The question throughout was: What are we supposed to do? I had no idea, but I kept telling Regina, “We need to pray.” It was a surprising thing for me to hear myself say, for even years after I became a Catholic, I didn’t pray — didn’t know what it was for or why anyone would do it. I remember once when Regina and I had first started dating, she told me a heartfelt story about the power of prayer in her sister’s life, and I replied with blunt skepticism. There was, I pronounced with unrecognized arrogance, definitely another explanation. (A double arrogance, for I was not only ignorant about prayer, but also ignorant of what the other explanation would be.) By the grace of God, Regina stuck with me, and now we sat hand in hand by the fireplace of my childhood home, murmuring the rosary with great hope, full of grace, begging for the promise of salvation now and at the hour of our death, a death which seemed more profoundly and unimaginably real as the boy’s body was latched to earthly life with wires and tubes.

This strange desire to do something reminded me of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. In the wake of Mr. Shimerda’s death, young Jim is left alone at the house as his family travels the icy road to see the Shimerda family. He recounts:

They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought... I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the house.

I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar, and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn, emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions. I got ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed upon me that if Mr. Shimerda’s soul were lingering about in this world at all, it would be here, in our house

There’s something strange about the way that death releases its sufferer from all mortal considerations while obligating those left behind to mundane practicalities or bureaucratic nightmares. Some seem to thrive on the piles of paperwork and deluge of decisions, as if the big business of death and its many calls to action might offer some comfortable refuge — sign here, sir, and sorry for your loss. But the solace of frenetic activity is transient and illusory, and soon enough the stillness comes, and we come to see — like Jim — that the question plaguing us is not what to do about what has been left behind, but rather what to think about what carries on.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him. I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground, always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house. There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that Ántonia had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game—belonging, as Ántonia said, to the ‘nobles’—from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.

I can call so few memories of the boy to mind, and it is a source of great sadness for me to reckon with the notion that an age which ought to be defined by firsts has become a temple in which his parents preserve the lasts: His last words, his last laugh, last smile, last kiss, last snuggle, last bedtime story, last mass, last breath — at the age of five. But it is a source of great solace to me that his parents know that he has experienced the mysterious unity of Christmas and Easter in a way that he understands more fully than any of us. Amidst the octave of our Lord’s birth, he participated in the great gift of the Lord’s resurrection.

Thoughts and prayers are often derided and mocked in our culture, and it’s understandable: For those who deny the soul — who deny anything immaterial, who deny God — prayer is pointless. But kneel before a diminutive casket and cry at the boy’s body and ask: Do we cry because we’ve lost what’s here or because we’ve lost what’s gone? There are no materialists or atheists at the funeral of a dead child. Anyone who stands in this place will know there is a soul — will see the face of God and find faith in life everlasting — will discover the treasure in earthen vessels — will understand that what is most real is that which is not seen — will fall on knees and pray for God’s mercy and grace for this boy and for ourselves.

And at last, perhaps they will come to believe even that hard teaching — the one that even the disciplines found it hard to accept: We encounter Christ’s body and Christ’s divinity in the Eucharist. The most surprising thing turns out not to be simply that the spiritual world is real, but that we can encounter it in something as humble as the host. And indeed, our bodies can become the tabernacle for our redeemer — as this boy’s body was in his last days on earth.

When I was a little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By ‘n’ by war-times come, when the Prussians fight us. We have very many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp, and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and it preserve us.

Those who mock prayer often demand in its place action — as if there could be anything more efficacious than communion with God, for it is His thought, His will, His love that is the law of all creation. All prayer is praise, and with the proper faith we can praise the Lord even in the midst of our sorrow — for the peace, after all, surpasses all understanding.

None of us should wish for death, for God has gifted life to us to steward for his greater glory. However, none of us need fear death either, since the God of mercy clothes in light those who pass through the unknown darkness. Though I weep as I write, I rejoice that the boy is delighting in the Lord, and as we meekly pray for him, he prays mightily for us.

Rest in peace, MJK.

The NICU is the sort of time-warpy place where four hours at the bedside feels like four weeks of having small birds keep you awake by eviscerating you with a million teensy pecks; and on the other hand, one shred of good news stretches out toward an infinite eternity that is suspended only by some hellish alarm squawking about medical despair — or a mere malfunctioning probe — fifty beds over. Several hospital staff echo proudly to me that this hospital is a baby factory — 10,000 births a year — and this NICU accepts those poor souls who come off the line with some defect or difficulty: A hundred beds for struggling children, the smallest of whom are half a pound or less. In this endless hallway of suffering, Eloise by contrast is both a giant — seven and a half pounds — and quite fortunate — struggling with breathing under a diagnosis that has "transient" in the name, lending an ephemeral character to our despair and an eternal light in our hope. When Regina and I feel after 9 hours in the hospital that we've been there forever, we meet a couple in the scrub room who have been there for 9 weeks.

If Dostoevsky is right that "man is a creature who can get used to anything," the NICU is perhaps the proving ground. It's true, of course, for Regina and me, who quickly take on habits and understanding of things that were yesterday foreign: wheelchair rides and byzantine hallways and five-digit numbers that assure the security of our baby and visitor logs and pulse oximeters and IV flow measurements and rounds and gastric fluids, bubbling and collecting in a syringe, forced out by the flow of air measured in liters and pressing open alveoli, something we are sure was covered in biology class. But Dostoevsky's maxim is far more true for Eloise, who emerged from a cozy womb screaming and minutes later made peace with a breathing mask, EKG leads, a pulse oximeter, and an IV that punctured a tiny vein to deliver dextrose. Her equanimity shows itself in miniature hands folded lightly and eyes swollen tranquilly shut and the curve of small lips from which peaceful little bubbles emerge. The beautiful little girl fights to breathe but seems to accept that whatever world she's ended up in, this is just the sort of thing babies do.

That same peace passes our understanding, so we turn to the Litany of Trust, its patient refrains taking on a new and deeper meaning. From anxiety about the future, Deliver me, Jesus. From the fear of being asked to give more than I have, Deliver me, Jesus. From the fear of what love demands, Deliver me, Jesus. That not knowing what tomorrow brings is an invitation to lean on You, Jesus, I trust in You. That You are with me in my suffering, Jesus, I trust in You. That your plan is better than anything else, Jesus, I trust in You. That life is a gift, Jesus, I trust in You. We recite the prayer awkwardly between hospital meals, conversations with doctors, and re-runs of the worst season of Parks and Recreation — and it's always perfect. Our spiritual posture takes on a certain repose, softening from the need to control and welcoming the fruits to be borne of suffering and confusion.

Father Mike tells the story of a young father who sits by the bedside as his young son is administered chemotherapy. Though the boy is too young to speak, he looks at his father as if to say: "Father, father, why have you forsaken me?" The father knows that he is doing the best he can for his son's fragile life, and yet he can also empathize with the boy's confusion about the state of things. Regina and I sit now in place of the boy: We know that God's plan is better than our own, but we don't understand.

Modern man is too seldom humbled, so close to complete is our subjugation of nature in vain — and futile — attempt at control. In moments like these, we are painfully reminded that our call is not to fashion for ourselves a comfortable destiny of our own design but instead to conform ourselves to the narrow way that has been destined for us by a loving and perfect God. Eloise, too, has a way prepared for her, and may God make us grateful for every moment of it.

For she is as close to a vision of perfection as we can grasp on a fallen earth. Her delicate and dark eyes scan the room and aim to make sense of formless shapes and shifting lights; her tiny nose wrinkles and sneezes; her little lips stretch and yawn and shiver subtly amidst dreams of heartbeats and warm caves; her long fingers reach out to grasp a tube or hand and her small body softens as she rubs her ankles together and drifts into a peaceful sleep. She's all scrunched up and inquisitive and hungry and perfect.

Little scratches and dots and spots on her body act as witness marks to the treatment she's received and the masks and tubes that have day by day left her little body. Now she is left with just the basics of monitoring: a strong, consistent pulse; an even and reassuring respiratory rate; and blood rich with oxygen supplying the prettiest rosiness to her delicate cheeks. And today, we pray, we'll get to take her home.

Now in his dotage, my father is constrained not by cost but by custom, the traditions and rituals that draw all of us nearer to that faint and far-off Beauty. Pork chops, of course, are no Eucharist, but I'm certain my dad was grateful for the thick seared vertebral loin cut from some fattened, ancestral, unblemished pig. In his understated manner, he reported today that, "It was good" — echoing our Creator's response to fields and rivers, plants and animals, Heaven and Earth, and Man himself. My father has walked far further than I on the path of humility trod by St. Joseph, and though he has now outlived his father (who outlived his own father), my dad's life is more easily measured in acts of service than years, for he has carried out his life with dishes and sweeping and gardening and eBay auctions for obscure Midwestern Christmas village accoutrements beloved by my mother and round trip flights to Los Angeles and back side-by-side with me for no other reason than that I was afraid to go alone and Bible studies and soccer tournaments and endless prayer (for Jack, for me, for the whole church) and indeed the things he went without though he could've had, like a job title more prominent than father or a devotion to the things of this world rather than the next.

My father's life, I sense, is nearly bereft of disappointment, though I know I've failed him in at least one way: I never watched as many episodes of Star Trek as I ought to have. Sure, I've seen a few of the classics and can identify their concomitant ornament on my father's top-to-bottom Star Trek-themed Christmas tree: I've had my fair share of trouble with Tribbles, one might say. But in that byzantine labyrinth of stardates and storylines and Section 31, I have but scratched the surface of the D'Arsay Archive, so to speak.

Still, there's one episode I shall not forget, whose prominence grows and gets a greater hold on me as my own life approaches its margins with a rapidity that feels increasingly like warp drive. "The Inner Light," an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, opens with Captain Jean-Luc Picard struck by the beam of an alien probe, knocking him unconscious. He wakes up disoriented in a rustic village on an arid planet, lurid with golden light. A woman addresses him as "Kamin," and she purports to be his wife, Eline. Though he at first holds dear to his previous reality as a Starfleet Captain, Picard eventually relents and accepts his humble life as Kamin. What other choice do any of us have, after all, than to become who we are?

Kamin conforms his will toward the communal good, sharing his knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of his adopted people. He becomes a father to a daughter, Meribor, and a son, Batai, named after his first friend on that harsh planet when Kamin was still a stranger in a strange land. And as he pours out on his wife and others, he finds meaning in solitude playing on his Ressikan flute, a melody at once melancholic and hopeful, an expression of joy amidst suffering.

