Looking Out for Each Other

Student assembly address:

Our friends often see things more clearly about us than we can see for ourselves. We all know situations where a girl dates a guy who is "no good for her”, but she cannot see this herself, because she's too blinded in her affection for him. I once knew a fella who drank too much, and his friends knew it, but he was too proud to admit it and claimed he could stop whenever he felt like it—but he didn't feel like it. Or maybe we have a friend who is in an abusive relationship and we see quite clearly that it’s abusive, but he or she cannot see it, because he or she is too wrapped up in it.

We see these things and we care about our friends, but we often don’t know what to do about it. There’s a part of us that doesn’t want to interfere, that wants to respect the privacy of others, that recognizes at some level that we have to live our own lives, and that if our friends make mistakes, they will eventually have to pay for these mistakes on their own. 

The instinct to respect someone's privacy is a good one, but too often, it can become a cop-out, a rationalization to avoid doing what is hard. We don’t want to challenge our friends. We know that they’ll get defensive, maybe even angry, and tell us to mind our own business. We worry that if we tell our friends the truth, it will hurt our friendship, maybe even end it, and we don’t want that.

Two quick stories:

A former colleague of mine was the best friend to a woman who was engaged to the man of her dreams: He was witty, successful, very polished and handsome. What she did not know was that he was unfaithful to her, even during the engagement. My colleague knew this, but couldn’t bring herself to tell her friend the truth, because she knew it would devastate her. So she kept what she knew to herself. What eventually happened was entirely predictable, though tragic: they got married, had a daughter, he committed adultery many times, they got divorced, he remarried, he cut off ties with his child, the wife was hurt very badly, and her child grew up a psychological mess, having felt abandoned by her father. My colleague tells me it was one of the biggest mistakes of her life not to tell her friend what she knew well before the marriage—she saved her from hurt during the engagement and instead guaranteed her far worse hurt for many years, not to mention the scars the daughter now carries.

The second story: Two girls I know grew up together as best friends, from kindergarten on up. They spent the night together often, went on family vacations together, and had pictures of each other all over their bed rooms. Since they were both smart, they took many of the same classes together, and helped each other excel in school. They were very close. However, in their junior year, one of them began to smoke marijuana. At first, it was just every now and then. But as she became a more regular user, her friendships began to change, and she began to change too, caring less about school. Though she had been a very moral person, when she was high, she was promiscuous, and had been in several compromising situations with guys, which made her feel terrible about herself the next day. 

Her friend didn’t know what to do. She talked to her, and was instantly rebuffed. She wrote a letter, telling her that she loved her and was worried about her, that she would go with her to tell her parents and to get her help, but was told to back off and quit acting so “high and mighty”. Her friend’s life unraveled further. She began to use other drugs. Grades were awful-attitude was worse. As a last resort, not knowing what else to do, the friend met with the girls’ parents privately. She told them that their daughter was her best friend, but that she was destroying her life and she needed help. She told them everything she knew. Her parents suspected as much and had been reluctant to admit it , but could not avoid doing so once told by their daughter's best friend. They family did an intervention. The girl went into treatment. 

Of course, the girl who used drugs was very resentful toward her friend for what she had done. For a year, she cut off contact entirely. But as she became well again, she slowly became her old self and started doing better in school. She graduated on time with her classmates. Eventually, slowly, the two friends reconciled. “I hated you for over a year”, she told her friend. “But it wasn’t really you. I knew you were right all along. I hated myself. Thank you for doing what you did. You loved me even more than you loved our friendship. Please forgive me.“ 

Let’s look out for each other. It’s easy to be a friend when it’s all good times and laughter. The real measure of our friendships is how courageous we are to tell each other the truth, even when the truth is hard. Let’s not wait for things to escalate or to get out of hand. We often know things about our friends long before people in authority do, and when it finally reaches that level, it’s often too far down the road to resolve well. 

May you be blessed to have these kinds of friends. May you have the courage to be these kind of friends to each other.

The JPII I'm Proud Of

Student assembly address:

I went to the Fr. Ryan soccer game last Saturday night—the quarterfinals of the state playoffs. We had about 50 students there to cheer on the girls, and they did so with great enthusiasm. Boosted by their support, our girls played very competitively and were briefly ahead, always within one goal, until mid-way through the second half when Fr. Ryan pulled away. Even when it became apparent that we were going to lose, our students stayed and continued to cheer. When the game was over, our students shouted out “We are proud of you” and stayed to high five the girls as they came off the field.

On my ride home that night, I thought about those students, loyal to the end, who cheered with great gusto for their school’s soccer team, not because we were winning but because they were their friends and classmates, and that’s what we do here at JPII.  That’s the JPII I’m proud of.

