ITE AD JOSEPH

In the beginning . . .

. . . there was a rather sarcastic and troubled young freshman named Bill Powell, entering Franciscan University for the fall semester of the year 1997. That man was I, though so much has occurred in the last two and a half years that I fear that an open and honest conversation between my freshman self and my current one might not be possible (much less desirable). I hesitate to try to re-enter that world with any kind of real claim to accuracy, but that is the one way this tale can ever be told. For this is certainly not my story, but I can only tell it from my perspective, hoping that you too will glimpse in our lives the omnipotent hand of the living God—and the roughened hand of a Jewish laborer who, after two millennia, is still very much alive.

I was undergoing a severe culture shock here at Franciscan, though I would be surprised if there is any student here who would not say the same of his or her first semester. Naturally, I had long ago formed the resolution never to join a household (from a certain point of view, I never did). Households, as everyone knew, were merely artificial crutches for people who were too socially inept to find real friends on their own. For me, this explained the exalted position they seemed to hold in campus life.

The reverent awe with which some people pronounced the very word annoyed me to no end. For instance, a large part of being a freshman here is hearing testimonies, whether officially, as part of Orientation, or unofficially, from older students whose job it is to make friends with you. My original resolution to stay single deepened every time some woman (or, worse, some “Steubenville guy”) testified with moist eyes some permutation of the phrase, “I couldn’t imagine life without my HOUSEHOLD”. I hoped I could find enough “brotherhood” on my own without having to wear a poorly designed shirt and do loud, embarrassing things in the caf to prove my undying loyalty to people who were even more insecure than myself.

For some reason, the most irritating aspect of all was the fact that there was a “discerning household” for the priesthood. It probably took me about forty-eight hours to unconsciously absorb and tacitly accept all the accumulated years of resentment and jokes surrounding the whole Living Stones romance situation. The guys who were getting their hearts broken in the traditional and red-blooded American fashion (without the protection of a real or imagined religious vocation), explained angrily that all the most beautiful women on campus seemed to prefer a pre-thee buddy to an actual boyfriend because they could be “just [incredibly intimate and affectionate] friends”. The real motivations behind these liaisons were obviously twofold—primarily, the perpetual quest for the impossible “safe” relationship, and, secondly, the unfortunate psychological principle that there is no one so attractive as the man you cannot have.

These days I have come to appreciate the discernment struggle a little more maturely. Though I am still deeply skeptical about the “pre-thee buddy” phenomenon, (the existence of which no one, least of all the pre-theologates themselves, would deny) I have to come to believe that some men do actually join Living Stones to see if they are called to the priesthood, and not to worm into the paranoid hearts of recently converted women. (I’ve also learned that some girls sincerely want a real relationship, too, with all its risks and humbling joys, and are attracted to men because they want to give, not just take. Of course, this realization was much slower in coming.) I only mention my original point of view on this whole seemingly irrelevant situation because, in God’s loving Providence, it provided the unlikely mustard seed of our whole future household.

For I was not merely cynical about the value of the “discerning households” as such. I was also offended that apparently marriage was still not considered a real vocation. Sure, we would all honor those brave young men who were so ostentatiously considering a divine call to the priesthood. But what of marriage? Well, of course, there were all the normal folk who flirted and dated and broke up and flirted again—you would always have such rabble—but this was merely inevitable human nature, not some divine mission. If you were going to be a priest—”Hey, join a household, be proud! Tell the world!” If you were going to get married—”Oh.” Basically, you were on your own, just like the rest of the non-Steubenville world. Having a certain inclination towards Holy Matrimony, I thought this was a ridiculous state of affairs, and one day in the caf I said the fatal words which would change our lives.

“Why not have a discerning household for marriage?”

All I can remember is that almost everyone laughed, probably at the logistical impossibilities of trying to accomplish such a thing without humiliating yourself and getting a reputation as the Catholic equivalent to Sam from “Cheers”. I wasn’t even really serious, and I had not the slightest wisp of a dream that I would ever seriously undertake the foundation of any household at all, much less a household for discerning marriage. It was merely one of many sarcastic comments I made over the course of the semester, and I quickly forgot that I had said it.