The planet that Kamin lives on, Kataan, is on the verge of destruction as its once benevolent sun is transforming into a red giant whose heat and radiation char the desert people with no regard for culture or continuity. In a final effort to save a shred of themselves, the doomed people launch a probe into space that synecdochically holds the collective experiences of eons and generations in the mind of a single man: Kamin. Picard, who was struck by the probe at the episode's onset, has lived in a few minutes unconscious the entire life of a fated man who wanted to preserve for eternity the humble love and service owed to one's wife, one's children, one's family, friends, and community.

What would I see if I could witness the whole of my father's magnanimous life instead of its dim edges and faded stories? A portrait of a man devoted to his wife, his children, his family, his friends, his community, and his church. A man uncomplaining in his duties and labors. A man committed to his faith. A man unbothered by a death that has been defeated. A man who emits toward others his inner light, that is to say, Christ's light.

Jean-Luc Picard plays his Ressikan flute, reflecting on a life well-lived.

My dad stores a bottle of Coca Cola in his office from the St. Louis Cardinals' World Series win in 1982. Sun and time seem not to have dimmed the label or the treacly black liquid, unmoved and uncapped for three decades, so what remains is a beverage whose final cause has shifted from conveying its own short-lived sweetness to carrying the abiding joy of a moment long gone but never lost.

II

We had very few and very many bottles growing up. My parents rarely drank in those days, and their house was not yet a shrine to the wine they more often collected than consumed. On the other hand, my mom, a nurse, had a pill for every ailment, and the mirrored medicine cabinet upstairs was the storehouse for bottles of every shape and size, many filled with long-expired drugs that had been prescribed and therefore potentially useful at an unknown future date, and at least one bottle was a hodgepodge collection of capsules for numerous symptoms experienced by children during long shopping trips or family vacations, so the small white bottle with its label ripped off was often thrown haphazardly at the bottom of a purse like some sort of suburban drug cocktail, Tylenol laced with Dramamine. But I never remember seeing my parents drink.

III

I'm not sure why I didn't start drinking in high school when everyone else was clanking bottles of Natty Light and PBR in Alex's backyard over in Fremont, the cast party where my friends seemed to know their lines and stage directions for a raucous rager while I read Franny and Zooey under a knit blanket by flashlight trying to ignore the shouting and the smell of vomit steeped in chlorinated pool water. It seems implausible, but I really wonder if I was so damn scared by that insipid video I saw freshman year — with the high school quarterback who drank, drove, fell asleep at the wheel, and was paralyzed — that I simply gave up on the idea of drinking altogether. At least for a long time.

IV

I celebrated my 21st birthday in Germany watching a Noah Baumbach film alone, observing the cheerless protagonist aim to recover his life after a psychiatric hospitalization, falling in love with a flittering self-conscious bubble of a woman. For me then, it was just a film. Later that spring, as massive white stalks of asparagus appeared in the market and ice cream shops replaced ice storms, I made my way to Munich's Viktualienmarkt and had my first beer alongside Weisswurst with Süßer Senf. I enjoyed the otherworldly white sausage more than the diminutive .2 liter glass of Münchner Weisse, which left me wandering the market in a stupor, feeling from the weight of alcohol so long deferred as if I'd been drugged and left for dead rather than experiencing a slight buzz.

V

In San Francisco I had the unfortunate experience of meeting a beautiful woman regrettably named after a second-rate department store cologne. Her taste in whiskey was even worse than her father's taste in scents, though in my eagerness to please her, I bought a few bottles of Jamison. Thus began a misguided and ardent courtship. I had started drinking bourbon a few years earlier after visiting my then-girlfriend's father in Kentucky, and I amassed a modest but sophisticated collection of bottles that I occasionally sipped in small glasses the way I was taught in a cozy house in Crandall Station. As I continued the affair with the city girl, I had substituted real whiskey with bland amber water and real love with a sad and barren tryst.

VI

When the emptiness started to fill me up, I checked myself into a hospital for a night of deathlike sleep induced by Ambien, then woke up to a breakfast of paper-thin pancakes with a woman whose neck was stitched as if her head had been fully detached the day before. I could see my high school's football stadium through the window. After reading Butcher's Crossing barefoot and belt-free on the patio, the doctor saw me. "Girl troubles, it sounds like, son." An apt if uninspiring summary of the situation. "If you agree to take this prescription, I can get you out of here this morning." My sister had driven three hundred miles that night with two kids in the back seat to pick me up as my parents gazed upon four famous stone-faced presidents in the Black Hills of the Dakotas. We got the bottle of Prozac later that day, and a few years later I threw it away, unopened.

VII

When I got sick again, I was given a bottle of holy water from Fatima. Though I was then Catholic — I'd been confirmed and sealed by the Holy Spirit with chrism oil years before — I essentially denied the miraculous. To appease the giver, though, I took a dab of the water each day and made the sign of the cross on my forehead, begging God without belief to heal me. Over time I stopped taking medication, but I never ceased sprinkling the water and making the sign of the cross, and the hopeless prayer became hopeful as my dry bones drew holy breath. Health returned, and in my hubris I too often thought myself the healer. But the gift of divinity is strange: It transcends all physical reality and manifests in material things. And I'm quite sure the water healed me.

For both of us, though, the real treat of the game was the trivia cards. While our genetic inheritance found dissent more often than consensus, we both had a deep desire to know — and at that age, especially to know something that the other didn't. While Sarah had lived a few early years in St. Louis, I knew almost nothing about the place save what I'd learned on short trips and by inference from the ways that my parents' Midwestern upbringing separated them from the native Californians surrounding us: a preponderance of casseroles, a stalwart Lutheranism, a collection of faux German traditions, and a love of Ford cars among a proliferation of Hondas and Toyotas. The trivia cards asked straightforward questions about the Cardinals, Budweiser, and frozen custard — mystical Midwestern knowledge that I had to learn by sheer repetition having been mostly stripped of firsthand experience.

Our favorite question, though, asked about the pronunciation of the east-west freeway that ran through the heart of Downtown St. Louis. Whoever got to proudly yell out, "HIGHWAY FARTY!" often seemed to be the real winner of the game irrespective of wealth or penury. In those days, despite Bible camps and Sunday sermons, forty was not the number of days of desert wanderings or Jesus's post-resurrection appearances — it was the name of a concrete spear of freeway aimed like a missile at Busch Stadium, pronounced with Midwestern decency and a hint of flatulence.

Today the form of forty has taken a new shape as my parents celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. Summing up forty years of marriage is like weighing dreams or measuring memories: The sheer accumulation of one minute of married life is an infinite universe ever expanding, and the accrual of years forms a vast territory that no one could plumb or map except the two intrepid and intertwined travelers each holding hands with each other and their God.

Perhaps marriage is a sort of homeostasis — a careful balance of two persons living as one. From 1983 to today, a mustache is lost and gray hairs gained; chicken pot pie erased from the dinner menu and enchiladas added; a tolerance for cold eradicated and a love of far off places established. Marriage spreads itself into every nook and cranny of being, slowly replacing tempers and preferences and selfishness and envy and strife with patience and peace and understanding and self-gift, not to mention quaint Christmas villages, Bible studies, children, and grandchildren. What's most curious about marriage is the thing that doesn't make sense until you're in it, that the question about why you love the other person is unanswerable in any other way than this: "Because you're you."

Forty years of meandering is more pleasant with the mission of getting your spouse to heaven — and much harder, too. Nothing more quickly erases arrogance and eliminates pride than marriage, which is the home of love and humility, a place where we can confirm each day that, indeed, we are not good enough. No better place than marriage to practice reconciliation and forgiveness, to utter nunc coepi — "Now I begin" — falling a thousand times a day and rising a thousand times in turn to be who we ought to be before our spouse and our God. Marriage is like a circle unwound into a spiral: We come again and again to the same moments, the same conflicts, the same flaws, only this time we have grown deeper and are called higher.

This number forty has been walking alongside me even before today, as my brother-in-law Jason died one month ago today at the age of forty. This sort of unexpected death leaves one sifting through cliches for truth and hating the limits of language and the triteness of text — even uttering unexpected death makes you feel like a fool, for who does not expect themselves and everyone they love to die? Gone too soonfeels apt, but too soon for what? Everything happens for a reason provides comfort in the causal order as well as a reminder that many of the reasonable things happening are quite awful indeed. Time heals all wounds, but first it binds you to an uneven gear that meticulously counts out long minutes and short days or short hours and long weeks, each moment a mess both stretched out to infinity and contracted to single point, shifting focus from enormity to insignificance, from fear and trembling to wonder and terror.

And then there's this problem that memory immediately fails. I started trying to recall conversations, count up the minutes we spent together, create a reverse chronological history of our relationship — and what's left is less consequential than the bits and baubles I have stuffed in a box in the room we rarely go into. I can remember two or three board game nights with some clarity, but what did he say? A drive along Topanga Canyon en route to Santa Monica with the gas tank too low; a poker night with his college roommates; family photos in St. Louis; saccharine punch at Knott's Berry Farm; hugs at hospital bedsides when the bad things were new and less clear; a homemade dice rolling game featuring a plunger; many rides in a Jeep; a Rascal Flatts concert; a book of hikes in the Austin area; a direct-to-DVD special featuring, inexplicably, the Jetsons and Wrestlemania. As little as it all is, there's enough here to remind me of him and the 18 years we knew each other, but his essence is lost, untouchable. I keep seeing tall folks wearing pastel plaid button downs around town and thinking there he is, only to be reminded of the stupidly simple yet utterly unacceptable fact about death that it means you won't see someone again. Not here.

I used to treat my teaching like a magic trick. I'd share something strange with my students and tell them to hold on — it would all come together at the end of our two hour lesson. An obscure Latin passage; a picture of cannon balls on a battlefield; a radio transmission blasted through the cosmos. But it was all contrived. There's sense in the world, sure, but it doesn't come in two-hour English lessons or thousand-word essays. These days, I end my teaching with a question I still have. Most things still don't make sense. Maybe what we started with wasn't even the right place to begin our inquiry. Perhaps Highway Farty doesn't lead anywhere at all and trivia is just that, a place where three roads meet and you sometimes take the wrong one. Maybe a marriage still has questions after two years or fifteen or forty, or maybe even after all that time we didn't even have the right questions let alone the right answers. I don't know what to make of any of it. How is it that difficult moments are when people are most often to find faith and to lose it?

"What kind of doubts?" my mom asked.

"About the resurrection. About whether we'll really be resurrected, whether our bodies will really be resurrected." Ma considered the momentous promise of eternal life, the implausibility of her ailing body carrying her heavenward when it begged earthbound for help moving, breathing, carrying on.

