Position and Decision
a year behind, a year ahead
People keep asking me the same question when I’ve told them I’m now halfway through my time as a Creatio missionary: “What are you going to do once you’re done?” It’s understandable, everyone’s always so fixated on the future. Plans on plans on plans — apparently one must always be looking ahead instead of where you are. That’s not news though. Many people complain about our cultural obsession with controlling the future. My answer to this persistent question suggests, to some people, that I don’t want to control enough. We shall see.
It’s officially been a year as a missionary. I, the Lord’s poor servant, have walked over 800 miles on trips this year with dozens of different people. My feet, callused as they are, are not tired. In fact, physically speaking, I’d keep doing this year round. It’s walking. We were made to do it every day. Mentally, I have only been tired in moments. The last trip of the season was quite tiring, but generally speaking the walking calms and rejuvenates every other part of me — mental or otherwise — in a way that little else can. This is good because it would be a shame to wrap up a year too tired and beaten down to properly reflect on the moment.
A few months ago I found a meme on Twitter describing a kind of archetype — “the walker.” One of the attributes it gives him is “mind is very quiet except when the universe reveals its secrets to him,” and I have found this to be true. I am rarely able to conjure up insights and reflections at will (although I suppose I never could) and they certainly come less frequently than they used to. I think that’s a sign of maturity; you’re no longer making enormous strides because you’ve gotten into the thick of things. Rather, as I have made my slow pilgrimage through the world, Wisdom has visited me more often but fed me smaller amounts — often only the tiniest morsels at a time. I rarely knew much of what was happening to me or how I was being changed. It is, of course, only looking back that we can see a full, cohesive path.
From this position atop the summit of the year, I know there was both joy and sadness amongst the peaks and valleys, fields and forests, deserts and rivers of the road these past twelve months. The joy was wonderful, and there was a lot of it, but grief and guilt flowed into the depressions of the land like rain, and most of it was of my own making. It’s beautiful and exciting to receive the rousing call to mission, but I have found that a “yes” means you will be stripped down to nothing in the process; not necessarily by the work (that wasn’t my experience), but by something or someone in the narrative. He must increase, I must decrease, and therefore I must come face to face with my poverty in all ways — not just physical or material. As that happens, and the path narrows, the only way out is through. It always is.
That has become a kind of motto on trail; “the only way out is through” and it seems to me to apply to reality as a whole. No one has an issue coasting through the best of times, but the crushing, exhausting nature of human life, or even the reality of death, is something that must be endured to be escaped. Eschatologically speaking, this is exactly what the Easter Triduum is. The only way to the Resurrection is through death itself and the silence of Holy Saturday. There is no shortcut for the Christian. The only way out is through, and this has very real implications and applications for the Creatio missionary guide leading others on pilgrimage after pilgrimage. Once we’ve set off for the day, or even for the week, there’s often not much I can do for you in regards to monotonous miles or persistent pain, barring the most extreme scenarios of calling an ambulance or helicopter. The only thing to do is keep walking, and for those of us put in front, to keep walking and leading the way. A year ago I rarely would have done that, being content to stay in the back and occasionally encourage with a brief comment or bit of dry, cynical humor. Now, I have found myself thrust into a position of leadership, and every day I notice this invites another decision to seize upon it and do what I can. My dominion is quite small, as I am only leading people on long walks they choose to go on, but I found that, in a sense, all leadership may be seen as divinely granted. It was God that put each of us in this or that position, no? If one finds oneself in the position to lead, the decision must be to act as a leader — and so we have arrived at the crux of what I learned this year.
Not Convinced, Led
It is a persistent lie of the present day that every single individual need only be convinced of this or that bit of information in order to start moving in a direction. That is plainly false. Beyond the hysterical and childish euphemism games of those who think dis and mis-information are words with actual meaning (they are not), our everyday experience shows us this simple truth; people do not make decisions by learning this or that fact and then changing accordingly. Our ability to respond to reality is far too constrained by our sins and failings, vices and selfishness for us to be naturally perfect responders-to-value (and what is truth and falsehood if not the supreme value and lack of it, respectively). Even those who think of man as the “rational animal” cannot sidestep their apparent belief that while they have named man rational, they have also called him an animal. And so we find ourselves in the same place.
No, instead, a realistic and authentic anthropology acknowledges that the great movements of the interior life and all acts of outward conversion are more often than not motivated by perceived value, and that may or may not correspond to reality. Subjective decisions are made in relationship to objective information, ideally, but that is not always the case, and relying on some idealistic and almost robotic appeal to perfect rationalism when trying to convince someone of something is a losing battle. Elevated to an ideology, this line of reasoning has failed every single time. Not only that, but perfect rationalism is not actually desirable for a human person, as we are not omniscient and our rational decisions may often be hampered by a lack of understanding or ability. This is the value of the poetic over the scientific. Much of reality is too mysterious to approach in any other way.