Several weeks later, I was standing outside of Marian Hall, (I can’t remember why, since I lived in Motel Kolbe at the time) and suddenly Tomas Fuerte approached, eager to talk to me. At this point, my relationship with Tomas consisted in sitting with him in Spanish class. Actually, there was usually a beautiful girl who sat between us, and though I cannot remember who on earth she was, I have a vague impression that she was beautiful, and a much clearer impression that she paid much more attention to Tomas than to me. So I’m not quite sure why I sat there, come to think of it, and I might be remembering it all wrong, but I what I am trying to convey here is that I did not really know the guy at all.

Thus you can readily imagine my consternation and surprise when, with glowing eyes, he came up to me and blurted, with no prelude whatsoever, “You’re the guy who’s starting a household for discerning marriage, right?”

As I, in shock, attempted to process this, he continued excitedly, “Yeah, someone told me you said that, and I thought it was so awesome because I’ve really been praying about it, and I think God wants me to do this, too.” I freaked. Red alerts were screaming in my head—”STEUBENVILLE GUY! STEUBENVILLE GUY! ABORT CONVERSATION! FIND COVER!!” Once one of these Steubenville people had “prayed about it” and convinced himself of a direct Divine Commission, there was absolutely no telling what could and would happen.

I am not really sure why I did not just tell him right there and then that of course I was not serious, and there was no way that the living God could actually want us to do something like that. Some indefinable force kept me from laughing and edging nervously away, and we even started talking. Over the next few weeks, we talked about it more and more. As I began to really warm to the idea, (perhaps the greatest miracle of all in this whole saga) I decided to tell all my friends.

I had two.

I had known both from high school, and one was my roommate, who (understandably enough) wasn’t remotely interested. The other was Jeff Ghering, and, mostly because he is a very nice guy, he listened patiently to my confused, vague notions of the kind of household we might wrestle into existence, and he was intrigued.

Soon it was the three of us— Jeff, Tomas, and myself—sitting around in one of our rooms and eating a Papa John’s pizza as we discussed our vision of an ideal household. We had quickly realized that, much as we desired marriage, there was something deeper that we were groping for in the darkness whenever we tried to express our idea of a “real” household. We were frustrated at the (real or imagined) superficiality that we perceived in many of the other households, and, more importantly, we were afraid they were too specific in their missions. We weren’t ready to have a strong devotion to this particular saint, preen ourselves for developing this certain charism, or embark on this specific mission. Something else had to happen first, and we weren’t quite sure what it was.

So we looked again at what had been our catalyst from the start, namely, marriage. All three of us came from families where the marital relationship had, unfortunately, left much to be desired. Independently, each of us had come to realize as we grew older how strongly this had negatively impacted our growth and development. We had come to know that our whole approach to life, God, and others had to be fundamentally reworked if we were ever going to think about loving a woman (or Him).

Suddenly it clicked. This “reworking” was what we had been searching for in the first place. If we had to change so much before we could enter into marriage, (a prospect which was, at least back then, a long way off for all three of us) then this was an inner condition which affected every other aspect of our lives as well. This was precisely why we had experienced such an instinctive avoidance of the specific “calls” of the other households on campus. They, perhaps, were solidly grounded enough to take on a particular role. We weren’t, because we weren’t men yet.

When a boy becomes a man, he can take a wife, he can become a priest, he can find his life work, he can offer himself in a concrete, real and therefore very limited way. He marries this woman and no other. He becomes a physicist and not a psychologist, a Franciscan and not a Dominican. Anyone can imagine marrying this woman or that woman, training for the Olympics or becoming a surgeon. To actually do any of these things always implies an almost infinite renunciation of every other possibility, because the gift of self is real and, depending on the context, entire. The difficulty is that the self cannot be given unless there is a self who is capable of making this gift. This was our problem, because the essence of being a man is precisely this ability to give oneself, and it was here that most, if not all, of our role models up to this point had failed us.