My mom, eager to save who she can and always despising silence, quickly interjected—a question hiding an assertion or a statement laced with inquiry—"But you do believe that we're saved?"

"Yes, yes. I do. I do," Ma said. "It's just... a few months ago, they showed us a video about the Book of Revelation, about the end times. The narrator said we might be shocked by what we learned. And we never finished it. I asked if they'd show us the rest but they haven't."

I was about to ask whether the movie had shocked Ma, what had stuck with her, what she was still hoping to learn from the rest; but someone walked in with a gift basket for Ma and the conversation shifted: a ranking of desserts, a decision about the trash, a presentation of birthday cards, a recollection of Pa, a headcount for the party. I wasn't able to steer the discussion back to her doubts, doubts I've shared.

Later that night, Ma couldn't sleep because the podcast I set up for her—Bible in a Year—wouldn't stop playing. Over and over again she heard of the desert wanderings of the Jewish people, walking the divide between faith and doubt as they sought the promised land.

At the party the next day, family, fried chicken, and cake all came together perfectly. As the child of Midwestern exiles, I spent as much time as I could catching up with family I have always been too distant from.

Many of them I hadn't seen since Pa's funeral—almost seven years ago now—so the party served as an unlikely icebreaker focused on basic biographical facts. "Where do you work?" I'd ask to someone who shared ancestors with me more numerous than the stars in the sky—at least stars visible from a relatively dense city.

I joked and bantered and quipped and never once tried to steer a conversation toward something serious or real. I sat by Ma for hours and thought to ask more about her doubts, but it was a party, so instead I asked her how the cake was.

At the start of the party, we had all sung together a few verses from "Abide With Me," Ma's favorite hymn. Susan thought the song was a bit funereal, but it was Ma's party after all, so Susan picked out the verses that seemed least about death—quite a challenge if you look at the lyrics:

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens Lord, with me abide
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day
Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away
Change and decay in all around I see
O Thou who changest not, abide with me

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness
Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee
In life, in death, o Lord, abide with me
Abide with me, abide with me

Most sung cautiously, some boisterously; others could not see the small text of the lyrics sheet at all; many found the tune a beat after Jacob presented it; though in a few short verses the motley choir carried together what none of its members could have carried alone, and the hymn was a perfect accumulation of somber joy and hopeful fear—a happier birthday one can hardly imagine than to be surrounded by family, love, peace, and hope amidst life's fast falling eventide.

The next day, Ma collapsed.

It was a stroke, or maybe not. She was confused—or maybe entirely unconscious?—and no one was quite sure how long she'd been out before she was discovered. It was possible, someone said, that she was simply overtired from the party.

My mom and I had been at the airport arguing over how to connect to the internet as San Francisco's QB had his elbow smashed on a nearby television. We rushed to the hospital with the hurry-up-and-wait energy that defined my family's approach to everything from dentist appointments to Disneyland vacations. There was nothing to do but be there, so we went to be there.

The sparse waiting room offered no sense of the situation's gravity. Anonymous blue chairs carried the weight of different grieving bodies each hour of the day, sanitized regularly to remove germs but not the memories of interminable waiting, waiting, waiting: for news, good or ill, to at least remove doubt and provide certainty.

Ma's five children sat in a row while I stood nearby anesthetizing myself with chess puzzles and Mentos as the 49ers were getting absolutely slaughtered on one television while two others played discordantly the audio of a Gordon Ramsay cooking show and the video of an animated children's movie.

The doctor came out to unwind us all from our ruminations about Ma. His assessment came out like Maimonides' understanding of God: We can't very well say what he is, but we have a pretty good idea what he isn't. Medicine, like metaphysics, is the art of exclusion, a process of ruling out, a science of what's left behind when every other possibility has been tried and left wanting.

Ma had good vitals, normal bloodwork, clean imaging—so what was left? The MRI doesn't diagnose brainstem strokes very well at all, so. And that kind of stroke? Well, it wouldn't be good, he said. We shouldn't call a pastor yet, but if he's right about the stroke, there isn't a lot of hope for someone like Ma.

My mom and I sat on each side of Ma's bed. She was breathing well and looked perfectly at peace, but she would not respond. My mom held Ma's hand and hid a plea in a question as she repeated, "Can you wake up, mom?" Soon her requests turned to consolations: "I love you, mom. I'm so sorry you're here. I'm so glad you're going to see dad again."

Sensing that Ma might soon leave this earth, I quietly prayed for the repose of her soul:

In your hands, O Lord, we humbly entrust Ma.
In this life you embraced her with your tender love;
deliver her now from every evil and bid her eternal rest.

I couldn't think what else to do for her. I had no salve or secret cure. So I played "Abide With Me" quietly on my phone, set it next to her ear, and cried.

Neil drove me back from the hospital and we watched the Chiefs whittle away at Joe Burrow, distracting ourselves from what we did not know and could not change. I tried to sleep, but woke to texts with minor updates and stayed up to read, look out the window at the accumulating ice, and pray.

Early the next morning, Ma woke up. She didn't remember anything about collapsing, wanted to know how in the world she'd ended up in the hospital and could someone please bring her something to eat. All of us had largely accepted that we were waiting for Ma to die, so our joy was braided with caution as we celebrated a miracle. But caution melted as the snow floated down and Ma breathed with new life.

The eventide of life's little day stretched out a bit longer as the orange burnt sun seemed to hang on to the horizon's edge pushing back against what must be but was not yet.

Paradoxes pile up for anyone who takes the Christian life seriously. To live, you must die. In poverty there is wealth. Mortal flesh is a vessel for eternal divinity. What is unseen is more true than what is seen.

Also: Faith is strengthened by doubt. No serious Christian can avoid doubt—and not doubt on a small scale. Indeed, the question each of us is confronted with is: "What if I'm wrong about everything?" The Christian ought not fear such a question, but rather pursue the truth lifelong.

And of course, every non-believer ought to do the same. Have you ever asked yourself if you're sure that you know the truth? Do you know what it is you don't believe? Do you have answers to the questions that plague all of us? About purpose and meaning and suffering and anguish and death and morality and loss and origin and creation and everything we can't see but sense must be more real than what we do, like love and spirit and grace. Confront doubt. Embrace revelation.

None of us should seek phony solace or make-believe comfort. Everyone, though, should long to know the truth. If you think there's nothing more than what you see and your only proof is that you can't see it, you may never experience the peace that passes all understanding. On your deathbed, will you be confident that you have it right?

In memory of Jerry White (1933-2023).

Admittedly, I remember very little of my first time reading Brideshead. I recall telling Martin that it was probably my favorite book of all time, but that merely meant it was the most recent thing I had read, since in those days every new thought felt vibrant, and the latest one always shone most brightly.

In a few successive seasons I had been enamored with Spinoza's determinism, Nietzsche's will to power, and Kant's categorical imperative. Kurt Vonnegut had given way to John Updike; Updike to Franzen; Franzen to Williams; and Williams to Wallace, whose big book was easy enough to move from apartment to apartment without reading, influencing my thought and manner through aura or osmosis rather than—you know—reading.

What could I have understood reading Brideshead? The book evokes a time so clearly lost that it hardly seems to have been possible that it ever existed, even tenuously—a truth echoed in the title of the first chapter, Et in Arcadia Ego, the name of a painting that portrays the transience of earthly life and the dim perfections we enjoy.

In a letter to his publisher about the book, the charming snob Waugh wrote, "I should not think six Americans will understand it," and I do not count myself among the six then or now. But re-reading the book recently has brought me closer to understanding, as with many difficult ideas that one can only approach but never quite grasp: those intellectual asymptotes—like the incarnation and the resurrection—that lie in the fuzzy penumbra of faith in reason's shadow.

The book hadn't changed in the time since I'd read it, but I had. That's an obvious truth, but take a moment to consider the rare reflection that re-reading affords us.

We are not strangers to ourselves. We are not our distant grandmothers who see us a few years later and remark on our growth, wistfully remembering how we were just yesterday crawling around and biting Uncle Dave's ankles. We see ourselves grow by accretion—the gradual shifts in manner and habit, mind and mood, faith and fancy through many moments, minute and magnificent. We don't clearly see the slow-growing lines on our faces until we look at our picture in the high school yearbook. The story arc of a life lived long bends slowly, not like the neatly packaged plot points of a two-hour film but much more like dropping grains of sand one by one: after a while you'll have a beach, but you'll hardly notice the tipping point.

Reading Brideshead again, I saw clearly how I had changed in the past ten years. Like the protagonist, Charles Ryder, I had moved away from a life of aesthetic indulgence and hedonism to one tempered by virtue—or at least attempts at virtue. In my first reading of the book, I had hardly noticed the novel's Catholicism—if anything, it felt like a necessary literary device to propel aspects of the romantic plot. That I could have missed that now seems to absurd to me: The book is singularly focused on faith and conversion. But I changed.

Curiously, I was just a year from converting to Catholicism when I read Brideshead, but I didn't know that then. What I am left with after re-reading the book is a sense of my own continued conversion.

When I was received into the Catholic Church, I was prepared to enter, but I was still standing in the doorway. The spiritual life has its own accretion, and it is only with careful reflection that we see our soul formed and reformed through prayer and practice, failure and forgiveness, inspiration and insight.

Over the past decade, I have walked slowly past the pews toward the altar—and turning back I can see the life I left behind, sitting on the stairs outside in sin and sorrow, panicking on the night of anointing as the truth wrestled with desire ("O God, make me good, but not yet.")—eyes fixed firmly on the the cross, approaching ("Troubled on every side, yet not distressed"), approaching ("Perplexed, but not in despair"), approaching ("Persecuted, but not forsaken"), approaching ("Cast down, but not destroyed"), approaching ("Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body."), always approaching, until: Death and resurrection.

‌For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.

At our table, Gay and Al and Mary and Jerry and I feast on shrimp and fish and conversation. The discussion takes on that particular tenor of octogenarians: doctor’s visits past, present, and future, cruise ship travelogues, war stories both literal and otherwise hard-won, measured pauses, and half-heard half-truths. Al's stories embody a charming paradox as they emerge at once perfectly rehearsed and entirely fresh. Like the crisp tzzzt of a just popped soda can, his quips erupt after being packaged and stored for the right moment. After meeting some married men on a cruise ship, he tells us, he responded enthusiastically: "My wife is Gay!"

