in the Holy Land, asking the intercession of St. Bartolo Longo and Blessed Fulton Sheen.

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Just before Christmas 2016, the rector, Fr. John Kartje, gave every seminarian at Mundelein a $25 Amazon gift card as a present. It was our yearly installment of the Kartje Kristmas Kash. I remember using mine that year to buy a new desk lamp for my room on campus; I still use it because I like that it has different settings, from warm to daylight, and can be either really dim or bright enough for open-heart surgery. We were on break, so I had it delivered to my house in Oswego where, being wingback-chair-less, I set up a Christmas break reading corner using a red lawn chair and my new lamp.

Finding a place to settle in and read was imperative that year because I was coming to the end of a new-to-me book by an author I was just encountering. The book is a novel about a small-town barber named Jayber Crow who, through his first-person narration of life, love, and work in Port William, was teaching me marvelous things about life, love, and work in my own world. I finished the book very late at night, in my lawn chair, in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, lit only by my little airport floodlight. I closed the book and set it down on my chest and just stared at the ceiling for a long time. New books are like new relationships: most are fine, and some are good, but now and then one comes along, and you just know you’re about to change for the better.

There are a lot of books that have moved me, changed me, and helped me live life better; this book, Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, is a book that I have no problem saying literally changed my life. If I were forced to pick a single most impactful book on my understanding of myself, my life, society and societal change, modernity, falling in love, faith in God and in humanity, and death, it would be Jayber, without question.

If you had asked me, before that, what I thought a novel was for, I could have given you some perfectly serviceable answer about “character and plot.” Wendell Berry taught me that a novel has the power to be a confession, a pro-fession, offered on my behalf, so that through someone else’s life and voice I might more clearly hear and understand my own.

Wendell Berry died on August 31, 2026, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at age ninety-two, on land his family had farmed for seven generations. In the month since his daughter, Mary, announced his death, the tributes have come from Kentucky governors and small farmers and monastic writers and from the full gamut of editors and literary quarterlies. That range of mourners is itself a kind of testimony. Few American writers managed to be beloved by agrarians, environmentalists, distributists, contemplatives, and plain readers all at once, and he did it without ever compromising the basic truths that moved him. We can hear Berry’s voice in that of Jayber Crow:

I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

Berry goes on to say, through Jayber, that “faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows…we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.” (356)

Wendell Berry was born in 1934 in Henry County, in north-central Kentucky, into a family of tobacco farmers. He studied at the University of Kentucky, then went for a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford, and by twenty-eight had landed a position teaching English at NYU, exactly the kind of literary career an ambitious young writer was supposed to want (and one I’m jealous of!!) He stuck it out for two years and then came home, so he could farm and write from a place instead of just about one. Decades later, in his book, A Native Hill, he wrote that the land had once been his by accident, by happenstance, and now it was his by choice; the choosing of it makes all the difference. (Lovers of St John Henry Newman will recognize here Berry’s movement from notional to real assent, and likewise see here a real example of the difference that movement can make in our ability to love a place, a vocation, God, and ourselves)

Wendell Berry was part author and part activist. He will be remembered as one of the most serious and unglamorous defenders of small farms and local production of the last century, and his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, made the case with a patience that never gave way to nostalgia. In The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981), he argued that a nation which allows its farmland, its topsoil, and its rural communities to be treated as disposable inputs to an industrial system will eventually find that it has begun to make the same argument about people. Care for the land and care for one’s neighbor were, for Berry, the same thing, and he distrusted any economic vision that could not be answered for locally, in a particular place, to particular people. He wrote all of this by hand, in pencil, by daylight (and not by bright lamp), having farmed with horses rather than tractors for most of his life. He wasn’t LARPing for a different time, or living a merely performative existence. It was the argument, lived.

The fiction did the same work by other means. Port William, the invented Kentucky town where Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and a dozen other novels and stories take place, is not an idealized rural past so much as a sustained study of what a place actually costs and gives, generation after generation, to the people who stay in it. Jayber himself, the town barber and unofficial keeper of its memory, spends the novel learning to love a woman and a community whose wholeness he can only ever glimpse in fragments, which is close to Berry’s whole vision of what fidelity to a place requires. He teaches his readers that anything real and good will require devotion that can’t be fully rewarded, at least not in this life, but is worth giving anyway.

I’ve read Jayber Crow alone or with groups at least four times; at 356 pages, it isn’t that long, but still it takes me two or three months to read. It’s a monumental project for my heart and mind, and (at the risk of sounding melodramatic) taking my time with this book is a matter of justice.

That said, Berry’s poetry offers similar depth on a varied scale, and serves as shot-sized portions of his writing and worldview. The Sabbath poems, written on Sundays over four decades, read like a farmer’s private prayers, unhurried and often unresolved. I loved reading them on the Taylor’s couch in Downers Grove.

My favorite of his poems, and probably his best-known, ”The Peace of Wild Things,” finds its way into the woods, where despair for the world gives way to the patience of a heron feeding and to the quiet of stars waiting overhead. When I moved to Washington last month, my friend Suzanne surprised me and sent me off with her beautiful painting based on this poem.

When I started Pilgrims’ Prologue, I chose for the tagline a line based on the writing of Wendell Berry: “Please tell me where the wildflowers are.” It was my spontaneous response to one of the Sabbath Poems:

“I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling by a will not his own.”

Wendell Berry did not set out to be a prophet, and would likely have spurned the title if someone ever offered it. He asked only that we pay more attention to the earth, to the sky, and the heart within ourselves and each person; the flourishing of one affects the flourishing of each. We must never forget each other, and must strive always to do right by the ground below us and the hearts around us.

The song he gave us in “The Peace of Wild Things” is his song now, and he rests and sings it now on, as Jayber calls it, “that beautiful shore.”