Our understanding of manhood was all wrong, and the more we glimpsed what the real thing is, the more excited we became at the thought of really pursuing it. The phrase “Catholic manhood” could have all sorts of unpleasant connotations for different people, but we grew determined to cleanse it of whatever unfortunate mental associations had ever clouded our vision so that we could pursue the reality.

We wanted to openly proclaim that we weren’t men yet, we weren’t Knights or Holy Soldiers, or anything remotely grown-up and ready for battle. We had just begun to learn, and were barely ready for that. We could only think of ourselves as Squires.

Naturally, the term Squire linked us immediately with the household of the Knights of the Holy Queen, and though the honor was all ours, we wondered right at the start whether this was a wise choice. It carried a particular note of irony in Tomas’ case, because he had actually put his formal intent for the Knights of the Holy Queen after we had started talking about our new household. I never did figure out exactly why he did this, but he explained that he had always felt a certain attraction to the Knights, and he had to put his intent in before he could be sure that they were not the household for him. As he did not clarify this until later, the initial shock of getting the answering machine message that he was joining the Knights remains faintly with me to this day.

Nevertheless, we would be Squires. Squires what? This was the tricky part, but we were still kind-of-sort-of a discerning household for marriage, kind of, and even though we had this deeper focus on Catholic Manhood, whatever it would turn out to be, we still felt our original tug towards honestly discerning matrimony. This was a real conflict. Several pizzas later, we had re-interpreted “marriage” to mean any sincere gift of self—and when you look at it this way, every vocation is a marriage.

The priest marries the Church, a nun marries Christ (well, that one wasn’t too hard to figure out, I guess), a brother marries—his monastic community? That never sounded right to me, but that’s how we put it in the original covenant. We took at least six hours to hash out all these ideas, line by line, eating pizza and trying not to get sauce on my computer keyboard. After this very real labor, the birth pangs were over. Across the top of our new covenant we wrote, in an imposing font, “The Squires of Sacred Marriage”.

The Squires of Sacred Marriage
The Covenant

God created man in His image. In the divine Image He created him. Male and female He created them

(Gen 1:27)

Each human person is created in the image of God. Yet we are not identical, we are not merely parts of a whole. We are united in belonging to the Mystical Body of Christ, and yet each of us is a completely unique expression of the Infinite Love. With each person God creates, He shows His face to the world in a way He never has before, and never will again.

In baptism, each of us begins his journey toward the Triune God. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt 22:37-39)

Seeking the Kingdom of God, all men are given a vocation. Yet all men in every “vocation” are called to Sacred Marriage. Marriage is the giving of oneself totally for the sake of another. Sacred Marriage is a reflection of the mystery of the Trinity. Each of the several vocations is a unique manifestation of this mystery of Sacred Marriage. All fatherhood is an expression of the Eternal Father, all son-ship and brotherhood is in union with Christ, and a man’s spousal offering of himself reflects the mystery of the spousal relationship between the Holy Spirit and Our Lady. Priests are, by their ordination, married, in a very real way, to the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. Religious brothers, by their vows, enter into a marriage with their community. Finally, there is Holy Matrimony.

“Since God created man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing Love with which God loves man.”

(CCC, 1604)

Thus all men are called to Sacred Marriage.

As we are men seeking the graces necessary for Sacred Marriage, we liken our state to that of a squire. A squire, while practicing the virtues of knighthood, is constantly preparing to undertake the journey of knighthood. In the same respect, we, as Squires of Sacred Marriage, are actively focused on preparing our hearts, minds, and souls for the Sacred Marriage God is preparing for us. We are determined to seek the wisdom and understanding, through a life of prayer, that will enable us to fulfill our manhood in our discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.

(CCC, 1601)

Adhering to the dignity of this sacrament, we, as a household, are discerning matrimony.

