What is a Missionary Guide?
a quick intro
What’s this missionary guide stuff I’m doing? Fantastic question! So glad you asked unprompted like that.
First I’d like to say that I’ve been all over the place for the past few months, and will be till November. I finished grad school, had to pack up basically my entire life both in CT and up in Syracuse, and found not just a new job, but a mission. Then I traveled west for the month of August, where I was in Colorado, and a bit of Wyoming, training for that mission which will last the next two years. I am now a missionary guide; an outdoor guide for a Catholic apostolate called Creatio that runs pilgrimages, adventures, and service trips to bring people into a deep and affecting encounter with Creation and the Creator.
The idea beyond Creatio is simple, although the depths invite almost endless exploration. Our relationship with nature, with Creation, is broken. As are our relationships with ourselves, each other, and most foundational to all of those, our relationship with God. We struggle to, if we even can, relate to any of those four relationships in a free and healthy manner. It’s agonizingly difficult to find true community for many young people, our connection with our own minds, bodies, and souls is so broken we hardly even know who we are, the world we live in, the world we were given, is so used and abused by our endless consumption that some are swearing-off the planet entirely, and God Himself seems so distant a figure most just ignore Him. In short, we’re not doing great. Creatio’s mission is to heal those wounds by starting back at square one. We must encounter the real world again.
Pope Benedict XVI called this path of evangelization the “Via Pulchritudinis,” the way of beauty. It is from his writing that this project of mine takes its name. Of the three transcendental values that give our lives substance: beauty, goodness, and truth, beauty often comes first, and it can be difficult to know either of the other two without it. This is something my work as a photographer has always participated in, even before I could fully articulate it. It’s difficult to grasp any goodness or truth in this world without an enchanting encounter with beauty. I’ve always intended my work, however beautiful it may be, to point beyond itself to higher things. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up answering the call to such a unique mission in the Church.
I’ve spent the last month learning how to answer that call as part of the Creatio team.
I, along with my fellow MG, Mairead, spent the month of August reading and praying with the foundational ideas of Creatio, cleaning fake wounds in wilderness first responder training, nervously preparing for support-raising, and helping run a camping trip in the mountains. I also climbed my first 14er, which was awesome, and rather difficult for my sea-level lungs. Now I’m home until the end of October and will be undergoing the new and humbling experience of living fully on the support of others. Many of you are already helping me with that, and for those who can’t, I ask for your prayers. I’ll need them.
So all is well in this post-grad life of mine, and it’s exciting to be updating you with these posts. I’ll be sending newsletters out periodically, ideally monthly, for the next two years so you can all follow along on the pilgrim's road. I’ll still have my camera, don’t worry, and will be writing too along with photos. Thank you all for all the ways you have and will continue to support me on this new adventure. I can’t do any of this work alone.
Yours on pilgrimage,
Ryan