Screen Time, Take 11: A.M.D.G.
The first time I ever saw someone answer a cell phone in a movie theater was in the middle of a midnight screening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ. A blood-drenched Jim Caviezel was being whipped when I heard “Hello? Yeah, what’s good? I’m in the movie.” My stomach started to bounce as I tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a laugh. My friend Jeremy elbowed me to either egg me on or stop me, knowing the laughter would catch on with the rest of our group: ten other Saint Ignatius High School students who chose to go on an “Urban Immersion” retreat our senior year.
I saw Mr. Grady’s tear-stained face turn in the darkness. He was sitting a row in front of us, and he appeared to be livid. He let out a sharp “shhh!” then looked over to let us know he’d do far worse if we did anything further to disrupt his viewing experience. Disciplinary actions would be taken if we giggled again. Our trip would be cut short. A teacher threatening to send us all home to our parents that week, however, would have been welcomed.
Most Ignatius students went on “Kairos” retreats (Greek: “God’s Time”) that featured three days of camping and praying, followed by a “witness” portion where students arrived back on campus to share, at the center of St. Mary’s chapel, what they’d learned during their period of reflection. Typically, they said “I love you, Dad!” while fighting back tears before running back to their pews. They also wrote letters about their newfound or newly confirmed love of Jesus Christ. I received one of these letters from my best friend who was a year ahead of me. His words moved and excited me. I anticipated my trip all year.
The students in the movie theater with me that night, however, had all signed up for a retreat in which we spent the week living as if on the streets of inner-city Cleveland. The Urban Immersion retreat was four days of sleeping in a church basement, living off the equivalent of food stamps (about $5 a day for groups of four), and eating the rest of our meals at shelters where we also volunteered our time. There was also a “scared straight” period where we sat in a circle of folding chairs at the 2100 men’s shelter my friend Luke’s dad ran and listened to grown men scream about how “crack does not discriminate!”
Also, we got to see The Passion of The Christ opening night.
Perhaps you read about the record-setting earnings this movie made the week it premiered. The first $125 million was thanks to big groups like ours attending. Also thanks to the guy who had to answer his phone while the Romans killed Christ. I’m not sure how we as mock-poor kids on our immersion trip were supposed to be able to afford the movie ourselves in keeping with the rules, but the timing seemed right, so our teachers took us.
We saw the movie at the Tower City Cinemas in downtown Cleveland, and we all caught a glimpse of the shuttered food court as we walked through. I found it strange whenever I went to that theater at night and saw the closed mall, the fountains still, the Panda Express covered by a metal gate. In the daytime, I would often walk the length of the Carnegie (apparently called, though I never heard anyone say this, the Hope Memorial) Bridge and wander the mall by myself until I got tired and ate a “snack” of two roast beef sandwiches and a Jamocha shake from Arby’s two hours before dinnertime at home. Occasionally, if I could time it right, I’d go see a movie there. This became a routine for me because the year I entered Saint Ignatius High School, my family moved back into the city. My choice to attend the Urban Immersion retreat was so I could see a different side of my neighborhood, not strictly the used bookstore, the cafe that showed movies, and the mall across the bridge.
For several of the suburbanite students who commuted from mansions in Westlake and Shaker Heights, seeing anything downtown besides our school and Cleveland’s three sports arenas was a novelty. Certainly, none of them had spent much time around the people living on the street in my neighborhood. I’m not judging them. Aside from my first job downtown cleaning a tenement building’s wood floors with Murphy (a Saint Ignatius grad!) Oil Soap, I also had lived a life sheltered from the realities of inequality.
Here’s what I’ll say for my high school and the Catholic Church in general: they do try to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Every Sunday night, a few kids, including several from our sister school Magnificat (always an incentive to attend), crammed into a van with coolers full of hot dogs and PB&Js, and delivered them around the city where we knew people were living on the streets. I’m still haunted by the couple who came out of the tall grass in The Flats whenever they heard the van approach. Ohio City (the West Side neighborhood of Cleveland where I lived) was known for the vast number of shelters and soup kitchens it had in the early 2000s. The school itself, planted in the middle of 30th street, offered tutoring, free food, and occasionally opened the gym when the weather was too cold to let people sleep outside without it bothering the school president’s conscience. The dream of the Jesuits was to offer free education and aid to poorer communities. Easier said than done. The laypeople working for the school and many of the students drove Lexuses. The Jesuit priests themselves had a private chef. I know because the other opportunity afforded me as a local resident was an after-school job assisting said chef and cleaning their kitchen every night. I don’t even think the priests did their own laundry.
