Speaking Out

This past December, I had the privilege of helping feed the homeless at St. Francis Table on Queen Street West in Toronto with five of my Grade 12 classmates.

It’s 10 a.m. on a wintry Sunday and you’re sitting in a solid wood pew. The priest has stepped down from the pulpit to stand between a Nativity scene and an Advent wreath with half-melted candles counting down the weeks before Christmas. He’s speaking warmly as he delivers a heartfelt homily.

Last week I went out to do a bit of shopping and, to my dismay, found myself at a store early in the morning surrounded by too many people. I had difficulty manoeuvring my shopping cart around shoppers, strollers and the odd employee re-arranging displays. Occasionally, I would overhear a grumble of frustration from another shopper. The experience was so overwhelming that I returned home with a headache.

Crushes are all consuming when you’re a teenager. It’s all you can think about; it’s all you can talk about.

This year for Advent I decided to do something I’ve never tried before: New Year’s resolutions for a new Church year (a Year of Faith, in fact).

It is all too easy for young people seeking acceptance and recognition to be attracted by the glitz and glamour of a pleasure-seeking lifestyle. The idea of sainthood or even martyrdom at a young age seems unfathomable and difficult to comprehend. Why suffer for an idea?

In the summer of 2011, I spent at least three hours each day trying out new recipes that I found online. Baking, frying, steaming, roasting, barbecuing, and most of all, enjoying the food that I cooked.

My summer menu included simple dips like guacamole to more complicated dishes like Shepherd’s Pie, fettuccini alfredo, biryani and desserts like cakes and crepes.

Most of the time, I compromised the ingredients necessary for making a dish to prevent the grocery list from becoming too long. I substituted yogurt for sour cream, Nutella for sugar icing. But some ingredients are so vital, they should not be substituted.

I made mistakes with virtually every recipe and the worst was my pizza dough mishap. This ordinary recipe for a homemade pizza was ruined with an accidental reach into the wrong bag of flour.

I used whole wheat instead of all purpose flour. It was only after the pizza came out of the oven that I realized my mistake.

The pizza looked extra crispy and a little burnt. But even then, it still tasted delicious after I topped it with tomato sauce and cheese.

We are not unlike my pizza dough. Just as the pizza did not turn out as I expected, the mistakes that we make in our lives can make us feel overwhelmed and imperfect.

But God is like the cheese on the pizza. We all need God as our “topping” to enhance our taste, to bring out the best qualities in each one of us, to keep life more interesting. God is that crucial ingredient in our lives.

Having God in my life has helped me to make right choices. I have come to understand that when things don’t go as well as planned, God’s presence makes life beautiful. God gives me a positive attitude and gives meaning to everything. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move” (Matthew 17:20). With faith in God I can overcome any obstacles, in life and in the kitchen.

He is the icing on the cake that makes life sweet and smooth. God is the seaweed on the sushi that holds us in one piece when our lives seem to be falling apart. God completes who we are. He is the curry on the dosa, the ketchup on the hot dog, the corn beef with the rice, the sauce on the spaghetti. God is the cheese on the pizza.

(D’Souza, 16, is a Grade 11 International Baccalaureate student at Blessed Pope John Paul II in Toronto.)

The Internet is a wild and complex place, filled to the brim with all sorts of information ranging from nice fluffy baby photos to explicit content. It’s hard to imagine it as a space where one can be motivated to learn about faith, yet that is exactly what it became for me thanks to social networks like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

As a cradle Catholic, for years I was a Catholic in name only. Going to Mass was routine, and I had numerous doubts and questions that I couldn’t see being answered by the Catholic Church. I was stuck in the spiritual mud. And I had no desire to learn or examine any long-winded papal encyclicals and the writings of the saints or take a scant look at a timeline of our two millennia-old religion.

Entering university, I joined a Catholic group on campus primarily on the prodding of my parents and my not knowing what to do otherwise. The group helped me live out my faith, but it was the Internet that helped solidify my return to the core roots of Catholicism. 

In between the hours I spent researching online for my school work, I looked into apologetics, reading through to-the-point commentary on questions Catholics struggle with.

Many people don’t have time to learn why the Church has always taught against abortion, teachings based on the first-century didache (teachings of the apostles) and reinforced by Pope Paul VI in his 20th-century writing Humanae Vitae. Surprisingly enough, I learned about these teachings through simplified Internet memes.

It may seem odd to learn so much about intricate subjects such as ecclesiastical authority or the sacrament of confession through small, quirky images with simple subtitles, yet the simplicity of memes nudged my curiosity.

One meme about the sacrament of confession involved two simple caricatures. One wore a roman collar saying, “Forgive all the sins!” The other replied, “Detest all my sins!” This meme gets to the point that reconciliation at its core is simple and easy. But it also spins off a whole lot of other ideas and questions regarding the full procedure involved in confession.

This is the beautiful side of the Internet, the generating of curiosity and satiating it, reinforcing the realization people have that they are not alone. Following a Catholic on Twitter or re-blogging another Catholic meme showed me and others that there are Catholics who practise their faith even in the sort of online “wild west” that is the Internet.