Read this poem with me slowly now, as a prayer for our brother and guide, Wendell Berry.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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This week's episode marks a return to podcasting from Father Ryan's new home in Washington, D.C., where he's now in his first year of graduate studies in Canon Law at Catholic University. Drawing on Sirach, Romans 14, and Matthew 18, he unpacks Jesus's answer to Peter's question about forgiveness, seventy-seven times, not seven, and traces the word "forgive" back to its roots: a surrendering of the desire for power and revenge, not a denial that we were ever hurt. Forgiveness, he argues, is above all an interior work, one we can offer even to those who never know we've extended it. With the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falling this week, he closes by pointing to the crucifix as the clearest image of the compassion with which we ourselves have already been forgiven.

In honor of the 10th anniversary of this post here, and in honor of my Mom’s birthday!

Story time:

In my senior year of college, I studied in Rome for a semester. For most of September 2013, some friends and I traveled around Europe. We did part of the Camino in Spain, and went to Paris, Luxembourg, and London before heading back to Roma.

As most of you know, going to Paris was a huge deal for me. At that time, I was pretty fluent in French (not so much anymore, sadly), and I had been studying the language and that city since freshman year of high school. The day after we finished the Camino, my friend Daniel and I flew to Paris. Ready and excited to go full-tourist-mode, I even wore my map-of-the-Paris-metro boxers. Clutch.

Having just spent 5 days walking through the mountains in Spain, we were dehydrated and exhausted; definitely ready to relax. We checked into our hostel (St. Christopher’s Inn at Gare du Nord – nothing “saintly” about the place) and quickly discovered the first of our many mistakes. In Europe, when ordering a room online, “double bed cabin” does not mean a room with two beds, but instead is one small room with one double-sized bed. Whoops… a little coziness won’t kill you.

Daniel and I settled into the effect of our mistake and decided to hit the hay so we’d be well rested to explore Paris in the morning. However, around 2AM I woke up with the worst pain in my side that I’d ever felt; I couldn’t walk, could hardly even stand up. Daniel and I went down to the desk and asked if they could take us to a hospital….”oui, oui” said they, “but you’ll have to walk.” Walk? Humph. Off we go.

Limping through the dark Parisian streets, past the train stations, stepping over homeless people, wafting the smell of French urine in the streets, we eventually made it to this hospital:

Except, picture this at 2:30am with everything dark except for spotlights on the flags over the gate and being confused and in excruciating pain. I felt like I was suddenly a character in Les Mis. After checking the doors and hiding from security, we finally found the ER:

The metro stations in Rome are nicer than this ER. Eventually, my fears were quelled and they said the pain was not my appendix, but only a friendly, neighborhood kidney stone. The only option, obviously, was to sit in the waiting room with the drunk teenagers on cots, detoxing under foil blankets and with the guy covered in blood holding his hand over his eye, drinking from the tiniest paper cup you can imagine, and wait until the stone passed. Poor Daniel was accosted for money and probably other things (he doesn’t speak French, perhaps to his benefit in those moments) several times. Finally, the stone passed. “Monsieur, zere’s blood in your pee…you must stay for tests.” How long will that take? “Ze test iz only 4 minutez, but ze rezultz will take 5 hourz.” 5 hours!? Can I go home and come back? “Le LOL no.”

So I signed the “I’m leaving even though you told me not to and I understand if I die” forms, and got outta there.

On the walk back, I called my mother to tell her all that had happened. Partly because I was otherwise mentally occupied during this time and partly because I’m just a bad brother sometimes, I forgot that my brother was having his Orchiectomy that day and, because of the time difference, would just be arriving home to recover. Naturally, my mother was in no place to hear about her son visiting the emergency room in Paris, France, while she was busy tending the other son who just had a testicle removed. I’ll never forget hearing my brother, drugged as he was, yelling in the background, “You’re always trying to one-up me! I just had a testicle removed! You’re always trying to one-up me!”

—

What does any of this have to do with my mom’s birthday? Well, I thought it fitting to share the story of the time she almost had a heart attack the night before her birthday in 2013. That was one of the nights that her motherhood was on its fullest display; both of her sons were down for the count, and all she could do was suffer with us. In 2016, when she wished me a happy Kidney Stone-versary, she had this to say:

“Never could have loved you both more.” And all the way in Paris, I felt that love stronger and more present than ever. I have lots of things to thank my mom for, but the one that will always mean more to me than anything else is that she loved me, no matter what.

As that book says:

“I’ll love you forever
I’ll like you for always
As long as I’m living
My Mommy you’ll be.”

Happy Birthday, Mom!

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On the first day of school this year, I noticed a young guy wandering around the student center lobby at Catholic University. Smartly dressed, new shoes, new backpack, nice hairdo.

“Freshman.”

He was wide-eyed and, I’ll say, looked lost. While I stood in line at the bookstore order pickup, he weaved around the bookstore, checking his phone with quick glances, before he finally walked up to me and said

heydoyouknow is this is this thelinetoget textbooks?

Sure is, my guy, and welcome to Catholic U!

Interestingly, he turned on his heel (I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone actually do that) and left.

“Good for him,” I thought. In a totally planned world, where it can feel really embarrassing not to know something, here was a kid who went out of himself and asked a stranger a question.

Being in a new place is hard…like really hard, especially if it’s your first time away from home or your own to figure things out. (It can be just as hard in the day-to-day! I’d rather ask Google where Jewel keeps something than ask an employee for help.)

It’s been fun to watch our bunch of priests studying Canon Law at Catholic University try to figure out where our classes are, where the dining hall is, what the shortcuts around campus are, and, like our friend from earlier, exactly where to pick up these blessed textbooks. (Hint: it’s the sawed-in-half VW Microbus around the corner in the bookstore)

In a formation talk just before ordination, one of the seminary psychologists told us something that has stayed with me and helped me be more patient with myself as I have moved or changed assignments. He gave us a list of life’s top 5 most difficult transitions and pointed out that when a priest moves to a new parish or assignment, it isn’t just one or two of these that apply, but every single one.