Soon the conversation drifts toward the tropical storm that's dancing unsteadily as it finds its form and force over Caribbean waters. A news report on the television in the corner shows the possible trajectories for the soon-to-be-hurricane: hundreds of curving lines charting potential courses to disparate destinations stretching from Corpus Christi to Cape Canaveral, with landfall less than a week later. As the animation plays again and again, it begins to resemble catastrophic spaghetti, a collection of pasta-shaped possibilities for destruction somewhere. The entire experience feels at once like a celebration of scientific achievement and an exercise in intellectual humility: Our meteorological models are sophisticated enough to see a hurricane before there is one, but it takes time to grasp a storm's intentions.

Since the physical world is determinate, a perfect model would be able to account for every variable and offer perfect predictions. But as Borges notes in a very short story, a perfect model is just the thing itself:

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

Jorge Luis Borges. "On Exactitude in Science."

So the storm, a map and model of itself, set sail toward a destination that was determined but unknown. As the days go by, our understanding increases until at last the hurricane reveals its plans, ripping off roofs and tearing down houses in that little town that was always going to get hit, we just didn't know it.

When the storm finally arrives, I'm sitting five hundred miles away at Cafe Du Monde, munching on beignets and covering my face with powdered sugar as Meg explains to me how Pokémon GO works. Nearby, a man busks and belts out country hits, framed by the three spires of a three-hundred-year-old cathedral. Here at the edge of the hurricane's reach, the temperature has dropped from sweltering summer to something akin to autumn, or whatever similar state New Orleans approaches for a few days each year.

Strolling through the French Market, we come across a collection of chess boards, which foretell the growing fascination I'll have with the game in the coming months. After a few lunchtime games with Meg, I begin to find satisfaction in regularly getting humbled by Sal's potent Sicilian and a cavalcade of internet strangers.

Studying a chess board is a bit different than studying a hurricane, for while the possibilities for a storm's destination decrease over time, the possibilities for a chess game increase with every move. After white's first move, there are only twenty possible configurations: sixteen different pawn moves and four moves with knights. After black's first move, that number increases to 400 possible board arrangements, which I'll spare the reader from enumerating here. By the end of two full turns, the number of possible configurations approaches 200,000, and just three turns leaves us with more than 100 million possibilities.

Indeed, after just a dozen moves or so, it's quite possible for a pair of novices to have laid out the chess board in a way that no two players have ever done before—and by the endgame among any two players it's almost a certainty that the landscape of the opposing pieces has taken on a form never before seen in history. Mathematicians with an enlightened understanding of exponents suppose that there are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe, a fact that leads me to lament how few chess games and facets of the observable universe I'm likely to enjoy in this brief life.

Because of the unique nature of each chess match, studying old games feels a bit like dissecting a long-lost past. Focusing too hard on the past is fruitless, for no matter how hard we prepare to change our mistakes with endless rumination, we're never going to have another chance to encounter the same pieces in the same positions, as it were. And preparing for the next chess game is a bit like rehearsing for a date in front of the mirror: Not knowing what the other person will say or do, the preparation leaves out quite a few salient variables. Partners and chess opponents are likely to surprise us at least some of the time.

Preparation for chess and life, then, share at least this similarity: We must reflect carefully in the present upon our past mistakes to identify the patterns and habits that led us astray in order to shape a more sound intuition for the future. Thus a good person is not merely probabilistic like a chess computer, but rather wise, having the sort of well-formed prudence that applies the right response in each new moment.

A wrinkle arises with human beings, though, who exist with even greater complexity than chess boards. For while a chess board's possibilities feel overwhelming, they are nonetheless finite. On the other hand, even a pair of people with free will seem to bend the otherwise compliant universe out of shape—and several billion souls are infinitely less predictable than several billion hurricanes.

This presents problems for Christians, who must reckon with competing notions of divine knowledge and human freedom: If we are truly free, how is God really all-knowing? Or if God is truly all-knowing, are we really free? To not consider such a conundrum is to give in the modern fallacy that faith is a sort of thoughtless acquiescence, when in fact faith depends on reason.

Certainly we cannot eradicate human freedom, because the resulting picture is incoherent and un-Christian. Without human freedom, there is no explanation for evil except that God wills it—"and everything God created is good" (1 Timothy 4:4). And indeed without freedom, we could not freely choose God's grace, making a liar of Jesus. Freedom, along with all of the good and evil it affords, is clearly essential to humanity—and indeed to salvation. God's plan is not merely a perfect weather forecast, since human beings are free to fail while hurricanes are bound by law to follow a set path.

So we must reconcile how God knows what we shall do although we have not yet chosen. There's some appeal in imagining that God is a sort of chess computer—calculating at each moment all possible permutations for the future of each person's life and creation as a whole. In this conception, God knows all possible outcomes in every possible moment. However, we must admit that this does not seem to satisfy our understanding of omniscient. To know what could be is very different than to know what will be—which is why the weatherman's imperfect knowledge leads us to set up a barbecue before a thunderstorm.

To understand how God can know our choices but not determine them, we must consider his nature. Indeed, God is quite different from a weatherman, a chess grandmaster, or a clockmaker, for he is at once here and above; he dictates while listening; he authored time but stands outside of it. This last point is key because it straddles that line of human understanding that makes belief rational but difficult. Indeed, the simple answer to this question is not satisfying because it requires us to accept that we can only know enough to know it's true but not enough to understand: God's knowledge is outside time; it's not like ours.

When we worry that our path has been predestined, we are really worried that our choices have no consequence. But this fear would presuppose that God is walking alongside us in history, when we know (or nearly know) that he does not. And he has told us that our choices do matter. We can shape the lives of family, friends, strangers, and lovers with a daily decision to fight back against the temptation toward evil and instead share the daily delights of the bread of life. Indeed, the greatest value of our choices extends beyond the reach of a chess board, the oceans, or the observable universe—to eternal life, where we will share in the full vision of what we now can only glimpse.

So we pray fervently and freely that our lives conform to the goodness and grace that God extends. For true freedom does not arise from unconstrained action, but rather from harmony with the ultimate good. Thy will be done.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose. It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.

Franzen famously hates everything from capitalism to lingerie, though unserious art and unserious artists are particularly abhorrent to him. And he especially laments the "internet junk stream"—a disdain that he shares with his late friend, the prescient David Foster Wallace. While his widespread hatred borders on performative and parodic, Franzen's rebukes all hinge on one totally real and fundamental enemy: atomism.

Our culture has an enormous problem with loneliness—as well as an obsession with self. No one seems quite willing to admit that a relentless focus on ourselves may not be an antidote to isolation. We harbor a collective "main character syndrome," and our postmodern Copernican Revolution has placed our own minds at the center of a universal story that revolves around us. No where is this more literally obvious than in our social networks, where each of us is the hub with spokes of followers.

All of our Zuckerbergian overlords proclaim the utter goodness of the untamed connection afforded by social media, though the accompanying downsides of mindless scrolling, self-loathing, depression, anxiety, and addiction are rarely noted. Tech evangelists view these downsides as obstacles to be overcome rather than logical consequences of social networks that present people as commodities, as algorithmically malleable, as atoms.1 As Chesterton quipped, "The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums"—and we are driving ourselves mad with our hope that further self-discovery and public self-disclosure will set us free from our anguish.

A misguided understanding of science and unwavering materialism are at the center of our culture's solipsism—the frail belief that all one can truly know is one's own mind and thoughts. Those who seek meaning and find that it cannot be touched, cannot be tested retreat into themselves. What remains for these poor atomistic souls is a pile of paradoxes: A distrust of the people they desperately seek; an attempt to connect with others by endlessly cultivating themselves; a dense apartment building where they know no one; a collection of followers and no one to call in the midst of a crisis; a hatred of a God that they are sure does not exist.

After Chesterton decried foolish belief in oneself, his conversation partner replied, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" In response, Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy, a defense of faith.

Franzen's latest novel, Crossroads, is far from a theological treatise, but it does take a closer look at solipsism. Each of its main characters struggles with the consequences of all-consuming selfhood. Russ, a middle-age associate pastor, flirts with a younger parishioner in a self-assertive conquest. Marion, a depressed homemaker, justifies her self-sabotage with the failure of her therapist to spur on self-discovery. Clem, a college student, sleeps with a girl he does not love, repeatedly, in hopes of self-exploration. Becky, a high schooler, abandons her virtue to pursue self-revelation. And Perry, a savant, uses everyone in his life in his monomaniacal pursuit of self-fulfillment through drugs. Only Judson, the youngest child who has not yet reached the age of reason, is spared from the negative consequences of radical self-love.

Though Franzen set out to write a novel that only focused on the emotional aspects of religion, he may have unwittingly landed on religious truth.

"Crossroads" refers both to the pivotal events of the novel and a church youth group of the same name, from which Russ is ousted in favor of hotshot young preacher Rick Ambrose. Of course, Ambrose's approach is to bring kids in at all costs, and the price he settles on is abandoning religion. That is, he believes that the best way to save souls is to remove all stains of religion to make the whole experience more palatable—an approach that many churches have settled on today. In the end, though, many people find TED talks a poor substitute for homilies, concerts a weak stand-in for liturgies, hobbies a lame replacement for worship, and therapy an insufficient surrogate for confession.

Remembering a traumatic past, Marion reflects:

She might have imagined her story emerging with much guilty gasping, much reaching for Kleenexes, but confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions. There was no terror of God’s judgment on her puny self, no pity for her sweet Lord’s suffering on the cross for what she’d done. With Sophie, a female layperson, a maternal Greek American, she felt more like very naughty... People who weren’t seriously Catholic didn’t understand that Satan wasn’t a charmingly literate tempter, or a funny red-faced devil with a pitchfork. Satan was pain without limit, annihilation of the mind.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. We all fail repeatedly to be good, yet our solipsistic culture tells us that redemption is just a bit further down the corridors of our own minds. C.S. Lewis notes the absurdity of this suggestion in his excellent Screwtape Letters, written from the perspective of a soul-seeking demon to his apprentice: "It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."

Goodness is found in community, and real community is found in the physical world. Human beings are sensual creatures, which is why the spiritual truths of the faith are conveyed in physical manifestations: icons, statues, relics, candles, incense, water, oil, bread, wine, body, blood—and the cross. The same loss the faith incurred with online masses during the pandemic is the loss our culture has inflicted on itself with misguided attempts at connection and foolish hopes of salvation through self-realization. Truth, love, and beauty are found in people, in imago Dei. Go be with them.

As morning breaks, I close the book I'd picked up at LAX: The Road, now a major motion picture, by Cormac McCarthy. Finally starting to feel the fatigue I'd desired for ten hours at a crumbling hostel, I walk a few miles to the bus, bound for Tel Megiddo. I'm there to dig in search of lost civilizations and to putz around the kibbutz.

