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Chapter 2

An Event and a Process

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.

— 2 Thessalonians 3:5

My baptism took no more than five minutes, but the journey to the baptismal font took the better part of ten years — or maybe I should say twenty-five years. In the beginning — and the beginning lasted for a long time — I wasn’t even aware that a journey was underway, but it was, and God was directing me down strange and sometimes uncomfortable paths, usually in ways I didn’t even notice. Along those paths, there were countless obstacles, humiliations, misunderstandings, and even estranged relationships. Yet they were somehow all a part of that journey, all leading me, all nudging me in one direction.

Slow Start

When did it really begin in earnest? It’s hard to say, but I usually date it to the time I was sixteen and exasperating everyone.

Looking back at my life, I can finally see something that completely escaped my notice when I was in my teens, but it was something my parents (and probably everybody else) saw all too clearly: something needed to be done with me.

To put it mildly, I was as cocky as they come. Since the time I’d been a small child, I’d been considered gifted; by the time I was sixteen, I thought that meant I was extraordinary. Not only that, I was running amok in the manner of many teenage boys: having a good time, not caring about (or even believing in) the future, driving everyone crazy with my world-class self-centeredness and devil-may-care approach to life. I was within a few months of graduating high school but had no inkling concerning what I would do next. For some reason that didn’t bother me much: I was living for the day, for the moment, for the second, and the world was full of fun and overflowing with possibilities.

Out of all those many possibilities that stretched before me, however, there was one that did not occur to me. In fact it would never have occurred to me if I had been left to my own devices. Yet it was that very possibility that was to change my life, and it was offered to me one fine day by my dad, who, as I mentioned, was a Presbyterian minister.

He almost casually suggested that I take a few days off from school, which was just the sort of proposal guaranteed to capture my attention. Let me tell you, I lost no time in informing him that as far as I was concerned, he had come up with an excellent — perhaps even spectacular — idea. I was all ears when he told me he was contemplating a trip that just he and I would make: it was to be a road trip (great!) of international character (even better!). We would leave our native Ontario and drive south to the exotic and unknown (at least to me) land of Ohio. Why Ohio, you might ask (and, of course I did). Well, that was because Ohio was where a small university was located; it was a school my dad thought I might consider attending. “Terrific,” I said, imagining beautiful college girls with flowing blond hair, “Let’s go!”

At some point in the conversation (perhaps when I was emptying my sock drawer into my suitcase), he mentioned that it was a Catholic university, and that sort of startled my Protestant sensibilities a bit. I think I must have given him a quizzical look (maybe I even stopped dumping socks), but after my usual two-and-a-half seconds of deep analysis I decided I couldn’t care less if the place was Zoroastrian, as long as I could have a few days off from school and take the promised road trip (and meet those girls with the flowing blond hair). Besides, I was just looking after all, not signing up for four long years. This was to be an adventure, not a commitment. And I was certainly up for an adventure.

Road Trip

So we were soon on the road — my dad, me, some carefully folded maps (these being the days before GPS), and an absurd number of my socks. Our family station wagon was firmly pointed in a southerly direction, and I was still blissfully unaware that I was falling into a trap that my dad, my mom, and probably God had set for me. I hadn’t a clue that my road trip would become more than a teenage boy’s adventure, that it would irrevocably change the path of my life. All I saw was the possibility of having fun, of meeting new people. It never dawned on me to question why my father had chosen the school we were going to from all the possible schools in the world. I never even wondered very much why a Protestant clergyman was considering entrusting his son’s education to a Catholic institution.

Religion, faith, the things of the soul, didn’t show up on my radar screen very often back then. I’m a little embarrassed to say that even my parents’ deep Christian faith didn’t mean that much to me. Like most teenagers in our contemporary culture, I lived on the shiny surface of life, unconcerned with the possibility of any depth. I believed that God existed, and I had “accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and savior” in all sincerity during my pre-teen years (well … at least with all the sincerity of which a child that age is capable), but by the time I was sixteen, He had become remote — or perhaps I had. I had no trouble believing that God might be helpful in an emergency, but I had yet to encounter many real emergencies, so I usually kept God at a distance, out of sight and out of mind, like that fire extinguisher my parents had once bought, just on the off chance that it might be needed one day.

From Toronto we went through Buffalo, Erie, and finally on to Pittsburgh. Having received my license a couple of months before, I proudly shared the driving with my dad. As far as I was concerned, I was on the cusp of manhood, and with every passing mile I was feeling more and more collegiate. My time had come. I was on the move, and life was wide open before me, as wide open as the highways on which we traveled.

The drive lasted seven rather long hours, and I spent a lot of it committing everything I saw to memory. After we crossed the border, I found myself admiring the expensive and shiny new cars that so many Americans drove. I would have one of those someday, I decided, putting such a car on the rather extensive list of things I intended to acquire as I got older. As we drove on, however, I couldn’t help but notice that not everything was shiny and new. The sleek cars were a stark contrast to the grimy industrial sections of the Rust Belt cities we were driving through. Even the odor of the air was different, I realized. As we neared our destination, it became particularly distinctive — filled with the smog of steel mills and coke plants.