If you’re having trouble in your adjustment to college, or wondering why this move has felt like such a pivot, consider the list:

1. Relocation/moving to a new town or city: some say that moving to a new city, especially on your own, rivals divorce or job loss in the psychological toll it takes. Where am I? Where do I go for food or toothpaste? Will I find “home” here?

2. Job loss: Starting college is not the same as job loss. But, if you think about it, high school had a lot of the same qualities as a job: going to the same place with the same people, day after day for years, completing a series of tasks or requirements with deadlines and objectives. For a long time (and a very formative time!), that was a mission, a sense of purpose and identity, and now it’s gone. In theory, it’s been replaced, but we still have to process the change.

3. Ending a long-term relationship: Whether this means a romantic relationship or just personal friendships, there is really a transition here! The staff at Visitation had their offices on the first floor of the rectory, and that meant these people were more than coworkers and, in many ways, were the closest relationships and friendships in my life during that time. Even though there is no shortage of new relationships forming, this transition is hard! Those starting college spent the last 12 years with largely the same group of people; even if you weren’t friends, you still saw the same faces in the same hallways for years and years. Everyone seems new and unfamiliar, at least for now. Don’t underestimate the toll this takes!

4. Getting a new boss: In college, the boss is you! Mom and Dad aren’t here to keep you on track. Are you liking yourself as a boss? Or is it a challenge to keep a lot of plates spinning? (Hey Mom and Dad, if you’re trying to run their life from far away, just give it up sooner rather than later. It’s not helping you or them… Anne Lamott’s great line: “You can’t chase them with water bottles and sunscreen. You have to let them go; it’s disrespectful not to.”)

5. Retirement: in some ways this one’s a stretch. As a confessor, I was really surprised to hear the toll that retirement takes on the person themselves and also on their spouse, children, and friends. When we go off to college, we’re obviously not retired, but some of the same difficulties apply. Retirement, like college, is desired and planned for over years, but when it comes, it can leave a person feeling a loss of identity or purpose. “Not that long ago, I was at the top of my game, the big man on campus, and now I’m not sure what I am or where I fit.”

Starting college is a huge transition, and the real toll it takes stems from the fact that so many foundational aspects of life are impacted. Everything from “Where do I live and where do I eat” to “what am I doing here and who are my people” is foisted onto the table all at once. And, like so many of life’s hardest moments, the only way to really deal with it is to deal with it; the only way to get through it is to get through it.

But being proactive helps! So here’s a little advice from a priest who’s starting 23rd grade and going through these same transitions:

1. Find Your Way. Most of the time, in the beginning, we make beelines between certain places: dorm, food, dorm, gym, dorm, class, dorm. For a couple of weeks, take some time to wander around. Get lost on campus, walk through nearby streets, memorize where things are. As we get ready for the launch of GTA VI, consider your world like the map of an unexplored open-world video game: cloudy and hidden, but the more you explore and wander around, the clearer the map becomes.

2. Find Your People. In 2010, my first year at North Central, I became an expert in bubble shooter online because I was too nervous to put myself out there. The last time I lived in Washington, I went out to eat by myself every night for almost a month because I was too nervous to join everyone in the dining room. But then something happens, or someone says hi, or you strike up a conversation in class about meatloaf or the Bears or a common struggle and, the next thing you know, you’ve got a ride-or-die. But it takes time. Join groups, go to meetings, do an intramural, and just meet as many people as you can.

3. Find Your Spots. Hello from the window counter at Cool Coffee on 12th Street NE in DC. (I’m mad because the table where I usually sit is taken today.) When I was in Washington last time, I spent so much time here that when I moved back this summer, the owner said, “Ryan! Where have you been?” Every campus has a little nook or cranny that is out of the way but filled with peace and beauty for those with eyes to see. It’s been fixed up by now, but when I was at St. Thomas, I found solace in the shrine to Our Lady of Peace, given to St. Thomas by student-alumni who were also veterans of the world wars. So find a place that can be yours, and go there!

4. Find Your Outlet. If you’re an electrical wire in a wall, an outlet is a place to spend yourself. But if you’re a plug, it’s a place to recharge. Humans, by analogy, have both these needs. You will have plenty of opportunities to spend yourself in college, but the ways you will find life and recharge will not be as clear at first. This will be a major litmus test of your chosen major: I started as an English major, except I hated what I was reading and writing. I struggled through almost every assignment. When I went to graduate school and started studying real theology, I couldn’t stop reading and writing; I’d found something there that gave, and still gives, tremendous life and joy. Get yourself a hobby outside of schoolwork, and surround yourself with people who make you laugh and help you become more of the “you” you’d like to become.

5. Find Your Limits. In the seminary, we had a saying: someone kneeling longer than you is not holier than you; he’s just kneeling longer than you. Don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides. Your roommate might study longer than you, and maybe that’s because they’re smarter than you, or maybe that’s because they have a crippling fear of failure that has masqueraded as a success fetish. So do your work. Do your work honestly and take responsibility for it. But don’t let your life become your work or your work become your life. Everyone should wake up at 5:30 twice a day: take naps! Go for walks, hang out in bookstores. Stop just before you hit your limit, then recharge.

Good luck out there, everyone! You’ve got this.

All my best wishes go with you, and I believe in you!

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There’s a chapel in Rome that I truly love, maybe more than any other, where I have knelt so many times and felt overwhelmed. I love this chapel so much, and yet I find it almost impossible to pray there because my mind never lets me move on from the sheer amazement of where I am and what I’m doing. To me, it’s a scandal that this isn’t among the most popular spots in Rome, and even more unsettling is that so few people seem to mention this place or even know it’s there.

