Not long ago, the College of Arts and Sciences posted a video about Jesuits at Georgetown on its website. My Jesuit brothers Chris Steck, Matt Carnes, Kevin O’Brien and I were interviewed for this video. At one point in my comments, I mentioned that part of what we Jesuits are called to do at Georgetown is to be “keepers of the fire” of the tradition that gave rise to and animates the university.

Earlier this week I received an email from a Jesuit in California who told me that he had seen the video and liked it well enough, though he was not fond of the “fire-keeper” image. He explained that such an image is “too passive for my taste.” His comment has stuck with me. Perhaps a little background would have helped.

I remember going camping once when I was a Cub Scout. I must have been 8 or 9. I was with a bunch of my friends and a few of our dads in the mountains of northern Arizona. I remember it as quite a rugged adventure. We were learning about how the Indians had lived for thousands of years in Arizona, and we were learning by doing. Part of the challenge was that we had to make a fire and keep it going for 24 hours using no matches, lighters, newspaper, lighter fluid or any other modern invention.

Somehow, we got the fire started using sticks, dry grass and tiny twigs. Then it was a matter of gathering kindling, successively larger sticks and pieces of wood to get a credible campfire going. This we managed to do fairly easily for a pack of suburban third graders.

After dinner, we gathered around the campfire, told ghost stories, sang songs and did other Cub Scout-y things. As it got later, the Scoutmaster explained to us that we would have to make plans to tend the fire through the night. We were told to divide up into teams of two or three and take turns —I think we called them “watches” —until breakfast. I remember feeling that it was our sacred duty to keep the fire going.

In all honestly, the most daunting part of the challenge, at least in the beginning, was the thought of staying awake in the middle of the night and being at the mercy of what I was sure were thousands of glowing-eyed wild animals lurking just beyond the protective glow of the campfire. The night was cool but not cold, there was no breeze to speak of and we had plenty of wood stacked up near our fallen-tree bench.

For the first shifts, keeping the fire was, indeed, a fairly passive task. We were a little afraid, but all we had to do was toss an occasional log onto a cooperative fire under a friendly, star-filled sky.

That all changed during the pre-dawn shift. First, it got windy. Then it began to rain. The change came quickly, and my watch-mates and I were not sure what to do. One of the kids woke up the Scout Master and asked him what we should do. “Figure something out —use what you know,” he said, zipping his tent shut.

What followed was the frantic fumbling of three earnest Cub Scouts trying to figure out how to keep a fire alive in the midst of a windy rainstorm. We tried everything: shielding the fire from the wind with blankets stretched between us; holding an umbrella over the fire; even scooping some of the burning wood into a coffee can in the hopes of finding it easier to keep it going there until the storm passed.

In the end, it didn’t work. The fire went out, overpowered by the elements of nature and our own ineptitude. We were exhausted and humiliated. We had let the fire go out, and although the other kids told us that it was no big deal and our scout master told us that the important thing was that we learned from our mistakes, we still knew that we had failed in something important. The smell of a campfire still reminds me of that night more than 40 years ago.

That night is what I had in mind when I said that Jesuits are called to be keepers of the fire.

In my honest moments, when I assess the challenges facing Georgetown’s Jesuit and Catholic fire, I swallow hard. The wind is blowing, and the clouds have gathered. This time, the fire is figurative but the stakes are real; I hear someone more important than a Scoutmaster telling me, my fellow Jesuits and all of our colleagues who care about Jesuit education to “figure something out —use what you know.”

Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J. is an associate dean and director of Catholic Studies in the College. He can be reached at rjm27georgetown.edu. AS THIS JESUIT SEES IT . . . appears every other Tuesday with Fr. Schall, Fr. Maher and Fr. O’Brien alternating as writers.

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