I bring this up because when I was younger I was stuck on this idea that I needed to convince everyone of the truth, that that was the only way to a better world. Somehow, someway, every single individual must be reasoned with and give a perfect, rational assent to the truth, then everything would be wonderful and the world would be saved — or at least their souls would be. I was wrong. In reality — which is where we live and move and have our being — most of us don’t need to be convinced, and some of us don’t even need to be converted in practice (possibly already being part of this or that body, movement, or group). What we actually need is to be led. One might also say we need to be loved, but that’s a framing for another time. Anyone who has ever had to walk with someone through something difficult knows this to be true. Say your best friend is in incredible despair and grief after a crushing family tragedy, they cannot leave the pit of despair on their own. Will you argue with him, or explain all the reasons that life still goes on? No, that would be absurd and actually somewhat inhuman. Instead, you pick up your friend and walk into a happier, brighter life together; whether in the moment, by going for a walk and eating a good meal, or routinely, by pulling him up and leading him back into the land of the living over and over again. In the same way, if a participant on a Creatio trip is struggling and thinks themselves incapable of going any further that day, I do not begin some ridiculous lecture about the details of the day’s route and its possibility, I just keep walking, talking, listening, and pointing the way towards the next town. My participation in the act they cannot do on their own is essential. I am already on the road they must take, and so must lead them on the way. That is the call and choice of leadership.
This reality, so clear on the pilgrims’ road, seems to me absolutely essential for those of us living in this fraught, precarious, and pregnant hinge point of history. (Spare this cultural observer a moment to reflect on politics, if you will) If there is anything to take away from Donald Trump’s second election to the presidency (though there are many things) it is that egalitarianism, whatever our personal feelings about it, is not the driving force of history nor the bedrock of human society. The desire to flatten not only the socio-cultural landscape, but humanity itself, into an idiosyncratic, nameless, faceless mob as our current system is at every moment desperately trying to do, is evidently ineffective in the face of personal, invigorating, pseudo-mythic leadership. This is what happened on November 5th. Whether you’re gutted or elated, a shocking majority of the country chose a showman/strongman bombastic leader who pumped his fist in the air after getting shot at, over what was widely and almost certainly rightly perceived as another four years of the same slow, stifling, slow to dramatic (depending on who you ask) decline. The irony of populism is that “the people” always choose a single strong leader, and do not respond to flat democratic/anarchic ideals.1 What we now have in our immediate future is a potential overturn of the country as-it-is, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the New Deal, and in the long term, the looming, possibly insurmountable problems of ballooning debt, waning competency, social instability, and technological nightmares. In the face of all this, what will you do? I bring all this up not because any of you read my work for political insights, but because this stuff is, at the moment, the most obvious and pressing example of the need for exactly what I’m talking about. The world is turned upside down, history is moving, your rights are taken away, your world is shattered, your team won or lost against the odds — whatever you think happened — what to do about it? You must lead. Those among us who have the means, capability, and call to do so, must.
It seems clear to me now that the crown lies in the gutter. I have long spoken of how malformed, malsocialized, broken, and generally in need many people around us are. This has not changed. Whatever side you find yourself on in the current battles (I do not say this to imply those sides are equal, because they are not), few will deny that the mandate has been lost by not only our politicians, but the people of this country as a whole. To put it another way, we are no longer blessed by even a belief in ourselves, let alone actual success, strength, virtue, or glory. However, the potential of all such moments in history is exactly that; the crown lying in the gutter and the sword cast by the wayside are waiting to be picked up. The potential of the moment is to become worthy of the call you have received. This is not for everyone, difficult as that may be to our “everyone can be a winner” upbringings, but for those who have the means, the moment is waiting, and your people need you. Those people are your friends, family — everyone and anyone in your life at all; the people sitting across from you at dinner to the people you pass on the street. To everyone who has, more will be given2. It seems to me that right now what is given is the immense weight, potential, and responsibility to lead your people to their inevitable, and hopefully good, end.3
The Obligation of Nobility
I guide walking trips — pilgrimages and backpacking. I am poor, I live on the generous donations of kind and saintly supporters. I have two degrees but both are from a communications school, the most absurd and superfluous of all colleges in a given university. My physical assets amount to little more than a car, a few cameras, and warm clothes. I am in no way even remotely close to true nobility in material wealth or spiritual fitness. I am, as I said in the beginning, nothing more than God’s poor servant, which for many people may conjure up some image of a mendicant friar-priest, begging for his every money and meal and living in the same old, grey robe every day. I don’t exactly look like that, but that idea is not far off. All this to say, I am no great man in stature or spirit, and my actions have little consequence beyond a few hundred individuals.