It’s a little-ish church by Rome’s standards, sandwiched off a quiet park between the Lateran and the Porta Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill. It’s the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and the chapel behind it contains the relics of Christ’s passion brought back from Jerusalem by St. Helen, the mother of Constantine, in the fourth century. The church is called “Holy Cross in Jerusalem” and not “of Jerusalem” because Helen even brought several tons of dirt from Jerusalem, which was spread as part of the church’s foundations.

I’ve long been fascinated by this chapel: is it possible that I’m really kneeling in front of a beam of the good thief’s cross, the finger of St. Thomas, a nail that had pierced the hand or foot of Christ, and even the titulus, with the handwriting of Pilate still visible, that had declared this man to be IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDEORVM, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews?

As fascinated as I am by this chapel and the legends surrounding it, the British author Evelyn Waugh has given me another reason to stop and marvel, and that is the story he presents of the Empress Helen, her conversion, and her pilgrimage in his 1950 novel, Helena.

This is Waugh’s most uncharacteristic book and, according to him, his favorite, which I think tells you something about Waugh, since it is neither his funniest book nor his most technically accomplished. It is a short piece of historical fiction about Constantine's mother, written just a decade after he’d skewered the English upper classes in Handful of Dust and five years after reawakening the imagination of Britain’s Catholics with Brideshead Revisited. Waugh made a name for himself by fusing wit and the little things of life to bring readers to themes of ultimate importance, but in Helena he quite soberly shows us something else: the human desire to be seen and known, and the fulfillment of the innate human longing for life everlasting.

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Waugh’s Helen has almost no interior mystical life to speak of. She does not levitate, she does not receive locutions, and in fact we rarely see her pray. Medieval legends tell us that she is the horse-mad daughter of “Old King Cole” from the British Isles who grows up to marry an ambitious Roman soldier who tosses her aside when he becomes politically useful enough to need a better marriage. From the sidelines, she watches her son become the most powerful man in the world, and spends her old age troubled by the increasingly strong stirrings within her spiritual self.

Waugh surrounds her with every fashionable heresy of the age: Gnostics who think matter is beneath God’s notice, philosophers who prefer their truths abstract and unencumbered by anything so vulgar as a date or a place, courtiers drifting toward Arianism because it’s intellectually (and politically) easier. Helen views these as intellectually and spiritually lazy. She wants to know where. She wants a when. Her recurring question, needling every theologian who tries to spiritualize the Incarnation into a nice idea, is essentially: yes, but what did He actually touch, and can I go stand there? Tired of the monotony of her life at the Sessorian palace in Rome (now the site of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme), she does something that appears to the civilized world as either overdone devotion or the fruit of mental illness: she goes to Jerusalem and starts digging, motivated by one thought alone: if Jesus really died on a cross and rose from the dead, then there must be something concrete there to tell me it’s true.

In place of the usual sanctimonious hagiography so common in lives of the saints, Waugh gives Helen a tenacious, real, and relatable substance. By the time she gets to Jerusalem, she is well over seventy, Hadrian had built a temple over the supposed site, and nobody who might remember anything useful is still alive. The empire’s finest theologians have moved on to arguing about the nature of the Trinity and have no patience for an old woman’s insistence. She digs anyway. Waugh’s Helen is not content with faith that remains a hopeful feeling; faith, for her, moves the heart out of itself and toward real action. If faith is based on facts, she seems to say, and if those facts are buried somewhere out there, then sometimes a living faith means doing the work to unearth them so that countless more may come to believe.

When they ask him where he is staying, Jesus invites his disciples to “come and see.” (Jn. 1:39) Helen’s motto is similar: quaesivi et inveni - I sought and I found. In his 2008 address at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, Pope Benedict XVI brought back into our conversation the marvelous phrase, so often used in ancient times to describe the essential posture of man’s soul, quaerere Deum - the search for God. Every person possess the imago Dei (image of God) and therefore also the capax Dei (capacity for God). I’m reminded of St. Augustine’s belief that “to search for God is the greatest human adventure…and to find God is the greatest human achievement.”

Helen’s tenacious seeking throughout this novel finds its completion in a completely anticlimactic way: they dig where the legend told them to dig, and they found what the legend told them they’d find. In some ways this is both the simplest and most profound truth the spiritual life can give us. We must learn to ignore or at least mitigate the myriad distractions that call us away from the simplicity of this quest, and very often we will only learn how to do this through painful and difficult lessons.

If you know about St. Helen, it’s probably because you know she’s the one who rediscovered the True Cross and brought it to Rome. If that’s what you know about St. Helen, then it’s only natural to assume that a book about her would really be a book about that. From this perspective, Waugh’s account of the discovery of the True Cross is somewhat unsatisfying; but this is exactly why it works. There is no choir of angels, no heavens opening, no Star of Bethlehem, no voice of the Father. There, in a muddy pit, is an old woman, three crosses pulled from an ancient cistern, with no way of knowing which one is the one. The wonder is in the fact that the thing was there at all, waiting under Hadrian’s rubble, exactly where the story said it would be, for anyone patient enough and humble enough to look beyond the theory and actually pick up a shovel.

That is Helen’s gift to the Church, and I think it is the gift Waugh most wanted to give his readers: the reminder that Christianity is not merely a philosophy that happens to have some historical trappings. It is a series of claims about actual places and actual objects and actual dates and actual people. To the many Christians who are tempted to let their faith drift upward into abstract oblivion, and likewise to the many who sometimes forget to let wonder and awe pierce them deeply, St. Helen will be interceding for you with dirt under her fingernails, inviting you to help her dig.

St. Helen’s feast was earlier this week, and it has always struck me as fitting that the Church gives her a summer feast day, unhurried and a little overlooked, for a saint whose entire holiness consisted of refusing to hurry off in search of something easier to find. If you are looking for a patron for the parts of faith that are less about consolation than about persistence, for when faith feels like digging for a long and fruitless time, may I suggest the elderly mother of Constantine, an old woman with a shovel who believed what only Christian hope can teach us: the wondering isn’t for nothing, the searching isn’t in vain, and the digging deep is only the beginning of true wonder and abundant life.