It must be understood that the discernment of this sacrament is intrinsically different from the discernment process associated with Holy Orders, or the postulancy period before entering religious life. These, our Brothers in Christ, know already the spouse whom they are preparing to wed. In our discernment of Holy Matrimony as Squires, we know not our spouse, but we prepare our hearts for our future marital knighthood. We trust completely that the Divine Providence will lead us, in His own good time, to our spouses. For as the archangel Raphael told Tobiah, “…do not be afraid, for she was set apart for you before the world existed—so do not worry.” (Tobit 7:18)

And when we do enter into this sacramental relationship with our destined spouse, we pray as Squires that we will lovingly heed the words of Ephesians 5:25-30.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church, and handed Himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the Church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His body.

It may be revealed that, in fact, one’s vocation is not the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. For this Squire, our household life is still a beneficial preparation for his particular Sacred Marriage. We are striving to live simply as Catholic Christian men. All men, regardless of their particular vocation, must have an intimate relationship with God. All men, regardless of their particular vocation, must learn to love others as they are loved by God. As Squires, we especially pray for the grace to truly love and respect all women as sisters in Christ. And all of us, whatever our Sacred Marriage, entrust our hearts to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our Mother, trusting that she will lead us along our true paths to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, for the greater glory of God. Amen.

Wow. No doubt about it, we were discerning Matrimony with a vengeance. As to what this actually meant, we did not get much farther than joking (in private) that we would try to verbally engineer the word “discerning” to include going on dates. “Sorry, guys, I got to go do a little discerning.” We figured it would catch on. It didn’t. Well, it hasn’t yet.

Actually, that last paragraph captures what we really thought the discernment process would be like until we met that ’special someone’. We were three single guys who had never had a successful relationship (except a sweet summer episode of Jeff’s which ended in a very nice girl entering the Catholic Corps). As far as we could tell, our vocational discernment could conceivably be in this stage indefinitely, or at least for a very very long time. We were doing our best to heroically face the fact that God actually had plans for us now, even before we met the messiah-like Princess who would (at least in my rather confused mind) transform everything on a practically ontological level and make life really worth living for a change.

Thus when we finally finished singing the praises of matrimony, we ended on the more realistic note of noting what God wanted from us right here in the present. “We are striving to live simply as Catholic Christian men.” Despite our slight tendency towards being hopeless romantics, we were coming more and more to face the reality of who we were as men without princesses. We often spoke of the “Vocation of the Moment.” Love was not waiting in the eyes of a beloved who might not materialize for years—Love Incarnate was, in fact, aching for our love in the eyes of every person we met, and in His own person as well, at every moment. We had no intention of waiting to love until we met the princess. We had to love now, no matter how difficult or even lonely it seemed. And one day she would come.

We happily showed the covenant to our friends (I had more friends now— it was Spring of 1998) and they, mostly girls, said it was very nice, and not much else. Everything was looking good— we had finally written the covenant. This was the big hurdle. None of us, I think, really thought there was too much more to being a household than having really cool ideas, a really cool covenant, and talking about one or both of these things while eating pizza in a dorm room.

Then disaster struck.

Tomas and I were still preening ourselves on what a marvelously revolutionary covenant we had when Jeff announced that he had “qualms”. Qualms? How could he have qualms about our masterpiece? I will never forget the afternoon in the caf when he painstakingly explained that he didn’t really feel like he could join the household. What if he felt called to be a priest? If the household was for “discerning” matrimony, what would happen if you discerned and the answer was NO? Guys always had to leave Living Stones when they thought they had finished discerning, so why should we be different?

The half-hearted assurance that he could still stay if he decided to be a priest was to no avail. Jeff felt terrible, but he was going to have to back out of the household. Aside from the loss of Jeff, things were ten times worse because you need at least three people to start a household, and Tomas and I did not foresee convincing anyone else to join us anytime soon. The horizon was bleak indeed. It seemed that the little household was about to die an unnoticed, ignominious death, just when it had finally gasped its first breath.

