Catholicity Ain’t What It Used to Be

At that time, I was an IYM – Intense Young Man. IYM’s are usually in their mid 20’s. I was on the threshold of 30. I was always a late bloomer and reluctant to move out of whatever stage developmental psychologists determined I was in.
Religious IYM’s are into theology and church teaching. They have constructed a magnificent theological edifice in their mind and can talk about it for hours. They want to talk to you. They want to convert you, even if you think you are already converted. They don’t belong to any fraternity but they are drawn to each other at Knights of Columbus BBQ’s. They are focused, they are right, they are full of zeal, and if they have a sense of humour it’s an afterthought. In an earlier age, they joined the Crusades.
The problem with IYM’s is they see God in church structures, papal statements and doctrinal propositions but they fail to see God in the elderly man helping his wife off the bus, in the animated banter of teens sauntering down the street and in the entreaty of a child who says, “Come, play with me.” IYM’s see God in the extraordinary lives of the saints but they don’t see the sanctity in the ordinary lives of the people they meet.
Older, wiser, more seasoned Catholics enjoy listening to IYM’s. Hearing IYM’s pontificate is spiritual shock therapy for seniors. It lifts their heart and makes them feel young again. They bite back the temptation to proffer a cynical comment or religious joke.
The papal secretary rushed in to see the Pope.
“Your holiness, I have good news and bad news.”
“Give me the good news first.”
“Jesus has returned!”
“And the bad news?”
“He’s in Salt Lake City!”
(Ha, ha, ha.)
An IYM would not laugh at this.
At that time in my life, I was an IYM and proud of it. I still maintain that every Catholic male should be an IYM when they are young. It can kick start your faith. A little bit of fanaticism is a sign of vitality. It is much to be preferred to a generation of dispassionate relativists. As Stephen Glenn once said, “It is easier to tame a fanatic than put life into a corpse.” My wife does not share this optimism. She thinks IYM’s are scary. My wife saw me as a rehabilitation project with promise. “Why would I get a divorce,” she says to me now, “after all the work I put into you?”
Some people claim that the vast majority of applicants to the priesthood these days are IYM’s. Others say the church is actively recruiting them. This may be a wise decision but only if the Church undertakes to judiciously train them. Otherwise you end up having to choose between a loose cannon and one that keeps firing at the wrong target.
As an IYM, I saw my seventh and eighth grade students as abstractions – “students,” rather than Katy, Rhea, Felicity, James, Susan, William, and Gideon. I had six years of teaching experience before I came to New Hampshire. I had evolved into a competent and self assured educator. But in New Hampshire I failed. And I didn’t know why. I do now. My class management was fair, firm and consistent. My lesson plans were clear, creative, and developmentally sound. These are the ingredients for success, say professors of Education. What do they know?
There was one really essential ingredient and I lacked it. I did not communicate to my students that I loved them – even liked them (which are the same to kids). I did not know I should communicate love nor did I know how. But that is what my students wanted from day one, and they wanted it grievously. I succeeded as a teacher previously because I communicated love like Tevye’s wife in Fiddler on the Roof: I prepare your lessons, I grade your papers, I answer your questions – if that’s not love, what is it?
But the students of Holy Trinity were not content with these few scraps that fell off the table of my professionalism. These kids were starving. Whatever socio-economic-culturally-dysfunctional system they were trapped in, whatever conflicted history of broken friendships and family stress they were caught in, my class was not a soothing balm. It was more like a cluster bomb that would randomly and sporadically detonate. And that was bad news, for them and me. Perhaps I was a shock to their system, being the only male teacher on staff. Perhaps it was the intensity of my class management and systematic lesson plans that precluded any relational warmth and warm fuzzies. Maybe it was just New Hampshire.
Rhea and Katy obsessively talked to each other during class and no strategic seating plan seemed to help. They became incensed when I corrected them and retaliated by egging my house. William, seated in the middle of the class, was continually looking around like a man with a price on his head who suspects his assassin is somewhere in the room. Once, when I stopped at Susan’s desk to check her work, she looked at me and exclaimed matter-of-factly, “You’re an idiot.” The class ham, a boy, would upstage my lesson by asking irrelevant questions: “What month is it?” Then Laura, a pleasant looking girl with long curly sandy colored hair, would suddenly start weeping. Her friend would quickly escort her to the bathroom, returning fifteen minutes later with a look on their faces that said, ‘None of your business!’ I didn’t know what was going on or what to do about it. Control was slipping out the door. Rapport had long since departed.
Two students, however, seemed to like me. Felicity, a pleasant, proper, unfashionably dressed girl with long auburn hair, would linger at the end of the day mixing questions about homework with personal anecdotes. We were two misfits, Felicity and I, in solidarity.