Every time someone shares another Catholic meme, I am inspired to learn more, whether by asking the complicated questions behind the meme, by searching for answers on Catholic networks such as the Patheos blogger network, by starting a public discussion on Twitter or by sharing the meme again on another social network so that others may see it.

Simple messages work best when they motivate people to explore the meanings behind the simplicity.

“Please come to the altar to renew your vows with your wedding rings,” said our parish priest.

My parents looked at each other, and then to the rest of our extended family, with a mix of horror and amusement. It was their 20th wedding anniversary ceremony, and they forgot to bring their wedding rings.

In a flash, my aunt found an impromptu ring to fit my dad’s pinky finger, while I handed my mom my diamond gold ring. And like two teenagers up to no good, my mom and dad scurried up to the front of the church, laughing at the situation as they joined other couples from our parish.

Some of the couples celebrated their 10th anniversary, while one couple celebrated their 80th. The renewal of the vows ceremony was simple and beautiful. The couples posed for pictures and then celebrated with a delightful potluck lunch of sandwiches, a delicious wedding sheet cake and other desserts.

This heart-warming image is a stark contrast to the very popular world of reality TV weddings. The bride spends hours at a designer store trying to find the perfect princess dress for $10,000. This is followed by a trip to Cartier for the most ostentatious necklace to match the bedazzled 24-karat engagement ring. The bride and groom argue over the wedding cake, but the bride chooses the most lavish one. Then scenes of the reception hall filled with ice sculptures and martini bars transition back and forth with that of dancing guests. For the grand finale, a dollar sign with six or seven figures usually pops up. The unspoken rule: the higher the price tag, the more successful the wedding.

I learned more about celebrating love in the span of a two-hour renewal ceremony than the countless hours I have spent guiltily watching reality wedding shows. My mom glowed through the entire renewal ceremony, despite forgetting her wedding band. This completely contrasted with a reality TV bride who refused to walk into the church for two hours because the florist sent the wrong bouquet.

I love waking up in the morning and finding my parents sitting at the breakfast table casually talking and laughing. When they have an argument, they are eventually willing to forgive one another. Even with hectic schedules, they attend Mass every Sunday to celebrate and reflect on the life they share together.

Marriage is not perfect and it is definitely not simple. But they are committed to each other and to the vows they shared in front of God and their family 20 years ago. And their wedding cost only a fraction of the average reality TV wedding.

My mom can’t recall the location of her wedding dress. My dad’s wedding ring no longer fits. But the night my mom’s car had a flat tire in the pouring rain during Hurricane Sandy, my dad immediately stopped cooking dinner and drove to the rescue. He gave her a hand to hold, an umbrella to shield her from the storm and piece of mind that she would never be alone through any test God might send their way. 

Liberal arts students, when asked to describe what university life promises, would generally respond with a similar romantic concept: days spent learning new and radical ideas, afternoons debating conspiracy theories, nights at a postmodern art show.

Engineering students are less likely to identify with postmodern art shows, but are more likely to be proud of stories which make their workload seem i mp o s s i b l e . Students have their own sense of what it means to be part of their department. Whatever the particular narrative happens to be, students know it, are influenced by it and make it a part of their campus identity.

Even the reputation of a university, as a serious institute of research or as a party school, is developed on the ground and it can have a profound effect on a student’s university career.

So what kind of reputation, true or false, surrounds our nation’s Catholic colleges and universities?

Canada has at least 20 Catholic post-secondary institutions, many of which operate in close association with secular partners, such as St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta and St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo. Without a purposeful effort to develop a unique identity, we are likely to revert to Catholic clichés of piousness or orthodoxy.

It is for this reason that my alma mater, St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, set out over the last number of years to explore the meaning of its Catholic identity. Following extensive consultations with its students’ union and other stakeholders, STM has successfully integrated its legacy as a Basilian-founded college with the dynamic needs of a growing province. The Basilian belief that education is a means to achieve good, rather than an end in itself, grounds the educational philosophy of the college.

And in this world of financial austerity, the ability of Catholic colleges to differentiate themselves from secular institutions is necessary for their existence. Without providing something that their non-religious counterparts do not, it is hard to justify public funding for Catholic post-secondary institutions. But this has lead to a misguided strategy.

Rather than trying only to answer “what they do,” the focus of Catholic institutions must also be on “who they are.”

Generally, each has the ability to invoke the Church’s academic history as a source of its character, calling upon a tradition which views faith and reason as complementary components in scholarship. Then, incorporating the local oddities and traditions of every school, our colleges should be able to say definitively this is who we are.

The foremost goal of Catholic post-secondary institutions should include developing robust, local identities. It is also essential to their ongoing success to ask identity questions from a student-centric point of view. “What is unique about a person who studies here? What do they value?” With these thoughts in mind, our colleges can develop constructive and meaningful campus cultures, a process which goes a long way in meaningfully connecting students to their campus and community.