That is how it ought to be. Missionary life is supposed to be lived poor. To once again reflect on my past year with Creatio, I took great solace in Matthew 10 last year while fundraising for mission. Jesus sends out the Twelve Apostles, his closest disciples and friends, and tells them to take nothing with them. Similarly, in Luke 10 He sends out seventy-two disciples with similar instructions. They must take nothing of their own with them, they must live entirely on the goodwill and charity of others, and must do the Lord’s work as they roam. This, to the extent I am capable, is true for us Creatio missionaries as well, but looking back I realize how rich we truly are. I don’t mean that in the sense that most of my problems are first-world problems (although they are, but that matters little when most people you encounter are relative peers on that plane), but rather in the formational sense. I received tremendous gifts this year. From our classroom and dialogue formation back in Denver, to the endless gifts of authentic community, to the constant training ground of the trips themselves, I, through no merit or virtue of my own, have been formed into a far more capable and confident man than I ever would have been if I stayed at home, content to work a “normal job” after school. That, of course, is not for nothing. I was given these abundant gifts entirely to pass on to others, specifically on trips as a missionary, but in actuality, every second of every day. They are not for me. As Bishop Barron has so famously said in many a sermon, “Your life is not about you.” If there is anything to learn from missionary life, it’s that.
Just as I was given formation to be able to discuss and impart the great treasure of the Church’s wisdom to people on trips, so were you given your knowledge and insight to give to others as well, and so on with physical capabilities. Tying the wide-ranging ramblings of this essay together, all gifts, especially those of leadership, whether looked for or unexpected, are for everyone else. This is, as the French say, “noblesse oblige.” It is the obligation of those with privilege, those with nobility (which is primarily an interior reality before it is material), to care for and steward those entrusted to their care whether by circumstance or otherwise. This nobility, initially given as a grace like all of life,4 must be cultivated if one wishes it to bear fruit. As I said earlier, the call of the moment is to become worthy. The world is changing, as it always is on pilgrimage when no day is the same and every group is different, and it is the responsibility of those who have been given much to guide their people through the tumultuous waters and torrid wastes that will ultimately have to be contended with on our way forward. I do not have much, Creatio does not have much, but we do have a depth of insight and wealth of know-how to lead people within the dominion given to us. Most importantly, I have found that we have been formed as leaders, on however small a scale, who are more than capable of whatever challenges lie ahead. The pilgrim knows his poverty, and I have certainly come face to face with it on countless occasions this past year, but I know my destination and call as well. Pilgrims that we all are, there can be nothing that will deter us from our task or turn us from the road. You, if called to the front, must not turn either.
Year 2 of mission came quickly, and just as rapidly I will find myself on the other side of it, as materially poor as when I started out and with no solid plan. My position is precarious, but when is it not? More and more I think the life of the Christian, and possibly the life of the world as it moves through history, is always on a narrow path5. The path that leads to life being Christ himself, I intend to approach my eventual decision of what to do next with the same docility with which I found myself at Creatio. “Lord, I’ll do whatever you want.” His will is my will also, and so I will decide to do whatever He decides I must do. That seems to be how all discernment works. We are not called to discern, decide, lead, or guide in the abstract, but with feet on the ground in reality. We find where to go as we take steps on the way, by knowing our position and making a decision; no other way and in no other place. It has just been a year of pilgrimage. I am not tired. I have been whittled down to nothing over the course of this year but in the process have been given so, so much, and have, after repeated exhortations, stepped into the life of a leader to a degree that I did not forsee, as small and humble as it may be. The world is changing, that much is certain, but I got myself into this Christian life asking for nothing less than adventure. Now that that has taken on more weight, both personally and practically, than ever before, I trust my God to incline my heart according to his will and speed my steps along his path. I don’t know what comes next; so Lord, I’ll do whatever you want, and for the first time, I’ll bring others with me.
in statu viae,
Ryan
The persistent problem for democracy, historically, is that “the people,” on whom the ideology’s legitimacy rests, do not actually seem to like governing themselves (on a national scale) and have little interest in egalitarian social systems except in name. Like it or not, history seems to suggest that “the people” usually want a king. The “threat to democracy” is apparently, democracy.
Luke 19:26
There are many kinds of ends. I don’t necessarily mean death, although that could be the case. Everything has a telos; you, your society, your actions, everything is pointed towards some point. That point is its “end.”
Reality is fundamentally received.
“For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Matthew 7:14
beautifully written. and nice emphasis on those 'factual' reflections on what informs us, and what doesn't.
I enjoyed this read very much. About to go on a hike and reflect. God bless.