On Thanksgiving and Delight

Written by Kaitlyn Willy
BCC Chaplain's Apprentice
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I cannot believe it is November! November is a crazy month in college, I think. We just celebrated Halloween (with a super awesome Confused Holiday party—check out the BCC Facebook page for pictures) and now we’re getting ready for Thanksgiving Break.

I love Thanksgiving. It’s not about the food—with celiac, most of my family’s food choices make me sick—but rather, it’s about seeing my family for the first time in a long time, some of them for the first time since Christmas.

The worst thing about being so far from home in college, and now as a college grad, has always been what I am missing at home. I have baby cousins whose ages span from one year to six years. I have missed more of the important moments of their childhoods than I can bear. The only thing that really makes it bearable is the time I get to spend with them at the holidays. 

Last week, as I was thinking about how close Thanksgiving was, I kept thinking about these beautiful babies and how I couldn’t wait to see and hug each one. These cousins, really the sons and daughters of my cousins, Bailey, Trustin, Westin, Colton and Jarret Wayne are pretty much the highlight of every holiday (and the cause of much ruckus and chaos that it wouldn’t be a holiday without). Food is nice, presents are great, but these beautiful kids and the energy and love I get from them are at the top of my list when I think about what I’m thankful for at Thanksgiving; them and their mommies and daddies, their grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles who have loved me from the moment that I was born. I come from a big, crazy, hillbilly family in the Missouri Ozarks that makes the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding look tame. Both sides of my family live in the same town and together, we make up about half of Rolla (or at least, that’s how it seems). Words are inadequate to express how much I love them and how hard it is to be so far away.

Just as I was beginning to look forward to this Thanksgiving and getting to see my family, I found out that one of these precious little ones, Jarret, was sick. Jarret is my cousin Travis’ son and has always been the one who was more likely to be sick. This time, he had had an emergency appendectomy (extremely rare for a five year old) that caused an infection. They have had to do two more surgeries (one major, one minor) since and Jarret is still in the hospital. Every day, I wait for a text message from my aunt or a phone call from my mother to see how he is doing. I am scared at how sick he seems to be and bothered that I’m not there to do anything (as if I could do anything anyway). I believe with all my heart that with prayers and love, he will be okay. But I can’t help but think about how this experience reminds me of my junior year.

As many of you know, I spent the second semester of my sophomore year in Rome. While I was there, two of my cousins passed away, one from cancer and another from a blood clot. The week I got back, another cousin died, this time in a car accident. It was a horrible, difficult, painful year for our family and when my cousin, Travis, was in a serious car accident five days before the start of my junior year, I wasn’t sure how to keep moving. It felt like I was trying to move under water, everything was sluggish, everything was slow. Even though Trav and I have never been extremely close, I couldn’t imagine my life without his snarky personality or beautiful smile or wonderful laugh. For several months, I started my day by checking facebook to see what updates his mom or sisters had posted, called my Mom to check in, texted my aunts. It was not until Thanksgiving that I got to see him, safe, alive, and getting healthier every day. That Thanksgiving, even in light of the losses we had suffered, we truly had a reason to be thankful.

 Travis and Jarret Wayne (I think JW is two in this picture), my two miracles!

I believe with my whole heart that Travis recovered as a result of the numerous prayers that were being offered for him. Our whole hometown seemed to rise up and embrace our family with love and support and give their prayers. My university community and the high school students I worked with prayed for us, my priest offered many masses for Travis, and friends would sit with me and pray and hold me and let me cry. That’s what healed Travis, and I believe that with those same prayers, Jarret will be okay, too.

Of course, now I have even more desire to be home with my family this Thanksgiving. I want to support my cousin Chris, Jarret’s grandma, who has spent far too much time in the hospital as a caregiver these last few years. I want to be able to show my love for this family whose love gives me life. And I want to be able to be there, to look at and count my blessings, and to thank God for the gifts He has given me.

As Thanksgiving approaches, we talk a lot about what we are thankful for, perhaps more often than we do all the rest of the year combined. But I want to introduce a new word to you, a word that I have been meditating on a lot lately: delight. Delight is something that wells up inside you, that brings you joy even when there is also sadness.

Take delight in those you love. Something I enjoy immensely is to stand apart for a moment and look at a group of people whom I love deeply and just delight in this gift of having them, having them so near to me, being given the opportunity to love them. When I go home next week, I will spend a lot of time delighting. I will delight in holding Audrey Cecilia, the two-month-old daughter of one of my best friends who I haven’t gotten to meet yet. I will delight in seeing Travis healthy and hopefully, I can delight in Jarret being healthy too. I will delight in the little ones and all my cousins, my aunts, uncles, and my parents without whom I could not be me. In this delighting, I grow more grateful and also grow closer to the God who stands and looks at and delights in me. And I will thank God that I have this chance to be with them, that I can delight in them and love them in person, and that He has made me in His image, made me His own delight.