And then I began to think of other things. I thought of a young man who graduated from last year’s class, for whom school was difficult. He came to countless tutorials and was met with generous, patient teachers who helped him get through a college preparatory school. And as he walked across the stage last May at the Grand Ole’ Opry to receive his diploma from the bishop and pose for a picture with me, I whispered to him “We are SO proud of you,” and he whispered back, saying, “Thank for all that JPII has done for me.” That’s the JPII I’m proud of.

I’m thinking of a family whose children are true scholars, National Merit finalists all, but carry themselves with great humility and concern for others. That’s the JPII I am proud of.

I’m thinking of a young man who graduated a few years back who lived without his father, and struggled early on as a student here. He graduated from JPII, signed a scholarship to play football, and will be graduating this spring with the intention of going to graduate school. During his senior recognition ceremony, he's asked a member of our coaching staff to escort his mother onto the field, so grateful is he to JPII and to this coach. That young man, and that coach, and the teachers who helped him, are the JPII I am proud of.

I am thinking of students who are curious, smart, playful, competitive, ambitious, committed to serving others, and committed to their faith. That’s the JPII I am proud of.

I hope you’re proud, too.

Letting Go

Student assembly address:

Most of you know my father died in April, so my siblings and I agreed to use the Labor Day weekend to converge on my mother’s home in Mobile, AL and help her begin the process of purging the house of “stuff” to get it ready to sell.

My mother has lived in that home for almost forty years. It’s the place where she and my dad raised me, my three sisters and brother, and where she and my father built a life together. Mom has an eye for decoration and over the years, through several renovations, purchases and inheriting some nice furniture, she’s been able to build a home that resembles something you might see in Southern Living magazine.

Mom loves that home, and she’d prefer to live there until she dies, but it’s simply too big for her to live in by herself, and she’s having a hard time getting up and down the stairs. It’s time. We spent this weekend clearing out the attic. It was like an archeological dig, sorting through old pictures and other memorabilia, deciding what should be kept, what should be given away and what should be thrown away.

It was a hard weekend for Mom. Losing one’s life partner is very hard, but she had no choice in the matter. Deciding to sell one's home is a voluntary decision—a “letting go” of something of great importance, a decision to “move on” to something else even though what one is moving on from is very precious.

“Letting go” isn’t something that only 73 year old widows must do, however. It marks all our lives. Fact is, we don’t like change—we have a natural aversion to it. It’s why you sit in the same seats for every class and get really annoyed if someone else sits there. It’s why it’s so comfortable to let our mothers wake us up in the morning for school as if we were still five years old, or be the one responsible for remembering deadlines for us, or appointments, or waiting for her to tell us to do things that we knew needed doing long before she told us.  It’s why mothers, by the way, are so reluctant to give up those roles as we get older—to withdraw that support they must acknowledge that they are no longer needed in the same way as when we were children.

“Letting go” is hard, because it means we’re accepting something new, something unknown, while giving up what is safe and familiar. And yet, that’s the journey that mature, healthy people take. Seniors, you’re less than a year now from moving out of the house, most of you, and beginning to forge your own life. Whether you attend Church next year, or go to bed at a reasonable hour, or wake up on time for your classes, whether you party 4-5 nights/week, the friendships you make, the activities you choose, the amount of studying you do—it will all be up to you. And as exciting as all that sounds, it will be also difficult. Most freshmen get terribly homesick and go through a period of depression—not so much because their lives are awful—in fact, they’re quite interesting and exciting. The depression comes from giving up something very precious—our childhood—and instinctively wanting that security and order that marks our childhood, where others do things for us instead of us having to do things for ourselves.

Freshmen, beginning high school is partly about letting go, too. Homework folders are no longer being sent home to your mom and dad which tells them what they should tell you to do for homework—it’s up to you know to keep all that tracked. The clubs you join, the friends you make, the kind of person you become, is much more up to you.

Sophomores, most of you will get your driver’s licenses this year, and it marks a big break in your relationship with your parents, as you are no longer tethered to them to get where you want to go, or where they want you to go,  and that sweet freedom also carries with it the burden of having to decide whether you’ll attend events or parties that you know you probably shouldn’t and being placed in that new position of saying “yes” or “no” to situations that would never have arisen if we’re being driven around by our fathers. 

Juniors, the world is opening up to you, with classes getting harder and college decisions looming, and there’s real temptation to cling to our childhood, where life was easier but you also know, instinctively, that those days are behind us now, and we must move forward.

My prayer for my mother, for you and for me, is that all of us have the courage to “let go” of our pasts and the maturity and courage to embrace the future that awaits us. All of us are tempted, I think, to want to know exactly how the next twenty years of our life will unfold, hoping that we could look inside that crystal ball to map things out. But in the words of John Dunne, a poet-theologian-priest, that would be the “deadly clear path” which would rob our lives of adventure, wonder, awe. Instead, we are like cars driving down a windy road at night, with the headlights only illuminating a patch of darkness at a time. The only way to see beyond that patch is to keep driving forward. That’s the excitement of life, the thrill, the journey of our lives. 

May we all have the courage to accept what’s in store for us!