Then Jeff started talking about St. Joseph. The way he saw it, our real focus would go perfectly with St. Joseph. After all, he was the best man after Christ, right? As I listened to his idea, my frustrated inner self bellowed as our perfect, abstract, philosophical, non-committal “most basic household possible” shriveled into a sugary sweet, incredibly specific and insignificant devotion to one little saint. For me, St. Joseph was just another statue in church—this was precisely the sort of artificial and overly-focused squinting piety we’d been trying to avoid from day one. But it was no use. I was coming to the despairing conclusion that there was some sort of unwritten law embedded in the heart of the universe which prevented households from ever having anything really important to say. After all this time, we were going to wind up being “just another household” like everyone else.

Eventually, my inner self must have shut up, because I started to actually listen to what Jeff was saying. Not only was St. Joseph (like all guy saints) a real man, but his particular vocation was very similar to what we felt called to ourselves. While he and Our Lady did sacrifice together the sexual expression of their spousal love, he lived, in every other way, the life of a married man. He went to work every day, and came home to his small but exceptional family. Though there were certainly those miraculous moments with angels explaining the Incarnation or telling him to flee the country, the vast, vast majority of his life was, as far as we can tell, unnoticeable, uneventful, and seemingly unimportant. He was not one of these saints who single-handedly converted China, levitated constantly, and/or founded several Orders. He took care of his family, and he loved them all the time. The more we thought about it, the more this completely blew us away.

The most striking aspect of all, and the thought which still shocks me when I really consider it, is that he was the one who taught Christ Himself how to be a man. Scripture says that Christ grew in grace and wisdom—His human nature actually had to learn how to do things. More importantly, I think one could say without blasphemy that Christ learned how to love from St. Joseph. A mother’s love is crucial to her son’s happiness, but in a very different way. No mother has the same role in teaching the boy how to love as the father. He is the role model for his son, whether either one of them likes it or not, and Christ was no exception. The three-year-old God-man sat at the dinner table and just watched, like every other three-year-old. He watched St. Joseph, and how he treated Our Lady, how he showed the love he claimed. And He imitated him for the rest of His life.

Well, all these nifty little thoughts also entailed the slight inconvenience of completely starting over again, but Papa John’s was on speed dial and I still had my own computer. (Actually, we didn’t have speed dial, but 282-PAPA is so imbedded in my brain that it would probably survive an otherwise successful lobotomy.)

Originally, we hoped to just make a few key changes and leave it at that. I have a paper before me which is headed, “The Apprentices of St. Joseph. The Covenant. His mother said to the attendants, “Do whatever He tells you”. (Jn 2:5)” These are very promising alterations, but it goes on to consist of the first three paragraphs of the original covenant, absolutely unchanged. Then, there is a rather large deletion of all specifically uxorious material, and the last paragraph is the original ending paragraph, only missing the first two sentences and beginning with, “We are striving…” St. Joseph is not mentioned once in the entire document. I’m not quite sure what we were trying to accomplish here. Even the Scripture quote is a long shot which was more focused on the household shirt we planned (a full-color image of Wedding Feast of Cana) than good St. Joseph. Oh well.

So eventually we just did a complete rewrite. Though I miss some of the thoughts in the original, the final covenant is more the Apprentices and not the personal mission statement of Tomas, Jeff and Bill. While looking back it is clear it was the best thing to do, at the time we wondered if this was going to become a periodic event. “It’s been two weeks, guys - what’s our new name?”

We went through several variations of our current name before finally settling on “Apprentices of St. Joseph”. I didn’t want to have St. Joseph’s name in the title - it was going to be awhile before I would finally accept the fact that our name was going to sound like a normal household. I wanted to refer to him indirectly as the “Carpenter”, simply because it sounded cooler. And “Apprentice” was too obvious a word, too. We toyed with different ideas. I’m not sure if we ever seriously considered, “Squires of St. Joseph” or “Squires of the Carpenter” (explaining that one would have been fun). I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