Meggido's a fitting place to read The Road, McCarthy's contribution to post-apocalyptic literature. After all, the book of Revelation tells us that Megiddo—the etymological wellspring of armageddon—is where demonic spirits will assemble kings in preparation for the final battle of God the Almighty. The kings have not yet arrived as I sit on Mount Megiddo, but the nearby howl of military jets portends catastrophe well enough.

A number of my friends—and a student I'm tutoring—think The Road is at best pretty boring. I'm sympathetic to that perspective: Sparse dialogue, little plot, and relentless bleakness don't exactly lead to a riveting narrative. That said, I do wonder if we're asking too much for the post-apocalypse to be much more than searching for food, starving, avoiding cannibals, rinse, and repeat. A man and his son in pursuit of the coast... and why?

Day after day I dig in a small plot, trowel and toothbrush touching dirt untouched for a couple thousand years, covering potsherds and—nearby—a vase holding the skeleton of a newborn baby, preserved in death as it was not in life. Over the course of a whole summer, I'll move several hundred boulders and dig down a few inches, but I'll find nothing of consequence and make no meaningful contribution to archaeology.

The beauty of The Road is that it presents our world and our nature as in a mirror dimly, a shadow just clear enough that we can see what it is, what it is not, and what it could be. In McCarthy's broken world, empty houses, abandoned trains, and cans of food let us know that we're in a familiar place—surrounded by people who are, though more visibly desperate, like us. Those who lament that McCarthy fails to describe the "event" that made the world like this miss the point: Whatever it was, we did it. We don't need to look long at the broken men who inhabit this world to know they are capable of tearing down anything good without any help at all.

With this backdrop of wretchedness and despair, the novel proposes a simple question: Why do we keep going? The man and his son elude capture, fend off starvation, endure the elements, and trudge on desperately toward a coast that offers no certainty of a better existence. How are we any different? What are you hoping for? Why do you carry on?

Many people enjoy reading dystopian literature that places responsibility for destruction in the hands of some despotic government or a calamitous natural disaster—with the prospect that some hero can restore order (see, e.g. The Hunger Games or Interstellar). Fewer are fond of candid depictions of sin and the allure of suicide.

Suicide, of course, is one possible response to the predicament of carrying on. Just... stop. We don't have to live, after all. This is the decision made by the man's wife before the novel begins.

No, I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant...I dont care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes he is. Please dont do this. I’m sorry. I cant do it alone. Then dont. I cant help you... As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. You have no argument because there is none. And she was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they’d sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall. (The Road, pages 57-59, excerpted)

But the man, though he acknowledges the same premises, does not reach the same conclusion. He does not want to suffer, nor does he want his son to suffer, but his determination—only occasionally irresolute—is echoed in his refrain: "We have to go." But why?

The book of Ecclesiastes begins:

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

So it continues for many chapters. Ecclesiastes, like The Road, is relentless. The book details the fruitlessness of labor, of wisdom, of indulgence, of desire—after all, as both The Preacher of Ecclesiastes and the wife in The Road observe, death comes to righteous and wicked alike, and evil afflicts all throughout their lives.

But there is a remedy—a true and effective one—that begins with the question The Road actually explicitly asks the reader:

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

The difference, of course, is that what never was cannot be, but what never will be could. This is another way of describing hope, the virtue of believing in possibility. And indeed, this is what sustains the man, who fervently believes that each step may be in the direction of greater goodness despite all evidence to the contrary.

Surrounded by sensual pleasures and enormous comfort, most of us are in denial about the reality of our nature as we trudge toward death. We are, as Kierkegaard describes, ignorant of our own despair. Whether this plays out at either of two extremes is irrelevant—both lazy bores and ebullient pleasure-seekers have no idea, ultimately, what they are living for. This is the value of apocalyptic literature: In a stripped-down world, there's a much clearer view of the spiritual battle that really truly undergirds all of our lives. There's not enough Netflix to constantly mollify that nagging thought: What the hell am I doing with my life? But read The Road and try not to ask yourself what's the point of any of it.

A few years ago, fear took hold and enlisted me as a weapon against myself. In the grasp of madness, I began to walk with determination into the path of careening cars for reasons that were as obvious as a parable and as unknown as the truth. At 18th and Bryant, a bus narrowly missed me; a few blocks later, I gave all of the money in my wallet to a tarnished man outside of Duc Loi supermarket; hours after that, having walked several miles through San Francisco unscathed despite a desire for my body to be eviscerated by several tons of engineering, I sat down in front of my therapist and confessed that there wasn't much else I wanted to do with my life but die.

It's a good thing to keep reading Ecclesiastes to the end, because although it's an enigmatic collection of proverbs and poetry, it contains a central truth:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

Our lives are not certain to be comfortable—and indeed, it is only when we are uncomfortable that we are likely to confront the truth of our nature, of our sinfulness, of our mortality, of our need for meaning. We can distract ourselves quite well, but in the end we need to account for suffering.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible... In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. — Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

The sacrifice that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes could not have known is that of Jesus on the cross. Our own deaths erased and our own frailty ennobled. What is our call? To use our freedom for obedience. To sacrifice our lives that we might save them. To carry on despite fear; to believe despite doubt; to love despite evil.

Toward the end of The Road, the man, near death, reiterates that the boy must "carry the fire," which he says is inside him, has been all along. What is the fire? It is hope, it is faith, it is the conatus—the desire we all hold to persist in our own being despite desperation and suffering. Why do you carry on?

I remember the particular pride I felt when friends told me, "I didn't even know you were a Catholic." At the time, I felt that my covert Catholicism was a form of subtle evangelization: If my non-religious friends saw that Catholics could blend in, perhaps they would soften their sense about Catholicism. They would see that there were "good Catholics" after all, and perhaps this would bring them closer to the faith.

Of course, their view of a good Catholic was someone who disregarded the teachings of the Church, so instead of bringing my friends closer to Catholicism, I walked further away. I wasn't an undercover Catholic; I wasn't Catholic at all.

During that time, I never went to confession, nor did I attend mass. I abstained from holy days in favor of my own personal feast days dedicated to gluttony, envy, and pride. I praised technology as the savior from suffering. I entered relationships with the mistaken thought that lust could induce love. I ended up in a psychiatric hospital under the weight of anxiety spurred on by sinfulness.

My bifurcated soul was spent. I could no longer call myself a Catholic and live as if I weren't one—but I also didn't want to stop calling myself a Catholic. So, the only choice was to try to become what I had already professed to be.

———

A few months back, in an essay about my changed understanding of masculinity, I wrote this:

Since Christianity is not simply an ad hoc set of beliefs but instead an entirely different way of living, masculinity is reshaped along with everything else in the adoption of a Christ-centered life.

This truth underscores nearly every disagreement and misunderstanding between the secular and Catholic worlds. Secular people believe that Catholicism is just another belief or preference that someone holds: I like Trader Joe's, I enjoy science fiction, I think American zoning laws are ludicrous, I'm skeptical about Quentin Tarantino's films, and I'm a Catholic.

But this view is completely wrong. Rather, Catholicism is a set of foundational beliefs, a lens through which one's entire view of the world is refracted.

Thus, most discussions about controversial topics between Catholics and the non-religious are doomed from the start because neither side shares an understanding of reality.

And that brings us to Roe v. Wade.

———

When the Supreme Court's draft opinion leaked last week, I celebrated. As a Catholic, I have prayed for years that the unborn—the most vulnerable among us—would be spared from relentless and celebrated abortion. I had never imagined a reversal of course in my lifetime, and the joy I felt at renewed hope for the hopeless was overwhelming.

Yet the streets were quickly filled with red-cloaked, white-bonneted handmaidens decrying misogyny and forced birth. Supporters of abortion felt a violation of their rights, and they reacted with outrage.

If I take a moment to look through their lens, I understand their anger.

They do not share my understanding of sex, of gender, of personhood, of souls, of justice, of family, of responsibility, of sin, of salvation, of human nature, of God.

For that reason, they view abortion primarily as a right—and thus its eradication primarily as an infringement of freedom.

Of course, I do think they are mistaken. But to unravel the mistake, Catholics cannot have the discussion in the sphere of secularism, where our argument is incoherent. Supporters of abortion do not yet share the lens through which Christians view the world—how could they? We cannot fault them for this; nor should we acquiesce.

We will hear arguments of the following sort: This is all about controlling women, or a fetus is a clump of cells, or no one should be forced to give birth if they don't want to, or a child would be better off aborted than born unwanted by its parents.

You can't reply to any of these arguments with a clever Twitter retort, because underneath of each of them is a set of assumptions that forms a chasm both intellectually deep and spiritually wide. What is marriage? What is sex for? What is a person? What is the highest good? What is the role of society? What are laws for? What is the nature of suffering? What is the value of a life?

Anyone who supports abortion has radically different answers to these questions—and many others—than Catholics who oppose abortion, and our only viable response is compassionate catechesis.

Certainly we cannot endorse supporters of abortion, but neither can we cast them off, or who else will show them the truth? They believe that we are foolish and irredeemable in our folly; we must be more like Christ and pray that they travel beyond the dim shadow of misunderstanding into the full light of the truth.

Donate to the John Paul II Life Center in Austin, Texas.

Naturally I'm well-aware that the average Bachelor contestant does not stake their actual happiness on the stems of roses dispersed at the urging of producers from one man to thirty-something women. However, the state of modern dating, romance, and love is truly abysmal—and perhaps only slightly less absurd than reality TV.

Online dating distills a human person into a series of staged photographs and facile factoids. Tinder and its ilk force date-seekers not only to denigrate the dignity of potential matches by swiping them away in the blink of an eye, but also to erase their own intrinsic self-worth with the notion that they are only valuable if they are beautiful or witty or crass or cute. If you're swiping through people as if they were groceries, it may turn out that you are also being viewed as nothing more than a piece of meat.

Chesterton points out that the iconic characteristic of the modern era is a massive pile of virtues unmoored from meaning. As a result, we have a great number of well-intentioned but clueless people seeking to do good—but who have no idea what good is or where it comes from. So, for instance, we find people who suppose health is the virtue of inoculating oneself from bad choices rather than seeking to do what is good for the body. Or we observe that justice is re-cast as a sort of relentless equality rather than proportionality which gives each person their due—both reward and punishment.