By the time of the retreat, I already knew the more frightening aspects of living in a sketchy neighborhood. My dad had been mugged at gunpoint walking the block and half from our place to the priests’ house to see if I had finished working. We found a sawed-off shotgun in one of our trashcans. We were bombarded by hustlers with sob stories about their cars breaking down nearby and needing $50 which they asked for convincingly no matter how many times they had told us the same story before. Once, I stepped onto my porch and was immediately greeted by a grown man, his penis hanging out of the front of his jeans, staggering toward me on the sidewalk leading to my porch. When I was inside and had locked the door, I saw from the window that he was drunk and needed to pee. It was 2 PM.
The retreat showed me a softer side of Cleveland. I met people who simply wanted to survive another year. I met people who seemed unbothered by the rest of the world and read Stephen King novels all day under a pile of blankets inside the doorway of an abandoned building. I met people who wanted nothing more than a roof over their heads.
“We’re brainwashing you.” the young moderator on the trip with us told me one morning. He was an alumnus of the school and was in the midst of his own immersion experiment: living in a house on the school’s campus for a year and volunteering around the neighborhood. He was wearing a black baseball hat and staring at the sidewalk as if he were a famous actor who didn’t want to be recognized.
“Is that a good thing?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “whatever gets you guys to take this stuff seriously.”
Minutes after this interaction I was back talking to my friends about how Satan’s adult-looking baby in The Passion looked like local politician and current presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich.
“I want to know what was wrong with Judas’s lips!” one kid yelled.
Another kid was complaining about the score not matching what was happening on screen. “It was so boring,” he said. Only 12 hours had passed, and the movie’s spell had already been broken.
What makes a Jesuit boys’ school so entertaining is the irreverence in the face of certain damnation. There were adult authority figures, some imbued with the ability to forgive Mortal Sin, telling us we were going to Hell if we didn’t take our morality seriously. In response, we laughed and cracked jokes. We laughed so hard, in part, because the stakes were so high. If you could mock the Most Important Question, you could likely laugh off anything.
Humor was what opened me up to the idea that I didn’t share the values of the men teaching me to be a “good” person. Humor also taught me that I didn’t have to accept any of it.
The first time I heard shade thrown at the Theology department was during my freshman year when my favorite teacher sitting in a room in the fourth floor English department, in an entirely separate building from the Theology and History classrooms asked “what movie are they showing you over there this week?” It was true that for half the year, Theology teachers showed movies 40 minutes at a time to make important philosophical points. They screened The Matrix, Life is Beautiful (watched in tandem with our reading of Man’s Search for Meaning), and, my personal favorite The Shawshank Redemption which they showed to us in the summer before 9th grade to let us know what Jesuit school would resemble: something close to surviving solitary confinement. If you had music in your mind, you might make it out. I don’t doubt the efficacy of showing these movies to us to teach moral lessons. It was a better strategy than trying to force teenagers to read. I had never heard anyone mock the department, though, especially not another teacher.
To be clear, this scrutiny, at least of the lay teachers in the Theology department was justified. They fed us one-sided anti-intellectual drivel that had almost nothing to do with Catholic Dogma. Instead of learning about a biblical text, we spent hours listening to a guy tell us evolution was “just a theory,” that being gay was a choice, and that abortion was wrong in any instance (whatever your personal beliefs, understand that it’s kind of hard to hear both sides of that argument at an all-male school where the adult men were the authority on ethics). Then they showed us clips from Fox News of Terri Schiavo and told us the “correct” Christian response to the news.
One day, again in my freshman year when I was scared to question anything because of an inordinate fear that I could be thrown out of school at any moment, our Theology teacher pressed play on The Emperor’s Club (a 2002 Kevin Kline movie about a boy’s prep school that served in our teacher’s mind as some ethic antithesis to the more beloved (and frankly more entertaining) Dead Poets Society). A student in the back row raised his hand, and our teacher paused the movie. We sat in the dark room and rolled our eyes. Make this quick, buddy. We’ve got a movie to watch here!
“Jeff?” our teacher said, lifting his eyebrows.
“Yes, I was wondering about the prayer we read before class today,” Jeff said. He was a senior, a bit portly which was only noticeable because many kids did not bother buying new dress shirts every year. Once the stress of school forced you to eat your feelings four years in a row, you wound up with a gut putting pressure on your old shirts’ buttons. “It says in the prayer…” Jeff continued, “that Jesus descended into Hell. What’s that about?”
“Well,” our teacher said, looking excited to finally talk about religion instead of answering some weird kid’s question about the ethics of having sex with aliens should they ever land on Earth, “according to scripture, we know the gates of Heaven were closed for a time, so when Jesus died he descended into hell first to free other righteous souls…”
“Yeah, a quick follow-up on that,” Jeff said, sounding interested, “does anyone believe this shit?”
The cackles that erupted in the room nearly overwhelmed our teacher’s angry tirade. Jeff was sent to the Vice Principal’s office to await his judgment. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment you were allowed not only to question those teaching us about religion but you were allowed to reject the faith altogether.