We actually consulted a thesaurus for synonyms to the word, “apprentice”, and very nearly settled on the rather uncommon word “chela”. I still think that “Chelas of the Carpenter” would be an awesome name, but there are several severe drawbacks. In the first place, everyone would always have to be told what the word means. Secondly, everyone would always pronounce the “ch” in “Chela” with the same sound as the “c” in “carpenter”. There’s nothing really wrong with this—really, it’s perfectly natural. The problem is, when “chela” is pronounced this way, it is actually the name of a particular species of crab. In the context of our name, this would be an intriguing theological concept, but entirely misleading. The last and final difficulty is that even the “right” meaning (pronouncing the “ch” as in “church”) is not just “disciple”, but “disciple to an Indian guru.” Somehow we thought that if anyone ever looked up the word, they might get the wrong impression.

Through all these variations and desperate attempts at originality, Jeff patiently maintained that he though that “Apprentices of St. Joseph” was a very nice name, and eventually I had to give in. Tomas seemed to be more ambivalent, but perhaps that was because he had already received the cool title of “Paladin”. If we had to settle for a normal sounding household name, at least we figured out an interesting alternative to “Household Coordinator”, a singularly uninspiring appellation, in my opinion. At some point in this whole process, we spontaneously decided that Tomas would be “Paladin”, which is a medieval word for a leader.

Meanwhile, the long hours in my room continued, session after session of trying to finalize our new covenant. This whole experience inspired our own version of the (then) popular Counting Crows song, “Long December”. We renamed it “Long Semester”, and took it from there. It wasn’t the greatest achievement in lyrical history, but most of our humor at the time was born more of pent-up frustration than sparkling wit. Myself, I always had a difficult time maintaining the discipline of Official Covenant Scribe, and occasionally I couldn’t resist relieving my frustrations by typing nonsense which Jeff and Tomas would innocently read, expecting a coherent thought. One early draft of the Covenant begins rather normal and then suddenly veers into entirely new territories…

THE APPRENTICES OF ST. JOSEPH
The Covenant
[An Early Draft]

God created man in His image. In the divine image He created him. Male and female He created them.

(Gen 1:27)

Each man is created in the image of God. Yet we are not identical, we are not merely parts of a whole. We are united in belonging to the Mystical Body of Christ, and yet each of us is a completely unique expression of the Infinite Love. With each person God creates, He shows His face to the world in a way He never has before, and never will again.

The Eternal Father, having created all beings, saw fit to give the protection of His only begotten Son and His masterpiece of human perfection to a humble carpenter. The ideal of Christian manhood was achieved by this quiet married man who spent his life making things out of wood and caring for the future Queen of Heaven and God Incarnate. Jesus Christ learned how to be a man from Joseph. “And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.” (Lk 3:52) In raising and building up this little boy who would be “the rise and fall of many”, this young father helped to prepare the child Jesus to be a strong man in character. Humbling Himself, Jesus sought St. Joseph’s guidance. We pray we will do the same.

About here, something happened.
Perhaps the pizza ran out.

We, of our own free will, place ourselves in loving apprenticeship to St. Joseph. We eat pizza in our Apprenticeship as we rewrite Counting Crow songs in subjection to our Musical Call. We will do dancing, singing Apprentitelegrams for the Campus. “It’s been a LOOOOOONNGG Semester, and there’s reason to believe.” This one’s for you, Father Dave. Please don’t miss our upcoming Improv Apprenice Concert, held in the Fireside [Lounge] from 7 until they kick us out. All for St. Joseph. All. Period. Bye now.

THIS SPACE FOR RENT. CALL 284-3541 and ask for the Paladin’s Secretary. We’ll be standing by, fighting over who gets the big piece of pizza. We are true Christian men, right here. Right now. Yep. That’s us. Bye now.

PAPA JOHN’S UNIVERSITY SPECIAL. THIS PIZZA–SAVE 50 cents WITH THIS COVENANT COUPON. ALSO, GET FREE PICTURE OF THE BIG THREE WEARING CHEAP HOUSEHOLD SHIRTS.

And then, suddenly, we’re serious again…

His mother said to the attendants, “Do whatever He tells you.”