We finally arrived in Steubenville, which was the name of the town in which the college we were to visit was located. As we did, the air seemed to become thick not just with smoke but also with desperation. I couldn’t avoid noticing the poverty and living conditions. It was a dramatic change for me. I had never seen things like that in Toronto. I was in foreign territory, all right, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I vaguely considered mentioning the names of a few colleges in California to my dad. California — at least the California of my imagination — was all gleaming and new, and I was sure it would smell more like the sea than like soot.

The university itself turned out not to be the most spectacularly beautiful thing I had ever come across, but as my dad and I drove onto the campus it looked exciting to me. How could it not? It was going to be the scene of my adventure. The school, by the way, was called Franciscan University, and it was named after St. Francis of Assisi. Despite my very Protestant upbringing, I knew a little about him (who didn’t?): he was kind; he liked animals, especially the cute, cuddly ones; he had an affinity for birdbaths.

My dad and I were given a dorm room to share. We were given tours of the campus. We were given brochures and other reading material. The students in general were surprisingly kind and welcoming. They seemed to like me, and I was impressed with their obvious good taste. I saw a few crosses (different from the ones I was used to: these had a crucified Jesus hanging from them) and other Christian symbols. I noticed the chapel and thought it looked weird and not like a church is supposed to look, but that was about the only impression that the religious nature of the place made on me. I had other, more important things on my mind.

I was biding my time, you see, eager for my adventure to begin. And finally my moment came. My dad was otherwise occupied and would be for a while. Seizing the opportunity, I told him I was going for a walk and made my way up a hill past the weird chapel to the academic buildings. I tried to work up some interest in them but found I couldn’t, as they were just dull, drab, three-story brick buildings, about as boring as it was possible for anything to be.

So I continued wandering, heading toward the center of the campus, soon finding myself in the J. C. Williams Student Center. Miracle of miracles, it housed a campus pub, and almost immediately this pub started to exert some strange gravitational pull on my body and maybe even my soul. It was clear that I was in the grip of a powerful force. Resistance was futile, so I had no choice but to let myself be drawn inside. There I discovered that the miracles continued: beer was on sale for a mere fifty cents! Yes, this must be the place for me after all, I realized in a vaguely revelatory moment. My father was a very wise man, and Catholics were obviously very practical people.

Thanks to my above average height and a fake ID (which my dad didn’t know about), I soon had my first can of American beer. Every drop was indescribably terrible, but I discovered that with perseverance and quantity the taste slowly but steadily improved. I was soon having a good time — the good time I had come to Steubenville to have. Despite being only sixteen years old, I was being accepted by college students as an equal, and that filled me with pride. I was feeling happier and happier, and I was becoming louder and louder.

Then in my growing exuberance I suddenly stopped, beer in hand, transfixed by a maple leaf on an article of clothing not far away. At home, this would be a common place occurrence, but I was far from home, a universe away from Toronto. I was in Ohio, in the United States, at a school named after a Catholic saint who liked animals. Maple leafs were out of place here. As I expanded my slightly fuzzy focus, the face of a shaggy haired, unshaven young man came into view. He was older than I was but not by very much, and seeing his maple leaf T-shirt was like beholding an oasis in the desert. After all, I was an expatriate, an exile who had found a fellow countryman. I was overcome with emotion.

Thank You, Sir. May I Have Another?

Slightly buzzed extrovert that I was, I jumped up to introduce myself to the only other Canadian in Ohio — the only other one for miles around, perhaps the only other one in the whole state of Ohio. Mark was his name, and he came from Montreal. Within minutes we were swapping stories from north of the border … and drinking more beer. We would be friends for life; I could feel it. Much to my amazement I learned from him that there was yet another Canadian on campus — a member of Mark’s fraternity who hailed from the Toronto area, just as I did. There were actually three of us! I had to meet him. We would become a triumvirate; we would go down in the history of this school.

And meet him I did, as Mark and I soon left the pub and made our way to a dorm where many of his Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity brothers — the TKEs — lived with plentiful beer in their rooms. The rest of the evening was spent meeting — and drinking with — the other brothers in the fraternity and enjoying their generous hospitality. By the end of the night, I was completely blasted and completely certain that Franciscan University was the place for me. I was going to be a TKE, and who cared that the place was Catholic? In fact, who even remembered? It was a place where I would be happy, and that was good enough for me.

My exuberance began to fade a little as, in the early hours of the morning, I made my way back to the dorm room I shared with my dad, weaving every inch of the way. I discovered as I walked that someone apparently had moved the dorm since I had left it hours before — moved it and put it very far away. But I got there somehow and, incredibly, managed not to wake my dad as I fell heavily half onto and half off of my bed.

If somebody had told me that I had taken a small, almost infinitesimal, step toward becoming a Catholic that day, I would have laughed out loud. But I had.