Similarly, we notice that love is stripped not only of nuance but of meaning entirely, spoken of most often with the circular phrase "love is love," which seeks to assign equal value to all forms of love without defining what any of them are. In this re-formulation, we lose the particular beauty that comes with the differences between, for instance, filial love and friendship—or self-love and charity. Most of all, we discover that romantic love is largely dissolved into a tenuous combination of vanity and lust.

Most of us are prone to one of two errors (or both) in seeking romantic love. On the one hand, we may seek to erase our own loneliness, so we find a partner who will help us combat our own self-hatred. On the other hand, we may seek a vessel for our desire, so we find any partner capable of satisfying our sensuality. In both cases, we commit the grave sin of treating people as objects, as means toward satisfying our own needs. Many of us can deceive ourselves for some time about our own intentions, but the burden of a bad relationship tends to quickly outweigh whatever fraction of relief we find in it.2

Having spent the bulk of my twenties making mistakes in my romantic relationships, I arrived at an understanding of love in the same way that one might solve a particularly difficult Wordle puzzle: by systematically eliminating everything that isn't right.

So, in honor of Regina's birthday, these are some of the right reasons to be in a relationship:

1. You desire good for your partner, even if it involves sacrifice.

2. You can love your partner for who they could be without ceasing to love them for who they are.

3. You and your partner encourage each other spiritually, intellectually, socially, psychologically, and physically.

4. You want to start and sustain a family with your partner.

5. You love yourself, and you understand that absolutely no one except God can love you enough to erase your loneliness.

I'll continue to learn many more in the coming years, I'm certain.

That Holy Thursday arrived at the apex of my mounting health anxiety, a state of constant physiological arousal and psychological anguish: a persistent fear that I would soon die. That Jesus was to die the next day for my sins and that I was in perfect health offered little solace to a mind convinced that its vessel would soon perish. 

Human beings are far from the only creatures concerned with self-preservation, though we are surely the only species who can willfully choose the worse when we know the better. Even worse, we so often fail to know what's good at all—pursuing our own harm with zeal and fervor. 

My period of intense health anxiety was posed upon a series of paradoxes: I was so worried about my health that I was making myself sick; I was so intent on protecting my life that I was doing nothing with it; I was so depressed by my own fear of dying that I wanted to kill myself. He who would save his life shall lose it and so on. Any good pursued poorly or without moderation is quickly spoiled.

We can make idols out of nearly anything. I've worshipped cleverness, praised beauty, and obsessed about health. The great danger of idol-making is not the vanity of supposing ourselves great but rather the foolishness of supposing God is so small. 

When Pilate asked the Jews who they would set free to celebrate the Passover, they passed over Jesus in favor of Barabbas, a thief and murderer. The name Barabbas means Son of the Father. Staring at the Son of the Father alongside the Son of God, the crowd cried out for an imitation in lieu of the real thing. Like those Jews, we seek freedom in sin rather than in obedience to the truth. Staring directly at our own salvation—freely offered—we choose separation. We make gods out of sins and enslave ourselves.

But always hope rests before us—just three days away.

Those who love Radiolab may initially describe it as a "science podcast," but ultimately many find the show hard to describe. They've put out pieces about Guantanamo Bay, Helen Keller, and George Saunders that have essentially no connection to science. Other episodes—like a beloved episode about a sudden allergy to red meat—have a scientific foundation, but in the end focus more on people and their inner lives. Then there are stories which address questions of morality—of goodness and badness and the complicated mixture of both that resides in each of us.

Radiolab is a good show precisely because it understands the place science occupies among other disciplines and in our lives. That is, the show respects that science has no harsh boundaries separating it from psychology or statistics or philosophy or ethics. And the show's writers understand why we seek so fervently to understand the world—namely that we'd like to better understand our place in it. They're also quick to notice and admit what they don't know, what no one knows.

In recent years, I've noticed a tendency for popular understandings of science to ignore its place among other fields and its uncertainty about fundamental questions. Furthermore, news articles about science now speak as if it were a person—or even a deity—offering a proclamations on nearly everything, even those things which seem immune to scientific inquiry.

Take a moment to search Google for the phrase "according to science," and you'll be amazed to know how much science has settled that people seem to have no clue about. Here's how to be happy according to science. According to science, there are also proper ways to hug, rules for gift giving, approaches to a rewarding social life, and explanations for why we love Wordle. Don't forget that—according to science—you can know what your dreams mean, how to end arguments, how to create a sense of purpose, and the secret to creativity.

During my first year of teaching in San Francisco, I noticed a pernicious problem among my students, most of whom were non-Catholics at a Catholic school. Somehow, my students had acquired the notion that one cannot believe in both science and religion. To believe in science, they said, was to understand that truth comes from empirical investigations that leads to observable facts. Meanwhile, belief in religion was just that: belief. Religious claims can't be tested or observed, so they can't be sensibly held.

One day, I asked all of the students to stand up at their desks. I explained that I was going to ask them a series of questions. After each question, the students moved to one side of the room if science offered a better answer or the other side of the room if religion did. They were also welcome to stand anywhere between the two sides.

What are lungs for? led to a predictable migration of students toward the territory of science, and Who is God? pulled students back in the direction of religion. Some other questions left students split: Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Is there a soul? With some questions, though, only a few committed atheists remained steadfast to science: What does it mean to live a good life? What is justice? How should we treat other people?

The point, of course, is quite simple: We can't easily find the truths of one field using the tools of another. While truth spans disciplines, we quickly notice how foolish it would be to plot morality on a Cartesian plane or to search for quarks in the crevices of a soul. This is not to say, of course, that science and God have nothing to do with each other—truth does not differ simply because we look at it from a different perspective. Instead, the fact of the matter is that it’s nonsense to investigate God with the scientific method—as absurd as it would be to prove a hypothesis about the natural world by appealing to magic.2

Unfortunately, most people are not as well exposed to theology as they are to science. Thus, when they come across arguments for the existence of God, they dismiss them quickly as silly and non-scientific—or otherwise arcane and indecipherable. Of course, one wouldn’t expect to understand complicated science about the origin of the universe without a lot of context and background—but this same grace is rarely extended to theological arguments, which likewise make little sense at all without study and serious investigation.

So, for example, someone will come across a cosmological argument that goes something like this:

It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality.

And so on. Of course, it is nearly impenetrable—and even theologians aren't so foolish as to think that a well-crafted argument has ever been the first step in leading anyone toward the conviction that Christ is King.

If someone has settled on the view that science has all the answers—or all the answers that are possible, or the only tools that can uncover truth—they'll never consider how God could fit into the picture. And that's quite sensible, even if mistaken.

However, I was listening to Radiolab's recent episode "Life in a Barrel," and I was once again struck by the intellectual humility of the hosts and the scientists they spoke with. On the subject of the origin of life, one scientist after another humbly admitted: We don't know. Did life begin in deep sea vents? Was it caused by a spark? Could life have traveled here from space? This last theory, incidentally, was held by Francis Crick, one of the men who discovered DNA.

It strikes me that modern atheists have an exaggerated estimation of science and a complete misunderstanding of God. In the end, most of the questions that science can answer start with "what" and "how." What remains, of course, is why. The universe may well have started with a Big Bang—there is, after all, an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of this argument. But a question lingers: Why did it happen? We can explain what a Big Bang is, how it happens, and even its observable consequences—but science by its very nature of inquiry cannot explain what unobservable cause led to an observable effect.

The view that my middle school students held—that science and God are incompatible—is not only untrue, but incoherent. There is no proper account of God that is at odds with any scientific truth. How could it be that the existence of a first cause would invalidate the cause and effect chain that is science's proper object of study?

Upon hearing this sort of argument, the modern atheist may offer this sort of protest: "But there's no evidence for God." Of course, what they mean is that there is no scientific evidence for God, which shows that they're confused—either about what science is, who God is, or both.

Most modern atheists are fanatical proponents of scientific truth and vociferous critics of the ignorant masses who hold dear to blind faith. Of course, it's also true that the average Catholic sitting in on Sunday mass has a much more clear idea of what she believes and why than the average atheist, who hasn't a clue at all about science and simply assumes that the truth has been handed down to them.

To that end, perhaps we ought to stop reading headlines that begin with "according to science," preferring instead to echo the motto of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge: nullius in verba, or take nobody's word for it.

If you're convinced about the foolishness of faith and the preeminence of scientific truth, be certain that you can articulate the reasons for that yourself. And if you're certain that there's no evidence for the existence of God, make sure you know what it would mean for Him to be real—and take a look yourself.

One of the beauties of teaching middle school is that the students have not yet been thoroughly convinced about the distinctions between disciplines. Since they have just recently left a classroom where a single teacher embodied the truths of grammar, science, poetry, mathematics, and history, these students do not sense that knowledge is separated in siloes. Truth is not sorted into various binders and bordered by ringing bells, nor is understanding limited to the closed universe of a single field. 

In my eighth-grade English class, therefore, I aimed to incorporate a vast body of knowledge. Certainly we covered the list of standards related to reading, listening, speaking, and writing—but we did not limit ourselves to these, since the goodness of learning to read and write is that one can learn anything and convey it well. To satisfy curiosity that crossed disciplines, my class explored rock climbing, aesthetics, architecture, board games, Latin texts, logic puzzles, baroque art, cooking, guitar, improv, podcasts, Supreme Court rulings, gardening, theology, and whatever else occurred to us as we spent our time reading, listening, speaking, and writing. 

As a Catholic school teacher, I cared little for whether my students remembered particular details from the novels we read, nor did I fret about which of the many elite private high schools they'd be accepted to. I was unconcerned with their spelling quizzes and their standardized tests. Indeed, I was blessed to have the privilege of not needing to care about them as students much at all—but instead as people. To each of them I said honestly—however sentimental and treacly it may sound—that all I cared about was that they learned to be good. 

In one stretch of the year, my students and I would explore ethics in the context of several situations—true, contrived, and fictional. Listening to an episode of Radiolab about Memorial Hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, we'd debate how to handle triage in a crisis. How should we allocate scarce medical resources when we cannot save everyone? Later, we'd look at Kohlberg's Heinz Dilemma, which asks us to hold several virtues in tension, deciding whether stealing a life-saving medicine is justified if one cannot pay for it. Do good ends justify immoral means? Finally, we'd look at a short story from the 1960s that explores the fairness or unfairness of various punishments in the face of a student who blatantly cheats on a test in defiance of his school's honor code. What is the purpose of punishment, and how does it relate to justice? 

In the course of these discussions, it became clear to me that the biggest obstacle to my students becoming good was that they didn't believe there was such a thing as goodness—at least not objectively. 