From there, every argument began to collapse, mostly through funny moments:
A teacher tried to tell us IVF was wrong because “you have to jerk off into a cup. It’s not right.” One kid announced: “I’ve done weirder!” Guffaws. Cheers.
Another teacher claimed gay sex was always wrong because the sex itself was not ‘open to creating human life,’ to which a brave gay student volunteered “Oh, I’m open to it. I’ll keep trying and let you know if there’s a miracle.” Applause.
When a teacher said video games could be considered a sin if they distract you from work, someone, half-asleep in the front row, let out a loud “Ah, shut up!” that made us all giggle.
My fellow students weren’t playing the game, arguing with the teacher on his terms, using logic. They were dismissing the arguments flippantly, and no adult could reply unless they were funny themselves.
Let me back up.
When I was in 7th Grade I chose (me, not my parents or teachers or friends) to apply to a Jesuit high school known for its grueling academic demands and a football program that was often lauded as one of the best in the country. I was not Catholic and had attended a public school my whole life. I was so unaware of the Catholic religion that the first form I filled out at a summer program for potential students, I had to ask a teacher what the word “Parish” meant. I ended up writing down “Congregationalists?” in the blank space.
There was a steep learning curve.
I had decided to go to the school because it was a challenge. I wanted more from my academic career than Fairview Park could offer. My suspicions were vindicated when my family planned a trip for the last two weeks of 8th grade, so my teachers gave me the last month’s worth of homework ahead of time. I finished it in a single evening while watching all three Die Hard movies with my girlfriend. My old school was too easy. Saint Ignatius, on the other hand, prided itself on doling out a masochistic amount of homework every night. When you weren’t playing a sport or at a rehearsal for the school play, you better be rushing to get your work done if you ever want to sleep.
It worked. I became a person who could not enjoy doing nothing. Even now, I can’t watch more than two episodes of a TV show without feeling antsy about time passing me by that I’ll never get back. I certainly can’t find time to sit and think without wanting that thinking time to be productive in some way. It was around this time when my grandfather told me that no matter what I chose to do, I needed to be the “best” one. “If you’re going to be a bellhop, you better be the best bellhop.” The Jesuit school forced me to focus on time management to survive. I saw many kids get in trouble for not paying attention in class because they were doing homework for another class. What happened to the old days when kids passed notes or snuck dirty magazines into school?
Between my mom’s tearful plea one sick day in 4th grade to do something with myself, my grandfather’s insistence on being the best at something, and a school that demanded living up to a near-impossible workload, I was both overly prepared for adulthood and doomed to never feel good enough.
In Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering, a woman thinks about her husband’s subtle disappointment in middle age and how he blames the Jesuits.
Tom was taught by the Jesuits – which explains it all, he says. He is very clear-sighted about the world, and yet he questions himself, constantly. He pushes himself hard, and is rarely satisfied. He is completely selfish, in other words, but in the poshest possible way. I look at him, a big, sexy streak of misery, with his face stuck in a glass of obscure Scotch, as he traces the watermark of failure that runs through his life, that is there on every page.
Though the school aimed to create “Men For Others,” that is, selfless Catholic men who committed themselves to service ad maiorem dei gloriam (“For the glory of God”), what they created were people who tried in earnest, at least for a while, to be great. Great athletes, great students, great upstanding Catholics with great moral compasses. Not only did it feel like we had to be great, but we needed to excel in everything. I left the school feeling I needed to be near-perfect by any external standard. That’s a problem. Luck is in charge of external validation most of the time, but the subtle message, though Jesus Himself would have shunned it, was that material rewards would follow the hard work we’d done at that school. It was, after all, a preparatory high school, designed to send students to the best colleges so they could go on to get the best jobs. Unless you’re Henry David Thoreau, you probably don’t go to Harvard strictly for the education and not the diploma. You go because you want to get ahead. I went to Saint Ignatius to get ahead.
My problem isn’t that my school’s greatness-oriented academic program is fertile ground for making depressed middle-aged men (it is), but that the more I learned about Jesus, the more I saw that it was not possible to achieve the outward success the school wanted from us without bending the rules and values Catholic school tried to instill. I’m not talking about cheating on tests or stealing. I mean that to excel in America’s capitalist system, you can’t follow “What would Jesus do?” all the time. When you think of people who succeed in business or the arts or most especially in politics, does the word “meek” ever enter your mind? If it’s easier for “a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven” why are all of us trying ceaselessly to make money? Why aren’t the Jesuit priests themselves taking their Vow of Poverty more seriously?
I don’t want to rewrite the 95 Theses here. I’d spend more time writing about atheism on the internet if atheists on the internet were not the most annoying people on the planet. If you need someone to punch logical holes in religious texts, there’s no shortage of examples on Reddit, podcasts, and in comedy specials.