Quaesivi et inveni. Keep digging. What you’re looking for is usually right where they told you it would be.

Here’s an excerpt from a Helen’s monologue before an image of the Three Wisemen in Bethlehem (pp.199-201)

“This is my day,” she thought, “and these are my kind.”

“Like me,” she said to them, “you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way…How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot. How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

”Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too.

“You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation.

“Dear cousins, pray for me….For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

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Tuesday, coffee shop.

I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re cashless now.

“what? since when? I come here all the time.”

since March 9th, ma’am. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.

It’s tuesday morning and I’m in a coffee shop and
I’m listening intently to a lecture about the
perils
of innumeracy

(googles innumeracy)

“are you not aware that the inability to count is
rising among the youth
and the removal of tactile opportunities to handle numbers
is making this crisis worse?
furthermore -”

ma’am, would you like to pay using a credit/debit card, a gift card,
or use points?

“oh. I can tap my phone.”

— sometime later —

“Debra, did you try to pay with cash?”

No lol they’ve been cashless here since March.

“I come here all the time and didn’t know that.”

“There’s a concern about innumeracy in our society, Debra.”

“Debra, did you read what Donald Trump™ said”

debra, run!

__

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It’s probably the most common question from people discerning a religious vocation.

“But, won’t I be, you know…lonely?”

“Well yeah, kid, you’ll be lonely. Sometimes, anyway.”

And then follows a very well meaning discussion about the nature of loneliness and the difference between loneliness and solitude. Solitude can be chosen, cultivated, even enjoyed. Solitude is modeled in the Gospels by the Lord himself.

But the loneliness people are afraid of is something else: the experience of being surrounded by people you can’t quite reach, in a life that fits you imperfectly, doing work that matters to you in ways you won’t be able to fully explain to anyone else in your life. It is the loneliness of the person who has found something real, like a vocation, a true love, or a sense of what their presence in the world is for, and is discovering that this finding does not automatically produce connection or understanding with others.

Ask anybody: this kind of loneliness does not discriminate. It’s not limited to those in religious vocations, but is felt at least somewhat, at some point, by everybody. Why? Dunno. \_=/_/

“More tortuous than else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it?”1 This feeling, and how to live with it, is what John Williams (no, the other one) has given us in his 1965 novel, Stoner.

The novel’s premise is deceptively simple. William Stoner is born to Missouri farm parents, sent to the state university to study agriculture, and in the middle of a required survey course on English literature, he falls irreversibly in love with words. He turns down the farm, stays on campus, studies more, and becomes a professor. He marries a woman who doesn’t love him. He has a daughter he can’t protect. He is trapped in a decades-long departmental war which he all but loses. He experiences true love only once, an affair with a colleague which ends because the “man at the desk” needs it to. He publishes one modest, largely-unread scholarly book. He dies at home, alone, holding it.

That is the whole story.

John Williams presents the life of William Stoner with some of the most beautiful prose: it’s spare, precise, and merciless. But as he reads, the reader is given the sense that Stoner’s life, for all its apparent failure, is being told to you by someone who thinks it matters enormously. And somehow the fact that Williams thinks this life is worth reading, the reader reads on.

The novel’s central wound is what I want to call the problem of lonely togetherness. Stoner is almost never literally alone. He is surrounded, at every turn, by people who share his space and claim his attention: Edith, his wife, who manipulates even the layout of their home as a displacement activity for feelings she cannot name; a daughter he loves with an inarticulate fierceness that Edith dismantles; parents to whom he returns dutifully, speaking in sentences that say almost nothing, because “almost nothing” is all there is to say. Not only does Stoner stay, he never even entertains the idea of leaving. He endures! And Williams wants you to notice that endurance is not the same thing as resignation; endurance of trial gives life its own kind of dignity, even when everything else seems so undignified.

The “lonely togetherness” is most acute, most painful to witness within Stoner’s marriage. Edith is not a villain, exactly. She is a person shaped by damage from her own childhood in a moneyfull and loveless home; she holds grief over her father’s financial ruin and suicide that she has no tools to process; she marries Stoner out of an unspoken social imperative and then punishes him for the rest of their shared life. Her cruelty is not dramatic: it is domestic and granular, and she destroys his confidence and wonder through small decisions made over decades. Stoner absorbs it the way he absorbs most things: stubbornly, looking forward to returning each morning to the one place that still makes him feel something positive and real.

That place is his classroom. This is where Professor Bill Stoner earns the reader’s respect and pity. Stoner teaches because literature woke him up. It made him realize that the words of a sonnet written four hundred years before his birth could be addressed, specifically and personally, to him. When this happens to Stoner, it changes the direction of his life. And Stoner spends the rest of his career helping to make it happen for his students. He isn’t always successful, as no teacher ever is. Some students don’t care, and he knows it. But some of them really do, and in these he can see the same awakening, and to these students he devotes everything he has.

This is not nothing. Anyone in education will tell you that this, actually, everything. And so, as the novel moves toward a quick and quiet conclusion, something happens for which the reader ought to be very grateful: we are reminded that Stoner’s life looks like an apparent failure because we have brought to our reading the harsh and unrealistic judgement of an unfair and inhuman world. He did not win the departmental politics. He couldn’t save his daughter from the wreckage Edith made of her youth. He let Katherine, the woman he loved, leave. His marriage meant nothing to either party.

At the end of his life, a cancer-ridden Bill Stoner returns to the modest book he wrote on a topic he truly loved. Lying there, alone in his makeshift bedroom at the back of his house, the only room Edith allowed him to make his own, he feels something Williams describes with a phrase that has followed me since I first read it: a kind of joy, “as if borne in on a summer breeze.” Not triumph. Not vindication. The kind of joy that does not require the attention or approval of anyone else. And for Stoner, that kind joy is the greatest thing he could have found.

