On a Tuesday during the add/drop period, I was sitting in my office in the Intercultural Center, meeting with a steady stream of students who needed help tweaking their schedules. It was a busy day. In the middle of the frenzy, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an e-mail pop up in my inbox. It was from a sophomore, and its subject line read, “Quick question.” After eight years in this job, I have to admit that such a line makes me twitch a bit and want to yell out, “You lie!” I managed to resist that impulse.
Between students, I peeked at the e-mail. It was two sentences long. “I am writing a paper. Can you tell me why you are a Catholic?” I thought to myself, “Really? No, really?” I reached to delete it, but for some reason, I didn’t. It sat there in my inbox for several hours as I met with student after student. My mind kept returning to the not-so-quick question. Then, seized in a moment of I’m not sure what, I tapped out a response. “Because Jesus picked Peter.” Send.
Later that afternoon, a response arrived, an e-mail consisting of a single character: “?” Figuring that we were quickly descending into an unhelpful volley of haikus, I wrote back asking if maybe we might be better served by talking face to face. We made an appointment to do just that. I’ve thought about it. When we do meet, I’m sticking with my answer.
Peter is for me one of the most compelling of the figures in the Bible. Watching him gives me hope. Peter gets stuff wrong all the time – even important stuff. At one significant moment in the New Testament, the gospel narrator says of him, “. He did not know what he was saying.” He falters in his faith after initially striking out across the water toward Jesus and begins to sink ignominiously. He vexes Jesus so much that Jesus calls him, in front of the other disciples, “Satan.” At a poignantly crucial moment, Peter denies even knowing Jesus, not once but three times.
And yet, for all that, Jesus picked him to be the rock on which the Church was to be built. Why? Because Peter loved enough, had common sense enough and managed to summon moxie enough to keep coming back.
Jesus lets Peter know that no matter how many times he screws up or misunderstands or falters, he will be OK if he keeps coming back with a willingness to acknowledge his mistakes and try again to learn and grow. Now that’s an approach to life and faith and religion that gives someone like me a fighting chance. It’s also an approach that can help make a student’s experience at Georgetown better, fuller, more humane.
Anne Lamott, an insightfully neurotic Episcopalian writer, lays hold of a chunk of Petrine wisdom when she says, “All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.” That is certainly the history of the Church through the ages. It was certainly the story of my years as an undergraduate here. My sense is that it’s also the story of today’s Georgetown students.
ost of us try to make progress as human beings. We want to get things right, to do the right thing, to move toward the answer to our deepest questions. We also know that, in all honesty, on our good days, our progress is two steps forward, one step back. The good news is that, as Peter’s experience shows, sheer doggedness counts for a lot.
The Good News is that our hope doesn’t depend solely on our own doggedness. There is more to the human story than that.
We at Georgetown are lucky to be inheritors of a tradition that holds out for us the reminder that while we struggle toward the answer, the ultimate answer is moving heaven and earth, willing to do whatever it takes, to get to us. That’s the message of Bethlehem, of Gethsemane, of Pentecost, of every Mass.
Whatever our particular faith tradition, all of us on this Hilltop live and move and have our being in the context of a tradition that is the living dream of John Carroll, who envisioned Georgetown becoming a place of learning where people like you and I, people more or less like Peter, could, through trial and error, learn the habits of heart and mind that would enable them to become the men and women they were created to be.
Not a bad tradition, that. I think I’ll stick with it. And with Peter.
Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J. is an associate dean and director of Catholic Studies in the College. He can be reached at maherthehoya.com. As This Jesuit Sees It . appears every other Friday with Fr. Schall, Fr. Maher and Fr. O’Brien alternating as writers.
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