(Jn 2:5)

In another version of this covenant, the first half is almost identical, but then at almost the same point we veer off again…

We, of our own free will, place ourselves, like Jesus, in loving apprenticeship to St. Joseph. We feel this is the true way to become men—the men whom God created us to be.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

Don’t miss next week’s exciting installment of THE COVENANT.

And now, stay tuned for excerpts from next week’s covenant . . .

“Real Men date frequently and well. As apprentices, we consider this unique ‘discernment’ as one of our special charisms . . .”

“As apprentices, we need to remember that, since we are the humble ones, we always will know what should be done. Therefore, we will have a special ‘Know What’s Best” ministry, as we minister our Rightness to the other men on campus.”

“A characteristic of a true apprentice is to admit when he has been wrong. Fortunately, we are never wrong.”

This version ends with the same scripture quote from the wedding at Cana. As you can see, writing a covenant is a taxing job.

Dates on computer files are unreliable, but my earliest copy of this file was last modified April 21, 1998.

As you can see, we worried that we’d soon have to change everything all over again. Often we kicked around various new names, such as KOP, or the Kiss of Peace Ministry. Someone had told us that a group of misguided individuals, probably in the late 70s, (which on this campus lasted until about 1993), used to actually stand outside the Christ the King Chapel and hug complete strangers as they (the strangers) innocently tried to leave the church. KOP would have merely taken the affirmation to the next level.

At another point, the seeming hopelessness of ever really solidifying anything led me to suddenly type up an entire page of household adventures, while Jeff and Tomas half-heartedly tried to get back to business. I reprint it here as a “behind the scenes” look at what was really going on in our minds as we attempted to bare our hearts to the world.

WE WILL RETURN IN A FEW MOMENTS.

UNTIL THEN, HERE’S A FEW SCENES FROM NEXT WEEK’S COVENANT!!!

Well, you knew it would happen. They’re changing it all over again. This time, Jeff’s qualms have led Our Boys to realize that it’s not enough to be apprentices, there’s something more they need. The answer? A PIZZA MINISTRY!! Now, as the Bakers of Bethlehem (BOB), they’re going to change the way the campus looks at household life.

“Tomas, I’m feeling down, like my life is empty. What can I do?”

“Brother, HAVE A PIZZA!!”

“Jeff, I’m really trying to discern my vocation here. Am I called to marriage or the religious life?”

“Bruce, HAVE A PIZZA!!”

“Bill, I’ve got some serious qualms about the nature of my own existence, and whether or not in fact this whole world is a figment of my imagination. Can you help me?”

“Go away! I’m eating!”

“All right guys, there’s two pieces left. Why does this always happen? Tomas? TOMAS!! You eating both of them does not solve the problem!! Tomas—stop—please—never mind.”

“I’m going to make some soup.”

“Shut up, Bill.”

Don’t miss the exciting adventures and continuing metamorphoses of Our Boys!!

NEXT WEEK: Life As A Baker: Not All Cheese And Pizza Sauce Stains.

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Rereading this now, I am slightly amazed that we ever finally wrote the covenant we have today.

The Covenant of the Apprentices of St. Joseph

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them.”

Gen 1:27

There is only one reason for maturing into the man God calls each of us to be. That sole reason, that sole purpose, is to love, know, and serve God—to be transformed completely in Jesus Christ. Rather, to let Him live perfectly in us. To this end, we look to Jesus Christ as our fountain of grace, as our model of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Union with Him is the ultimate goal in our lives, yet He is also the Truth which we seek and the One Who leads us every step along this journey. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, being fully God, emptied Himself to become fully man, and chose to learn how to be a man from a humble carpenter—St. Joseph. Though we have no record of his words in the Gospel accounts, St. Joseph was a man of action, seeking only to do God’s Will. His life consisted of raising and loving as his own the Eternal Son of God, and caring for Our Lady, the Mother of God. He personified every virtue—most notably humility, fortitude, chastity, faith, hope and finally charity.