My students, who were quick to point out contradictions in the way rules were enforced with respect to dress code or dodgeball, hated to confront the contradictions in their own convictions. As soon as students learned the word "subjective," it became a battering ram to knock down the oppressive walls of absolute truth that teachers demanded. "What's right for one person," they'd tell me, "may not be right for another. It's subjective." 

The default view of nearly every student I encountered is this: Everyone is empowered to enact their own truth, and indeed the highest good is to live out one's own truth authentically—as long as it doesn't impose on anyone else's truth, of course. And that is the most potent problem with objectivity for my students: A truth that is true everywhere and always threatens the autonomy that individuals have to author their own lives and shape their own realities. 

Furthermore, my students were firm believers in MLK's assertion that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. They loved the celebration of historical moral progress, for which evidence was clearly available: the eradication of slavery or the increasing rights of women in civil society, for example. 

However, the obvious question arises: How is one to measure progress without a goal? In other words: If there is no objective truth or goodness, how do we know that any moral development is tending toward greater goodness? After all, that is no goodness to tend toward. We can't maintain both that goodness is whatever we shape it to be and that it has clearly defined contours that form a shape we can all recognize and walk toward.

This is, of course, the problem with much of modernity. We hear endless talk about ensuring that we land on "the right side of history," but this very phrase presupposes an objective truth we are reminded is impossible. As moderns, we are called to defend justice while denying a universal account of justice; we are asked to praise beauty while noting that beauty cannot be defined objectively; we are tasked with increasing freedom without regard for what freedom is for. 

Modern people, as Chesterton notes, have no means of understanding or unifying the virtues they hold dear:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Our world is a wasteland of dangerously unmoored virtues: love without counterbalancing responsibility, charity absent faith, liberty lacking self-constraint. All of this comes down to a fruitless desire to create God in our own image, or instead to try to replace Him with a polished political system or a well-functioning economy or an all-encompassing formula.

The moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice, but it is not long. Morality does not take shape over the course of history, but has existed—perfect and unchanging—forever. Virtues are never actually in tension, though in our limited understanding and slow-growing wisdom, we must navigate apparent contradictions with care. Objective goodness resides within the heart of every person, and though our fallen nature demands that we reckon with evil—and perhaps deny goodness itself—we are endowed with love by Him who loves us, we are drawn to beauty by the one who is beauty's source, and we are assured of truth not only by faith, but indeed because of the reason and rationality that is our great gift.

I settled on I Love You, Man, a late aughts buddy comedy starring Paul Rudd alongside Jason Segel, a combination that one decade later offers us a dim reminder of both the eternal (Rudd) and the ephemeral (Segel). The movie is not good, of course: It has a formulaic plot, a one-note conceit, cardboard characters, and a predictable ending. 

Still, the movie resonated with me. 

The opening several minutes seemed to mirror a moment in my life as well as a long-standing trend. Peter (played by Rudd) has just gotten engaged, and as he and his fiancée sketch out wedding plans, it becomes clear that Peter has no close male friends. Not only does he not have them on the verge of marriage, he seems never to have had any. 

Last year, as Regina and I planned our wedding, we quickly scratched the idea of a wedding party despite Regina's close friendships that she's maintained since childhood—I didn't have anyone to provide balance in the form of a series of suits to accompany a parade of jewel-toned dresses. My few close friends were women, and the men I called friends were older or long-gone or never quite as close as it seems we could have been if circumstance had been different or, perhaps, if I had given it a bit more effort. 

So, watching the movie, I was struck by the parallel lives that fictional Peter and I had lived—though my appearance has been more often (and inscrutably) compared to erstwhile Spider-Man Tobey Maguire than PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive 2021 Paul Rudd. Reflecting on Peter's predicament, I felt oddly sullen in the midst of a lighthearted movie that's meant to take the viewer on an amusing Vespa ride through a Californian Venice replete with fish tacos and basement covers of Rush jams. 

Why didn't I have enduring friendships with other men? While I Love You, Man glossed over the raison d'être of Peter's apparent lack of masculinity or male connection, I felt compelled to reflect on my own life. 

If virtue is found at the midpoint between two extremes, my estimation of my own masculinity would have been most clearly represented by a never-ending valley depicting absence rather than excess. Throughout my life, my defining features have variously been a bowl cut, a bone-thin frame, a love of hacky-sack, a gaming PC, and a desire to star in a musical. When I graduated high school, I was the only guy to receive (of my own volition) a customized "Senior Girls 2007" jersey. 

As a teenager, the word "gay" entered my vocabulary: First as a barb, then as a question, and finally as a concern. Ironically, I found it easier to dismiss when people called me gay as an insult than when they framed it as a compassionate inquiry. "Well... it's just... how you dress... and what you like... and how you talk... and especially how you run. It's fine either way. I was just, you know, curious..." 

On a trip to Washington, D.C. my senior year of high school, a student I met pulled me into a small circle of guys. "When did you know?" he asked. My face surely betrayed my confusion, so he elaborated. "When did you know that you were gay?" After explaining that I wasn't gay, he laughed, brushed my shoulder, and then with a sense of seriousness uttered a short sentence that's never left me: "You don't know you're gay yet. But you are." I didn't know if he was right, but after enough questioning from my friends over the past few years, I had begun to privately question myself. 

This boy knew what it was to be gay, which I did not, so I gave credence to his conviction about my sexuality even as I broke the school trip rules and snuck onto the girls' floor of the hotel to snog a classmate who I knew felt more strongly for me than I did for her. It wasn't until many years later that I realized this fallen and sinful tendency toward concupiscence was a much greater threat to virtuous masculinity than my love of musical theatre or my effeminate gestures. 

Lust began for me in 2003, when my friend Dario explained to me the features of girls that I ought to be paying attention to. Before, I had found myself captivated by eyes, but Dario instructed me in the art of a more downward-focused gaze that highlighted body parts I wasn't sure what to do with, but which suddenly seemed on fire with meaning—or at least desire. 

Greed arrived several years later in my high school library, where a group of guys ran a poker ring between carrels holding works of Catholic theology and biographies of celebrated statesmen. We'd exchange hundreds of dollars each afternoon, and we stashed the cash and our chips on top of a shelf in the dim corner. 

The other sins followed suit, as it were, and by my early twenties I was closer to converting to Catholicism than ever before but further from the faith than at any other point in my life. All of this to say: For much of my life, I had misestimated my masculinity. Because I had been so frequently called effeminate and gay, I assumed that a paucity of manliness was my curse. But perhaps as an overcorrection or simply as a result of my fallen nature, I had instead developed the sort of boorish tendencies that are now invariably referred to with the overarching label "toxic masculinity."

While there are many problems with toxic masculinity, perhaps the most potent is that alternatives are rarely illuminated by its critics. Instead, it seems that the existence of excess masculinity suggests that we ought to scrap the whole project of manhood instead of striving to moderate a natural spiritedness. 

It seems to me that Christianity provides the moderating influence on manliness that modern society has found impossible to furnish. Since Christianity is not simply an ad hoc set of beliefs but instead an entirely different way of living, masculinity is reshaped along with everything else in the adoption of a Christ-centered life. 

Previously vain-filled pride is recast as a commitment to developing a craft that inspires joy in others as well as oneself. The formerly arresting vice of lust is reformed as a perpetually renewed love and desire for one's wife. So, too, are the other vices peculiar to excess masculinity refined into virtue by the fire of faith. Naturally this is not to suggest that a Christian man is incapable of sin, but only that he is more keenly aware of his shortcomings and has a more suitable aim. How is a modern man who has been instructed in the foolishness of marriage, the preeminence of career, and the lack of spiritual or existential meaning to have any hope of conquering his passions?

When I think now about how few friends I've held onto, the reason is now apparent to me: Friendship always exists in a context, and my entire understanding has been changed and reformed again and again, until I finally settled on the conversion that took place in a moment and will take place for the rest of my life. The Catholic Church has afforded me a community that cherishes what is best in both men and women, helping me to grow in ways that I ought and shed what should never have made it this far.

I now have many close friends who are men. One is a secretly talented singer and patient listener who stayed at my house late into the night fiddling with a fussy Raspberry Pi; afterwards he went home to his wife and children, who are the constant focus of his life and his prayers. Another is an amply bearded musician who finds and celebrates the gifts of everyone he encounters; his two sons span the scale from exuberant to pensive, and he loves them both fervently.

A handful of us lift weights together; several others play music together; many play games together; all of us worship together. We are joined together by fraternal love—the enemy of toxic masculinity and a bond that helps grow what is best in men, namely a desire to care and provide for one's family, to protect, build up, and reshape the world in a way pleasing to God, and to always live in a spirit of sacrifice—that is, to try to live like Christ.

I had thought of our dog Bandit after thinking about llamas, since Bandit was a Lhasa Apso, a word that in my mind still begins with two L's; the llama emerged upon the dome of my head when I scratched the still somewhat bald spot where a llama had once munched on a bit of my hair; the urge to touch my hair was preceded by a quick glance in the semi-reflective window, which I had gazed out after noticing a sleek sports car. Before the car was a thought of the highway stretching out across California—indeed an unbroken stretch of pavement from Canada to Mexico—a thought which had arisen from a consideration of the map of the United States, which followed the brief and embarrassing mental reenactment of the time I cheated on my third-grade state capital test—going back into the classroom to find my paper in the stack and quickly swap in Albany, some far-off place that certainly seemed like it couldn't live up to New York City. 

My father's memory has always been impressive. That he's spent his life working on computers and databases seems hardly surprising given the preternatural lookup function that his mind calls upon when remembering obscure anniversaries or distant relatives or a seemingly endless entourage of ephemera about the year in which this or that thing occurred. That he repeated the same jokes over and over again ("Geology... rocks!") seemed curious to me when I was growing up, since I knew that he must have remembered making them before. Now that I do the same, I wonder less. 

I've often wondered, though, if my father carries the same burden of melancholic memory that I've acquired—or if perhaps that mixture of recall and sorrow is something my mother and he created together as a gift peculiar to me. In Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian muses: "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember." Meanwhile, I feel that I've done the opposite: In a largely happy life, I've left breadcrumbs of sadness to remember where I was ugly and miserable; I've erected high towers to see from any vantage point the places where I felt most low, where I could have dug forever and never found a remnant of joy. 

Like many people, my collection of childhood memories evokes a feeling more similar to watching a 1950s slide show than scrolling through comprehensive camera rolls that grace modern smartphones: infrequent and precious stills that must stand as representatives for days, months, or years or my life. A brief clip of a lost baseball card that a teacher had gifted me; a circle of students outside my preschool talking about a TV show that I did not know; an anonymous rose sent to me in middle school whose origin I never discovered; a smoke-filled bowling alley I fled; an Olive Garden where I sat on the bench in the wispy cold air, waiting for my family to finish eating amidst a bustle and clamor I could not bear.