As I pack up parish ministry and head off to study canon law, I can’t stop thinking about this novel. Parish life is relentlessly relational. You are with people at their most unguarded: at bedsides, in confessionals, at gravesides, in the sacristy at seven in the morning when no one is performing anything for anyone. You share meals and seasons with people you didn’t (and maybe wouldn’t) choose but find yourself loving nonetheless with the tenderness of friendship and the fierceness of family. And you are still, in some fundamental way, alone. Not isolated, certainly, but lonely in the more precise sense I mentioned at the beginning. There are things a priest carries that he cannot put down on the table over dinner. There are joys he cannot adequately explain and griefs he can’t fully share. He lives, in some sense, in the same condition as Stoner: among people, for people, and in a type of solitude that those people cannot and, probably, should not be given access to.

What the priesthood offers — what any vocation offers, if it is real — is exactly what Williams gives Stoner in that final scene. What it offers is the possibility that the work itself was real, that the love it expressed was real, that the awakening those students experienced in his classroom was real. It gives the priesthood the sense that everything done in silent sincerity, known only to God and the priest, is real. Stoner dies holding the book he wrote and was proud of. He doesn’t die holding his marriage or his career or his daughter’s hand. He dies holding the one thing he made that was uniquely his: evidence that he paid attention, that he cared, that he showed up. For the reader who removes the inhuman and unfair criteria for judging a successful life, it’s clear that this moment is not just a consolation prize.

It is, in fact, the prize.

Like every good author, John Williams has written a book trying to express something about being a human. We are made for more than that which our circumstances open up for us right this second. We carry in us a capacity for love and understanding and communion that the daily lived experiences of our lives will rarely fully accommodate. Most of us will live, in some measure, lonely together. The question the novel poses in its final pages is whether the work we did in the meantime was real, and whether we, in the end, can be okay with being alone in recognizing that fact. Stoner came to be okay with it. Reading this novel, I find myself inclined to look less harshly at the past, more tenderly at the present, and more calmly toward a future full of hope.

Stoner was published in 1965 by Viking Press. It is available in a New York Review Books Classics edition, which is how most people discover it.

(Read it slowly. It rewards that.)

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Jeremiah 17:9

Dear family and friends who’ve come here today from quite near and quite far, dear Jack and Amanda:

I want to echo all the sentiments of joy and congratulations offered to both of you by all those who have come here this afternoon. It is truly our privilege to stand with you at this altar, this place where heaven meets earth, as we witness the two of you administer and receive the sacramental grace of matrimony.

This is a day a long time in the making. That probably goes without saying, and for everyone’s sake I won’t say any more than that. But I think does bear mentioning this afternoon is the sheer, gratuitous, unmerited, unmatchable, unquenchable, un-understandable goodness of God. God, who knows you both and loves you both and has, we believe, brought you each into each other’s lives and to this moment. Remember that “Providence” comes from those Latin words “pro” and “videre”, meaning “to see ahead”. The connotation is one of care, and timely preparation. I speak for myself, and I think for everyone else here, when I say what a privilege it is to stand with you at this moment of fulfillment and beginning.

What makes a good marriage? Or, more morbidly, what is it that makes a good marriage become a mediocre one?

The best marriages are those marriages in which the husband and wife remain friends, and view their status as best friends over and above their status as “spouses.”

In the middle of the 20th century, Poor Clare Mother Mary Francis gave her sisters a series of spiritual retreats on the topic of friendship. Friendship, she says, is “the oldest topic in the world” and also in our era “is also the newest.”

Why are we going around and around in world affairs right now, trying to find peace? Well, I suppose I could be accused of vast oversimplification if I said that it is because people aren’t friends with one another. Yet, if we could reduce the present world situation to its basics, what must we conclude? … I think we shall see that is idiotic not to be friends with one another, and this idiocy is the bedrock to world problems and community problems.

Friendship is “the common denominator to every kind of love there is.”

There is no real love that is not rooted in friendship; and when love does not seem to be functioning properly, when it is not fruitful, it is always because there is no friendship in love. You see what is wrong with a lot of marriages. Too often people live in the marriage relationship and don’t even like each other…The mere physical relationship won’t hold up. It alone is not going to help these two people mature.

Amanda and Jack, how did you fall in love?

Oh, sorry; did you all know that these two are in love? Amanda loves Jack and Jack loves Amanda. But how’d you fall in love? By first becoming friends, and having invested in this friendship, you arrived at the conclusion that from this relationship there was springing forth a mutual and deep affection, an affection the fulfillment of which can only be realized in a mutual gift of self, lasting from literally as soon as possible until “death do you part.”

Mother Mary Francis proposes that there are three elements of friendship: esteem, respect, and affection. Notice that affection comes last!

• Esteem: from “aestimare” in Latin - “to determine value, to appraise.”

• Respect: from “re” and “spectare” in Latin - “to look again”.

  • “When we have friendships with people, this is basically the reason. We haven’t looked again, and very specifically, we haven’t looked again and again and maybe again. Often we do not like the first look when we look at people, and so - that’s it. We just turn off and decide, without pondering deeply. We have an unfortunate psychological reflex in this area: we look once, say ‘no like’, and decide, without reasoning about it, of course, that we will have a different kind of relationship than friendship with this person.”

• Affection: from early French “affeccioun” - “a desire, an inclination, a disposition/openness”

  • After looking again and again, and liking what we see, there’s an inclination, a leaning in toward this person and all that they have shown.

  • Consider how St. Thomas Aquinas describes the process of falling in love: first knowledge, then affection; then desire for more knowledge, then increased affection. You cannot love what you do not know and the more you know, the more you can love.