So, please pray for Jarret and our family and be safe as you go home to delight in your own family. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Greatest Adventure of All

by Kaitlyn Willy (BCC Chaplain’s Apprentice)

The Gospel reading this weekend was Mark 10: 17-30. This is one of those readings that I think we read a lot and miss the point. Often, we look at the rich young man and imagine him to be selfish, he doesn’t want to give up everything he owns and so he won’t gain entrance to heaven. It’s like this great attack on the rich, but then those of us without money are safe. NOPE! That is definitely not what God has in mind. In fact, I think that this is a reading that can speak to us at our core if we make ourselves open to it.

I don’t know about you, but this Sunday I started to feel uncomfortable sitting in the pew even before the priest got to the selling everything part. After all, the rich young man says that he has observed the commandments from his youth and is so comfortable with them that he is willing to ask what more he can do. Can you say that you have followed these commandments with that kind of faith? I certainly can’t. Even if we try to be perfect (it would be impossible for us to actually be perfect) and follow these laws completely, Jesus calls us to sell what we have and give it to the poor. Now, that certainly doesn’t seem fair! We’ve done all this work and tried so hard to follow these commandments and now we have to sell everything? No wonder the rich young man went away sad! I think we always imagine that he did not in fact sell his possessions—a failure, rare in Christ’s ministry.

I would like to think that if Jesus appeared before me and asked me to sell all that I have and give it to the poor, I would react at least a little better than the rich young man did, walking away without a word, his head hung down in sadness. But then I have to take into consideration my own priorities and recognize that they might be different from those of the rich young man. I don’t really value wealth above other things (if I did, I probably wouldn’t be a campus minister). I certainly don’t treasure money or possessions above my faith. While I might like my iPad a little too much to live in complete simplicity, I do like things being simple. My ideal house is a tiny house with 117 square feet (see Tumbleweed Houses if you don’t know what I’m talking about) where I wouldn’t be able to fall into the temptation to buy things because there would be no place to put them. I’m not really a money person. My biggest downfall in regards to materialism is probably my book collection, but even that I would give up (albeit sadly) if Jesus asked. But let me tell you what I do value so much I wouldn’t want to give it up for Jesus: my relationships.

St. Ignatius of Loyola talks about radical detachment: “We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one.” According to Ignatius, when something is taken away from us, we should be detached enough that the loss cannot shake our trust in God. We accept that all things are for the greater glory of God. Ad maiorem dei gloriam!

When I moved to Indiana to go to Notre Dame, it was really hard for me to leave Dallas: a place where I was loved, where I had made the connections and friendships that were my most prized possessions. It’s one thing to leave home for college. The relationships that sustained you in your childhood, the family and friends who have known you your whole life, those generally survive distance and time. But the relationships you make in college don’t always make it. Sure, I still have my best friends (my bestie even texted me this morning and woke me up), but some of the relationships I had in college necessarily had to change: we didn’t bump into each other in the hall anymore; we didn’t see each other in the cafeteria. Other than the occasional facebook status, I might not hear from some friends at all for months. This was difficult for me at first because a lot of my relationship with God had been centered around the people in my life with whom I ate, studied, hung out, and prayed. In moving to Notre Dame, I had to learn which prayers I said because my friends said them and which ones I said because I needed to pray them.

Last year, speaking with seniors who were getting ready to graduate, it seemed that this was the same fear that they had. How do you worship without the community that has helped you grow? How do you live a life as a Catholic without the BCC?

Friends, God can ask us to give up or change our relationship with many different blessings in our lives. For the rich young man, it was money. For me, it was my community and friends from UD. Fortunately, before I left UD, my spiritual director taught me about detachment. I learned that sometimes even the greatest blessings (like community) have to be taken away in order for us to grow. My friends and community at UD had become my safety blanket and as long as I clung to it, I could easily resist the change that God was calling me to. Sometimes, we must be brave enough to let go of our desires, our treasures and our loves in order to become who God calls us to be.

As is said so many times in Scripture, “BE NOT AFRAID!” I can tell you from experience that although these times of transition and letting go are hard, once we give up the things that we cling to (money, friends, habits, desires, plans, and sometimes even beliefs) we can become ourselves-- not someone else, not someone entirely different, but someone who is even more ourselves than we ever dreamed of being. I am more me now than I have ever been and I will continue to grow into myself the more I let God change me. These changes are never easy, but if we have the courage, we can embark on the great adventure of becoming ourselves. We become not only ourselves, but ourselves in relationship with the God who knows us more intimately even than we do: the greatest adventure of all.