Last week, I went to Ohio to drop off my brother for his first year at Franciscan University. It was a striking experience for me on a couple of fronts. The first and most noticeable thing was visiting the school that had formed some very dear friends and a few of the most important mentors of my life. There were tiny details as well as core values on display there that were so familiar to me. I realized that, among people who did not attend Franciscan, an unusual amount of my formation comes from the spirituality and practices of this place.
There are lots of times and places where people will give you a sales pitch for their approach to the world. At a freshman orientation, the sales pitch aspect might be a little toned down, but there were still a lot of claims being made about how much this place will shape its students for the rest of their lives. It was a unique experience to hear these claims through the lens of my experience with particular graduates of this school. There is no place that is perfect. There is no school or rule of life that will keep out brokenness, let alone guarantee holiness. Franciscan is no exception. But there is something that has happened there that did form some of the people who had the most profound impact on my life. Not every graduate of Franciscan moves through the world like they do. But the way they move through the world was impacted and formed by what they learned there.
As I noticed more and more of these strangely familiar things, I started to look for commonalities between the two men, both graduates of this school, who have had the most dramatic impact on my growth as a person. The two are very different from each other, but they both are comfortable and confident with the specificities of who they are. They have accepted both their strengths and their weaknesses, and while they are always seeking to grow, they act like who they are is who God created them to be. They make the people around them feel seen and valued and, from that, empowered to be uniquely who they are. Said another way, these men both really do act like they are beloved sons of the Father. And from that foundation, they are able to treat every individual person they meet like a beloved child of the same Father. That might sound basic, but I’ve been around a lot of Catholics and not all of them know how to live this way. But the people who do live this way, who keep Christ at the center of their lives and ground their lives in the reality of being the beloved child — those are the people who change the world.
With all of this in mind, here are a few of my favorite things from my visit to Franciscan:
Learning about the ‘Households’ model. My brother told me an abbreviated version of the story of Fr. Michael Scanlan and his quest to shift Franciscan from one of the top party schools in the country to a truly Catholic university. This started with spending a considerable length of time with the students, simply observing. From this time, his conclusion was that the deepest problem was loneliness, and from that conclusion, the household model was born. Households at Franciscan are groups of men or women who have made shared commitments to prayer and community, shaped around a particular charism or spirituality. The idea is to bring students into deep relationship with each other, forming a core group of friends who will know you intimately and be there for you in a unique way for the rest of your life. What I have heard from some of my friends matches this claim about how much households change lives.
For someone on the outside, I love the insight of saying the first problem is loneliness. Rather than jumping first to the judgements on problematic behaviors, understanding that loneliness is a root cause opens up profound possibilities for change. And with that, the practicality of choosing a household that matches your unique spirituality encourages an understanding of the diversity of gifts and callings that exist within the Body of Christ.
Something the dean of humanities said in a panel. He brought up the idea that, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” and expounded on it. He said that if an idea has made a significant impact on the world, it is because it is insightful about something, no matter how many distortions it may also contain. He said that it is worth spending time understanding these ideas and that doing so will make you more patient and humble, wiser and ultimately more human.
The way that the staff consistently addressed the new students — it was relational and welcoming. While there was plenty of information covered, the speakers kept returning to the individual experience of the new students, offering advice and encouragement that felt rooted in a deep belief of their worth and dignity as well as a real understanding of what they needed to be told at the beginning of this new chapter.
Again, I want to be clear that I am no kind of expert on this school and am not speaking from any degree of authority. Though graduates of Franciscan have played an outsized role in my formation, those people are not avatars or one-dimensional outputs of this education. Franciscan is only one component of their own formation and how they came to be the people that they are. But it was beautiful to see a place that had formed them and to reflect on the specific characteristics of a community that would form the people who so deeply changed my life.