Adam in the Garden - looking at all of creation, naming it, knowing it in an incomplete way. What was his first look at Eve like? Did he initially pass over her? Did he do a double-take? What estimation did he make of her in those first moments? Whatever his first impression, it’s when he looks again at her that he makes the decision to pursue her. All the other created things are nice - indeed God even calls them good - but none of them are for him in the way Eve is.

This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

He respects her; literally, he looks at her again and, as Mother Mary Francis advises, again and again and what does he find? He no longer sees just another creature, just another animal, but he perceives in her what he perceives in himself: the image and likeness of someone else, a unique personality, a personhood not made to imitate his or to become identical to his, but to complement his. This bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh is given to him so that by knowing each other - living as companions with one another - each may become fully what they’d been created to become.

Often, our estimations are hasty; they end up leading us astray. This is how we can create all kinds of theories and sAmandaes about people we barely know; it’s how friendships and marriages get all out of whack - I make a judgment about something, draw a conclusion without being sure my judgment has anything to do with reality, and then forget to look again at the person so that eventually, in my mind, the person and their action become inseparable.

Friendships - all relationships, actually, but especially friendships and especially marriages - get stale and dry when you stop looking again and again for the person at the heart of it all.

Gratiam supponit naturam et perficit. If I had a line of priestly merch, that would be all over t-shirts and hats.

Gratiam supponit naturam et perficit. Grace presupposes nature and perfects it.

Marriage already existed before Jesus turned water into wine during the wedding feast in Cana. Marriage is what’s called a “natural institution.” But like everything in the Christian life, Jesus takes something that is natural and good, infuses it with his grace, and makes the original thing even better but also transforms it totally so that it can become a vehicle for salvation, yes, in the long run, but even in the short term he uses the grace of the sacraments to make life here a bit more bearable. Jesus promised his disciples life and life in abundance, and it’s through living a sacramental life - a life in which the power of God is allowed to seep into every nook and cranny - that we will find the means and courage to live the most fulfilling possible life here below and also be maximally prepared to get each other and your children to the life beyond.

Amanda and Jack, the complete union of persons is not always going to be easy.

The complete union of persons is only simple and without strain for God. Human relationships, as we know, are fraught with complications and sometimes pain. But difficulty is necessary for knowing the full value of love, and loving another person in truth, in vulnerability, and in total self-gift is always worth the risk.

Jack and Amanda: love is always worth the risk. Difficulties do not surprise God, and that’s why we’re able to say that grace presupposes nature; the grace of the sacrament you will minister to each other today takes into account the fact that marriage is funny, and relationships are odd, and even the best of friendships can be hard sometimes.

But when the natural inclination is to say “get out of there! Get revenge! Hold that grudge! Leave that bowl in the sink one more time jusssttt because!” It will be the voice of the Holy Spirit, speaking through the power of the grace of this sacrament that says, “LOVE! Love requires sacrifice but it’s always worth it! Look again! Look again and again and again until you see the person within your spouse, the person, the best friend who you married.”

Jack and Amanda, the prayers of all of those gathered here can be summed up in this way:

May God bring to fruitful completion what today is so wondrously begun in you.

If you’ve ever been to Rome, you know that, in addition to world-famous monuments and priceless art, there is also plenty of beautiful, quiet places. One such place for is the Via Merulana, the tree-lined boulevard that connects the Papal Basilicas of St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran. The Via Merulana takes you past the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, down past the church of Ss Peter and Marcelinus, to the Piazza San Giovanni to the Holy Stairs, the Lateran, and the church of Santa Croce. But just before you get there, you have to pass a tiny street - a viale - with a tiny Metro station, called “Viale Manzoni.”

Alessandro Manzoni, who lived from 1785 to 1873, is one of Italy’s most famous writers. His book, I Promessi Sposi - The Betrothed is credited with doing for the Italian language what only one other work of literature ever did: Dante’s Divine Comedy, written some 500 years before. Manzoni is known as the Father of the Modern Italian language, and The Betrothed is the most hated book by Italian high school students who must study it over and over in a way similar to our own obsession with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

The Betrothed belongs to a category of 19th century novel which one critic described as a “loose baggy monster.” The English translation is a whopping 720 pages. This is a novel that is at once thrilling and life-changing, painfully boring and really too wordy, and is, at the end of the day, in the top 3 books I have ever read.

It is a truly Catholic story: a young priest who has no time for mercy or the details of his peoples’ lives causes great harm to young Renzo and Lucia, and one small decision of Don Abbondio unleashes a storyline that leads the young couple to depth of hell, to the height of glory, and to the fulness of the human experience.

It’s a book whose details remind us of the timelessness of human folly, and the eternal ramifications of both generosity and selfishness, and gives credence to what we learn from Quoheleth in the Book of Ecclesiastes: there is truly nothing new under the sun.

In The Betrothed we meet busy-body church ladies, and young men who have no vision for the future; set in the 1628 in the midst of Spanish rule of Milan, Italy, the book takes place in a time of great civil strife with great discord in local and national politics, and even includes a highly politicized pandemic - a plague, in fact - the civil discourse around which probably caused far more damage to life in Milan than the disease itself……..

We encounter the saintly Archbishop of Milan who teaches Don Abbondio (and every priest who reads the book) a lesson about the priestly heart, and we see such a heart exemplified in the Capuchin hero, Fr. Cristoforo, who changes the course of so many things simply by his fidelity to his vocation and the witness he gives.

Sent all over the place by his order, Fr. Cristoforo lands eventually at the Lazaretto, the community of exiles suffering from the plague just outside of Milan, where he rises through the ranks and becomes the rector of the place, overseeing every aspect of care. In one of the most moving sections of the novel, right near the end, the jaded and bitter Renzo - having lost all hope of ever being able to marry his beloved Lucia - meets Fr Cristoforo and listens to the speech he gives to those men and women who, by God’s grace, had been healed of the plague and were ready to be sent out into Milan; immune from the plague’s effects, they were called to serve even the poorest and most needy, even if only by the witness of their lives.

