“If Christ is risen, then nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen, then nothing else matters.” – Jaroslav Pelikan
For the past three years, I have mentored dozens of students in the Business Honors Program. There are few things as rewarding as mentoring, and I am certain that I have learned just as much from my mentees as they have from me. But now that I am leaving Notre Dame, I can talk about one aspect of mentoring that has always been a source of amusement to me.
All of my mentees may remember that in our first conversation, I ask them to rank the following items in order of their objective importance: faith, family, formation (= education), friends, fun. These are the “five F’s.” One’s claimed priorities say much about a person’s character, and open the doors to many fruitful conversations. Much can be said about this exercise, but I want to focus on one pattern that the majority of my mentees evince: putting “faith” in second, third, or fourth place. I always smile to myself when the mentee makes this ranking decision. I smile because whether Christianity is true or false, the ranking is absurd.
Here is my case: If Christianity is true, then we live in a universe in which a God has become man, died at the hands of men, rose again, and by that death and resurrection has saved us from eternal punishment, unlocking instead an eternal happiness beyond human comprehension. But it’s not just “pie in the sky”; in Christianity, happiness even in this life is a consequence of our friendship with and imitation of Christ.
But if Christianity is false? Well, as an atheist friend once told me, “The only logical options are Catholicism and atheism.” (Newman argues for the same claim in the Apologia). I have heard others make the claim. Well, in the case of atheism, Catholicism would be a beautiful fable, and hence our lowest priority. No fable is more important than one’s family, friends, education, or even leisure.
So, what does it even mean to put faith in second, third, or fourth place? I can paint something of a common picture. It means imagining Catholicism as a nice reminder to engage in service activities and be kind to people. It means imagining Mass to be a nice time to gather with friends, sing a few songs, and hear some inspiring words from an old book, commented on by a nice man in a robe. (How far this is from Chesterton’s “thick steak and red wine” Catholicism.) Frankly, it would be vicious for such a faith to hold priority over one’s friends and family, and I could only praise those who made such faith a middling priority.
The question is, how to make the faith a plausible first priority? There is, of course, the unum necessarium of making one’s faith a “love affair” with Christ, as Chesterton also put it. Nothing is as important as that. But for now I would rather point to something that may seem rather unrelated—that for many students, there is both scant knowledge of the virtues and great anxieties.
Virtues—when I ask mentees, “What do you most need to grow in right now?” they often refer to their desires to work out more or eat healthier foods. Yawn—and not the question I meant. I was asking what was keeping them from eudaimonia—which I like to translate as “rocking at life.” And the rungs of the eudaimonic ladder are the virtues. What does a eudaimonic man look like? I once wrote a description:
“He eats and drinks the right amount, gets sufficient rest, and has a good work/life balance (Temperance). He is self-confident but humble, charismatic, patient, and generous; he finishes what he begins and loves challenges. But most importantly, he is not discouraged by life’s inevitable failures. He knows how to get up whenever he falls (Fortitude). He is a quick and accurate decision-maker who seeks others’ advice (Prudence). He is someone others can rely on. He is affable and supportive to his friends and a respectable colleague who is attentive to his duties (Justice).” Such a person is rocking at life.
Anxieties—the great plague of students. And what is an anxiety but a fear of what may happen? And what is “what may happen” but an outcome? But one cannot control outcomes—therefore, if one is attached to them, one will always be anxious. So I say: Focus on what you can control, which are the virtues; and remember that we can only develop virtue through difficulties. So, look forward to, embrace, and celebrate difficulties as the chance to become a “rocker at life.” (Incidentally, this attitude is characteristic of fortitude, the key virtue for the anxious). Then let outcomes take care of themselves.
How does all this relate to faith as a first priority? Faith taken seriously is a response to an encounter with a real Person and our true love. And how does one respond to a lover but by doing what he loves? Well, we know what this lover loves: “If you love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15). This doesn’t mean following a bunch of arbitrary rules! His commandments are to love, the only thing that can make us truly eudaimonic—but to love, we need the virtues, without which we cannot love others as he loved us.
In other words, our great “love affair” with Christ will make his life (the most virtuous of all lives) connatural to our own. Daunting? Indeed—but only a goal that big and that beautiful could set the stage for our first priority.
Dale Parker is a former editor of the Rover. He teaches in the Mendoza College of Business and St. Thomas More Academy. In the fall he will start teaching at Thomas Aquinas College. Contact him at dparker5@nd.edu.
Photo Credit: Matthew Rice
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