This nearly vacant vacuum of memory became my home again during the brief period that I was taking antipsychotics for severe anxiety. The miniscule round yellow tablet was embossed 5 & 67, and when I took it each night, the elixir made sleep seem more like death and life feel more like sleep. The memories from that time are, like childhood visions, merely episodic—not the sort of long, cinematic, and interlacing dramas that characterize most of my other adult memories. I've tried to write about that period of my life, but it often feels more like invention than recollection. 

There's a curiosity about memory: We're able to remember just enough to know we can't remember it all. In the archives of that lost year, there are faces with burnt edges and names left in the wrong drawer, stories disconnected from anything that came before or after and feelings removed from their sources. If I sit in stillness long enough, I sense that I've marshaled adjacent memories such that I can outline the contours of what I'm looking for ("We've got you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!") but when I finally storm the compound, I find only a singular void. 

I remember that period of my life very clearly as the time that I can hardly remember anything at all. What remains—throwing pine cones against the tree in the backyard; a game of chess against a man perpetually clad in pajamas; flying kites with Regina in the Rose Garden—is a shadow of a dim time when the heavy past collided too fiercely with an uncertain future, erasing the present in the melee. That is, if I'm remembering correctly.

The cake remained frozen, occasionally moved to make room for Trader Joe's frozen dinners or grocery store pie crusts, and it has spent the better part of the last six months buried under a myriad of single-purpose ice packs purchased for the purpose of treating some intractable pain. Though the cake has been hidden under several layers of foil, a medley of ice packs, and now unidentifiable stew-like leftovers, it has never been forgotten.

In all of the excitement of the past year, we talked about the cake pretty often. We looked forward to our first wedding anniversary as a potent reminder of the excitement of our wedding itself, and the cake would be a trusty copilot in reliving a marvelous year. And, to be candid, we were also looking forward to making some space in the freezer. 

Our wedding day had approached perfection, as weddings and indeed marriages ought to. The vaunted wedding moments came to fruition, certainly—like seeing the back doors of the chapel open to reveal Regina, radiant and good—and we shared moments of the pleasant awkwardness that has shaped the arc of our love—like the hilarious business-like handshake we shared at the altar when we forgot what human beings are supposed to do with their hands on the most important day of their lives. 

A reception at a BBQ joint with hundreds of sexually aroused turtles swimming nearby, a first dance to a couple of songs stitched together in GarageBand, a series of toasts that were so unrelentingly loving that Regina and I cried, so fortunate for our family and friends.

As good and curious Catholics, we'd prepared for marriage in both the official way—watching a series of videos, filling out a spiral-bound notebook, and chatting with a priest—and in the way that I'd previously tried to learn to juggle, that is, by reading books. It turns out that this is the one similarity between juggling and marriage: Reading about it only takes you so far. Oh, there's one other similarity: I'm still learning how to do both of them. 

On the day of our anniversary, Regina and I flew back to Texas after seeing my grandmother in St. Louis. By chance, one of Regina's co-workers and her husband were on the same plane, so we all waited for our luggage together. They had been married by the same priest at the same parish a few months after us, and we joked with them that they'd soon have all the wisdom of marriage that ninety additional days had granted us. 

So here it is.

I have learned that marriage is a little city. Like a city, its success depends on things as powerful as the values it holds and as miniscule as making sure someone takes out the trash. It requires upkeep and constant attention. It's filled with surprises if you spend time exploring. It's much greater than any of its individual components. It's small enough to feel comfortable and large enough to contain an entire life. It's best when there's a church at the center of it. 

After the flight this past Sunday, our anniversary, we completely forgot about our plan to eat the cake. It wasn't until today—looking out at our frozen lawn—that we remembered the chocolate cake that had waited as patiently for us as we had for it. So we carefully sliced out a piece this evening. 

The cake wasn't good. I mean, it was good—about a year ago. But tonight, it betrayed us. So we tossed it out. And neither of us was disappointed. 

The goodness that marriage has brought us is not well represented by our wedding cake. The cake seemed to remain the same, but it had changed. By contrast, Regina and I seem to change, but we are always the same. The gift of marriage is not novelty and excitement—that's the sort of love that flares out. Instead, the joy of marriage is constancy: A perpetual place for renewal in the company of a spouse and God, who gave us marriage as a sacramental reminder of unity in the midst of division, of permanence in a world of flux, of life in the face of death.

Several years ago, I was riding my salvaged Schwinn Le Tour through San Francisco when my mom called: Pa had fallen down the stairs and hit his head. Things weren't looking good; we should book a flight to St. Louis. 

I'd had very few birthday parties in my life and I cared about them very little as a result. I'd seen my grandparents rarely throughout my life, and despite that I loved them deeply. 

As I coaxed my steel frame bicycle up the hill to my apartment, I tried to recollect at least ten times I'd seen Pa: that one Christmas, my graduation, last winter, the time my parents went to Europe... was there another Christmas? I don't think so. I wasn't sure what I even knew about my grandfather, a man so unlike me, so capable of quiet and labor and craft. He had worked with cars, loved his truck, gone fishing, and somberly sent men to die in a minor arc of an unavoidable conflict. He could have been a mere archetype were it not for the fact that he was my grandfather, and I loved him. 

Pa fell down the stairs and into a coma one chilly April afternoon, and he died the next day, my birthday. 

On the shelf next to me, I've got an old piggy bank that belonged to him. The little plastic bank doubled as a calendar, and each day Pa would add a quarter, spinning the internal gearing and propelling the date one day forward. This routine had guided the rhythm of my grandfather's days for decades, and on the morning before he hit his head he added one last quarter, marking the date: April 6. Though Pa made it to the next day, his ritual did not, and the date is a fixed reminder of the end of his earthly life. 

That phrase—the end of his earthly life—strikes the modern man as a bit of hokey spirituality or naive optimism: a Hallmark sentiment that offers some comfort but no truth. But it is of course the most important truth of our existence, that we are more than what dies. 

So at Pa's funeral, I read my favorite passage:

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in us the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

How could it be any other way? The flesh dies but the spirit persists. Our bodies are mere vessels that carry immense treasure—eternal life. We try to preserve our bodies in a vain attempt at immortality, ignoring the immortality contained within. Our hopeless pursuit disguises the paradoxical truth: in death we find life. 

The soul does not need to support the weight of scientific scrutiny: To search for 21 grams of soul is as foolish as trotting out the scientific method to find your soulmate, or seeking the physics of morality or the chemistry of goodness or the biology of truth. Why do we continue to neglect that which we cannot see, as if our minds are incapable of grasping more than our eyes or our hands? 

Still, what brings solace to the soul may not still the heart, and I wept for Pa. I sat by his gravestone and lamented that I did not know him, that we'd never gone fishing together, that I never called him, that he didn't teach me how to build anything. I recalled his voice, a calming rustic gruff holler that echoed in my mind with Pa-isms: "My achin' back!"

Years after my grandfather died, I called my grandmother. She was suffering from an infection, and I feared I may soon lose her, too. We talked about how she read the Bible to one of her neighbors in the nursing home, how she was struck by the sad note of many sermons, and how she prayed every day. She told me about the day Pa died: She felt guilty that she hadn't ridden in the ambulance with him. She was upset that she sent him down to the basement on that errand. She regretted not talking more to him before they took him away.

I could not assuage her: I felt the same burden of guilt and loss, and I suppose I will until I have nothing left to bear. But the consolations of faith are not the fortifications of fools: The God that sustains everything in every moment is as apparent as the sun—and brighter, too. Just ask yourself: What gives rise to order? From whom comes goodness? Out of what arose any of this? Faith is not a blind guess but a reasoned investigation whose evidence surrounds us daily if we dare look beyond appearances. 

With great hope, I look forward to getting to know the fullness of God's glory in the good days that will follow many other good days, and I will be glad to know that Pa is alongside me, and I'll finally get to know him.

And it is now that our two paths cross. Both simultaneously recognise his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian. He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his Scorpion's mouth. He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like to see him removed to some other planet. Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share?
— W.H. Auden, "Vespers"

Ask yourself: Did things used to be better or are they going to be better later? 

Most of us lean more strongly toward one of these beliefs or the other. Either we reminisce for an idyllic past—perhaps one we never knew—or we long for a perfect future. 

In either case, we divorce our visions from the pesky problems of the present, which we assume are unique to our age—and could not have spoiled the past—or can eventually be conquered. 

Thus, we belong to one of two camps: We are Arcadians or Utopians. We sense that Arcadia has been lost or we believe that Utopia has not yet been found. 

The Arcadian searches endlessly for that simple and unspoiled time when order and beauty reigned supreme. Yet the search for that perfect place reveals that everything everywhere has always been spoiled by... us. 

The Utopian plans and invents, reshapes and innovates, tooling with politics and art, science and technology to create a system where society will flourish free from evil or inefficiency. Yet they find it difficult to step outside themselves to solve the problem that they are. 

The Utopian and the Arcadian cannot understand each other. 

Those nostalgic Arcadians loathe the foolish Utopians with their misguided ideas about progress. In turn, the hopeful Utopians despise the cracker-barrel Arcadians whose best years are ever-further behind them. 

Nearly every modern political conflict is a battle of these two divergent ideologies: a sense that beauty must be recovered and a belief that perfection is attainable. 

Both of these beliefs are foolish because both are incomplete.

The two ideas aren't divergent—they're dependent. What at first glance appears an irreconcilable difference is in fact a striking complementarity. 

After all, what good can the hopeful Utopian bring into the world without mining and refining the goodness of the past? What comes after depends on what came before. 

And where should that Arcadian store the treasures of the past to enjoy them if not now and henceforth? What came before shapes what comes after. 

The Utopian and the Arcadian hold half-beliefs: they debate as one-legged straw men. 

Ask yourself: Did things used to be better or are they going to be better later? 

Yes.

When man was created, things were better. We existed for labor, for love, and for leisure. We were free from sin. We were in communion with God. 

When man dies, things will be better. We will no longer toil or carry burdens. We will no longer feel pain. We will be in communion with God. 

We should not look only toward the past with melancholy as we mourn our loss of innocence. Nor should we look only toward the future, forgetting our fragmented God-like nature that enables us to strive, to hope, to dream, to persist, to endure, to try. 

We are not Utopians and we are not Arcadians. We are Catholics.