Let us give heed to the many thousands who must remain here today, and who do not know by which road they will leave this place when their time comes. Let us take heed for ourselves, so small a band, who leave it in safety. Blessed by the Lord! Blessed in his justice, blessed in his mercy! Blessed in death, and blessed in health! Blessed in the choice that he has made in saving us. And why did he make that choice? … Was it not to make us feel more keenly that this life is a gift of his hands, to be cherished as a thing given by him, to be used in works we can offer up to him? Was it not so that the memory of our own sufferings might make us compassionate and helpful to our neighbors?

As I think about my time at Visitation, and especially as I watch this time come to its end, I’m really filled with a sense of gratitude and peace. I’ve shared with you before that the fact we priests get moved around so much is my second least favorite thing about priesthood. (If you pay enough money, I’ll tell you my least favorite thing). Over the years I’ve figured out ways to make moving less of a chore, and to help the transition to a new parish and ministry easier.

Everybody knows that priests make a promise of obedience to their bishops, but hardly anybody realizes that the promise of obedience is what makes priesthood awesome and free. It’s a reminder of something that everyone absolutely must recognize as true if they ever want to be happy: almost nothing ultimately important is in our control or will go as planned. Life on earth either becomes endless drudgery ending in death or happy interruptions leading to fulness of life.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. And, as St. John Paul II said, life with Christ is truly an excellent adventure.

I asked the bishop if I could stay longer at the Cathedral, he said no. I went to Ss. Peter and Paul and I loved it there. I asked the bishop if I could stay longer at Ss. Peter and Paul, he said no. I came to Visitation and I’ve loved it here. So this time I’m trying something new: just saying yes. Yes to the move, yes to Canon Law, yes to moving across the country because I believe ultimately that these yeses are a YES to Christ, who is the protagonist of my life. I know I have major aura, but it’s Jesus who has all the main character energy.

So I find a lot of inspiration in those words of Fr. Cristoforo:

Blessed be the Lord! Blessed in his justice, blessed in his mercy! Blessed in death, and blessed in health! Blessed in the choice that he has made in saving us. And why did he make that choice? … Was it not to make us feel more keenly that this life is a gift of his hands, to be cherished as a thing given by him, to be used in works we can offer up to him?

I came to Visitation in July 2024 both uncertain about what this parish would be like and also very excited to start something new. I was at a pretty big transition point in my own life and priesthood and I was ready for a change but hesitant about what it might entail. In the priesthood we having a saying that “Sunday comes every three days.” This our way of saying that time flies: the days are long but the weeks are short, and before you know it you’ve lived 104 weeks of Sundays.

Over these 104 weeks, I’ve learned a lot! The lessons from Visitation will unpack themselves over the months and weeks ahead, but there have been many. Visitation is a challenging and interesting assignment. Here I have found so many people who are hungry for the Truth and want to live their Catholic faith in a way that is both sincere and practical and, dare I say, relevant. Our weird times have caused so many to ask with great urgency: Where is God!? There is a sense deep down that there must be more to life than the trials of our current moment. And the Church’s message, in every age, has been: yes, there is always more. There is always beauty, truth, and goodness; there is always the possibility for hope and real love. But, as in every age, the people who believe in those things will have to work to find them so they can show them to others.

I am always moved by the way Fr. Cristoforo finishes his speech to those preparing to leave and live a new life:

I speak both for myself and for all my companions, who, without any merit of our own, have been chosen for the high honor of serving Christ by serving you, and I beg your forgiveness most humbly if we have failed in so great a mission. If idleness or rebellion of the flesh have made us inattentive to your needs, or slow to come to your call;…if our human frailty has led us into any action that has been of scandal to you - forgive us! And so may God forgive you all your debts, and bless you.”

I love that line: “the high honor of serving Christ by serving you.” As a priest you call me “Father.” And indeed it has been the privilege of a lifetime to be a spiritual father to you, and I hope that my ministry here has borne some fruit in you. But you’re also my friends, and my neighbors, and my fellow human beings. At times, you have seen that human part of me which can be angry, sassy, or cynical. So if my “idleness or rebellion…have made me inattentive to your needs or slow to come to your call…if my human frailty has led me to any action that has been of scandal to you” then I humbly ask your forgiveness.

And please pray for me! Know that every time you see the Eucharist lifted up from this altar that somewhere - maybe near or maybe far - there’s a priest named Ryan lifting up the Eucharist and praying for you.

If 25 years from now, you’re out walking the dog or watering the plants or in the delivery room or presenting to the board or changing your oil or walking to Brewpoint; or maybe you’re locked up in jail or just leaving divorce court or reeling from the news of the diagnosis; or maybe you just dropped her off at college or starting a new job or learning to paint with watercolors in art therapy…if in the midst of your life, wherever it takes you, if you happen to remember a certain 34 year old priest you once knew, who reminds you of George Costanza and Gru from Despicable Me, I hope you remember his quirks and faults less than you remember what he told you: that with God all things are possible; that in Jesus, all things are bearable; and that in Christ, everything can be different, because everything is new. But you have to let yourself and your worldview be changed, which often comes through suffering, and learn to say YES to Jesus, who is the protagonist of your life, whether you want him to be or not.

Can I leave you with the words Manzoni uses to end The Betrothed? This is my favorite ending of any novel I’ve ever read: (remember this after 720 pages)

After a long debate and much heart-searching, they came to the conclusion that troubles very often come because we have asked for them; but that when they come, through our fault or otherwise, trust in God goes far to take away their sting, and makes them useful preparation for a better life.

If the story has given you any pleasure, think kindly of the man who wrote it….But if, on the other hand, I have only succeeded in boring you, please believe that I did not do so on purpose.