We humbly beg St. Joseph to accept us as his lowly apprentices, that he may teach us the ways of manhood in all things, as he taught Our Lord. We submit ourselves to his holy patronage, his loving guidance, recognizing that he is the instrument through which Christ will fully transform our lives.

As apprentices of St. Joseph, we humbly accept the challenge to love Our Lady as he did—with all honor and reverence. We have a special devotion to her under her glorious title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Protectress of the Unborn and Patroness of the Americas. We will endeavor also to honor all women as reflections of Our Lady, the masterpiece of God’s creation, so as to see all women as the “Flowers of Christendom”.

Finally, it is imperative that we see our household brotherhood as the manifestation of our individual journeys towards personal holiness.

At this moment, and every moment afterward, let this covenant be the commitment of the Apprentices of St. Joseph, that we may follow perfectly the command of our Most Holy Mother Church . . .

ITE AD JOSEPH.

Now what? We had experienced a slight subconscious panic when we finished the first covenant and realized we would actually have to do other things too. Having to do a complete rewrite was merely postponing the inevitable - now, the time had finally come. All the banal, boring aspects of having a real household swiftly descended upon three unsuspecting idealists. Apparently, starting a new household would require more accompanying paraphernalia than releasing the latest Disney movie. We were told we would need a household Lord’s Day, a household wing, a household common room, a household advisor, a household banner, household tee-shirts, (we are still working on those last three) a weekly household business meeting, household commitments, and, finally, a ceremony where we officially initiated ourselves (?). Surprisingly, no one recommended a household therapist, a household chia pet, or a household mime, but I suppose that in recent years they’ve had to reduce the requirements to the bare essentials.

Up to this point, everything was always “household” for us, anyway. We hung out together so much that everything we did was a household function. With an overall membership of three, any two of us constituted a “quorum”, which was enough to qualify whatever we were doing as a household event. Generally, this meant meals, hanging out, and, sadly, little else, but it was still fun to say we were doing things “as a household”. It was only fun because it wasn’t true. Now that the covenant was finally written and we had all these actual household things to worry about, it wasn’t as enjoyable anymore.

I guess it had never occurred to me that when the Knights of the Holy Queen first got together for a Lord’s Day, the schedule didn’t drop out of the sky or materialize on the table next to a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread. Given my anti-household mentality, I’m not even sure I had ever been to any Lord’s Days celebrations, so trying to write one was definitely strange. Stranger still was coming up with an initiation ceremony, because, oddly enough, none of us had ever been invited to one of those. Dark and mysterious rumors of the ancient initiation rites of the well-established households never fail to intrigue me, but the most original element we could invent for ourselves was a passing reference to Papa John’s (which, incidentally, continued to be the mainstay of our creative powers as we hashed all these things out).

By the end of the Spring 1998 semester, we were official enough to stand together at the Household Mass. Naturally there was no room to sit, and we had a nice view of the service from the left wall, in front of the St. Francis window. We weren’t expecting any special attention, but after Communion Father Pivonka unpredictably started talking about “new households”. Tomas, anticipating the worst, anxiously told me to stand up. I wasn’t terribly satisfied sitting on the edge of the heater, but as I didn’t think Father would mention us, it was only the sheer authority of the Paladin which prompted me to leave my seat. (Note that if he had been named, “Household Coordinator”, I might not have listened.) It was just as well that I did, because, sure enough, Father happily introduced Stella Mariae and the Apprentices of St. Joseph as the two new households for that semester. Suddenly, the entire Christ the King chapel (laughingly packed, as always, far beyond fire hazard regulations) was staring at us and clapping with vintage Steubenville enthusiasm.

It was a formative moment for us, I think. For one, being totally embarrassed is always a deep bonding experience if anyone happens to be in it with you. But on a deeper level, the official recognition somehow brought our household from being merely an idea among the three of us to the status of a public reality. It’s almost as if we felt the first germs of responsibility for our household as an entity that had to be more than just our mutual friendship. Of course, all this happened just in time for the semester to end and a lengthy summer vacation to separate us for months.