I’m writing here about my values and my own spiritual feelings that never seemed to conform to the person my old Theology department wanted me to be.
The last time I read Moby Dick, I came away feeling that much of Ishmael’s thoughts were about whether his knowledge of the Bible had any practical use out at sea with other men hunting whales, or was the Christian religion holding him back from being as good a sailor as he could be? The closest quote I could find was from Captain Peleg:
“Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers- it takes the shark out of ‘em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”
That might be the answer. You have to put some thoughts and spiritual practice aside if you’re going to go out and hunt whales. If you’re going to survive years among ruthless men. I held the two thoughts in my head through school and beyond. I needed to be humble, endlessly generous, and (as Saint Ignatius himself advised when he claimed “what seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical church so defines”) blindly faithful. I also needed to be a bold go-getter who takes what he wants, an outward success in whatever business I entered, and intellectually open to new ideas. For whatever reason, I wanted to understand the religion and be the best version of a Christian I could be, even if I’d never been baptized. Mulling these contradictions throughout my high school years did not help me achieve that goal.
They did eventually break us on that retreat. They lit a candle in the church basement on the last afternoon and read us letters from our parents about how much they loved us and after days of eating soup for breakfast and buttered noodles we made ourselves at night, it felt like hearing from our families while stationed abroad. We all wanted to be home. That final evening, rather than witnessing for our friends and family members, we gave each other wooden crosses made by lepers. The final Mass was led by Fr. Ben Jimenez, the coolest of the Ignatius priests, the one who spent time in jail for protesting the School of the Americas (a trip I was supposed to attend but my parents said “absolutely not”). Ben gipped my bicep and looked me in the eye. “Who did you see out there? Who did you see?” he asked over and over while I stuttered and tried to find the answer. I was sobbing. It was the Catholic version of the big scene from Good Will Hunting. I had seen myself in people crushed by poverty in my city. I saw Christ Himself in one man, shirtless, covered in burns, who lived in a wooden box by unused railroad tracks overgrown with weeds.
I saw The Light, then I went home, ate three sloppy joes, and immediately threw up.
Something happened during that binge and purge. I went from convert to skeptic again as soon as my blood sugar normalized. I was awakened to the fact, overnight it seemed, that empathy was not something a god bestows on you but something you, you sociopathic teenage shithead, needed to learn by truly seeing people yourself. Whatever struggle you’re dealing with, it’s not nearly as bad as the struggle of a schizophrenic man living in the doorway of a building on Detroit Ave in Cleveland.
Slowly, my one night of faith faded. I argued in my head that if all humans had worth there must be a soul inside each, and if there’s a soul, there’s probably an afterlife and a God and the whole shebang. A few weeks later, I was back in Theology class, where the teacher asked “What’s one thing science can’t explain?” to which my friend Michael said “this!” and slapped his hands together, twisted them, and jiggled his middle fingers back and forth to make it look like he had one long finger.
The spell was broken. Whatever hold Mel Gibson had over us, whatever fasting for a week did to my body and mind, it was no match for someone saying something stupidly funny in response to a self-important man saying something even stupider. I realized, over the next few years that I could believe all humans have worth without needing a religion. I have smart-ass kids to thank for that.
I’m happy I didn’t become a pure atheist overnight. Otherwise, I’d have a podcast where I argued with religious fanatics and I’d be an insufferable asshole (more of one than I already am, anyway). I wasn’t led away from Catholicism through logic. It certainly wasn’t my spiritual beliefs that got in the way of converting, but rather the values I saw held by grown Catholic men with very little empathy for poor people, women, and anyone living in a way that didn’t conform to the Fox News version of American family life. That would include everything from being queer to watching porn with your spouse. It wasn’t the rules and regulations that got me or the intellectually stultifying myopia. It was the lack of compassion those teachers had for people who were different. For dismissing them. For saying there was one way to think. Accepting others who don’t conform to everything you believe was sorta Jesus Christ’s whole thing.
Sadly, when I dismissed my inkling of a conversion, I dismissed all religion for a long while. I threw the baby out with the bathwater, and now I mourn the long stretches of my life I spent without meditation, counseling, or — you know — being able to look at a flower and feel awe. All because I felt one religion, one group of close-minded morons, was hypocritical and cruel.
I’m much happier living by my own rules and not fighting with idiots about who has the moral high ground. But sometimes, I think of Father Ben, his weary face, his eyes filled with the pain of entire continents, his mug shot, his months spent in jail for peaceful activism, and the attention he paid to the lowest among us. I see him seeing humanity in me, another spoiled private school kid who nevertheless deserved compassion. I see his eyes lit by candles in the chapel that night and wonder if I saw the face of God.