Veiled Emptiness: the Nemesis of Campus Ministry

Sit down. Take a moment to catch your breath and close your eyes… well, you better keep ‘em open so you can read this. Imagine this scene. University gymnasium filled with booths and freshman touting activity after activity in which students can be involved. Here I am with nice pants and a polo (a rarity) alongside Fr. Baker in his Roman clerics (not-so-rarity). We are trying to promote Catholic campus ministry with the help of other dedicated and prayerful students. Meanwhile, stalking about the tables is a fellow dressed as a 6-foot tall banana. In case this wasn’t queer enough, he felt inclined to wear an obnoxiously colored shirt that makes a new tennis ball look dull. Soon enough emerges his cohort in fashion-absurdity, a black gorilla with the same radioactive shirt to match.

Now, I am not one to criticize odd clothing—please, I think my generation was thoroughly sold out when striped calf socks, short synthetic-fiber shorts, tight polo shirts and reflective sunglasses went out of style. This is not a blog about fashion; rather, it is a blog about beauty (among other things).

You see what disturbed me (and Fr. Baker) wasn’t the juvenile costumes, but rather the activity that a 6-foot banana and gorilla were promoting—Campus Crusades. Students for World Wildlife, Students for Animalistic and Vegetative Cross-Dressing, Dramatic Student Organization, College Democrats, College Republicans, or any other half-baked lunacy would have made the scene make sense—there was a whole gymnasium of options; yet, the lean-witted dunderheads were promoting Christ.

So, the scene unfolds with Fr. Baker turning to me as we notice the banana and monkey’s shirts, and we laugh (because we would so much like to cry), and he half-jokingly says, “What would Flannery O’Connor say?” It’s hard to tell. It would be hard and blunt, but charitable, nonetheless. Perhaps, she has already said it in her letters: “At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

You see, Campus Crusades wanted to get attention. They wanted to make a splash by making a scene. So they put on costumes and made the world a stage. I am not opposed to drama. But I am opposed to promoting a serious and dramatic love story through utter buffoonery and shallowness. That is what I think Flannery has tapped into when she mentions “domesticated despair.” First of all, too many Christians have tried to make Jesus “sexy” or “silly” to attract our generation of way-faring souls. Whatever happened to the Transcendentals?! When did Truth and Beauty, Unity and Goodness become antiquated like stripped calf-socks?! When did the depths of the Incarnation and the captivation of the Beatific become too complicated to be satisfactory? Small minds are entertained by small things, which is true enough, but here we were at an activities fair for university students, not a preschool bible school pageant.

Respectably-dressed man next to a habit-ually dressed man surrounded by passionate, sensible students promoting and proposing Christ, and in jumps a burly ape and a monumental banana. This is the life of campus ministry—trying to make a lost generation understand that the sublime is serious, and trying to make the serious sought-after; trying to make a lost generation hell-bent on wanting to be deep and free, to understand that this requires they get out of the kiddie-pool and take off their float-ies. Jesus doesn’t need clowns, He needs disciples; the Kingdom doesn’t need mockery, it needs fun-loving soulfulness. Christians don’t need more absurd distractions than we already have—you don’t attract people to the prospects of Calvary by pitching it as anything less than what it is—and it ain’t a dippy-do, popular, entertainment-ridden circus extravaganza. It’s a (freak) show of simplicity and suffering. Faith which has no better means to promote itself than with the flare of a 6-foot banana, rightfully requires an absurd costume to hide behind.