A reflection on unexpected mission
John Sebastian serves as LMU's Senior Vice President for Mission & Chief Mission Officer. He is also Professor of English.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I often joke—probably to the chagrin of my co-workers—that I am spectacularly unqualified to be the chief mission officer of a major faith-based university, having been raised a bad Catholic. Sometimes I extend the joke further by revealing that although I never went to Mass on Sunday as a kid, we were often in a church on the weekend to witness some member of my large, extended, Irish and Italian immigrant family getting baptized, married, or buried.
The temperature got turned up on the lukewarm faith of my childhood when I decided to attend a Jesuit school as an undergraduate student. I chose the school for its location and academic programs, not because of its affiliation with the Jesuits or the Catholic Church, affiliations of which I was only dimly aware. But although I was a bad Catholic, I was an earnest, rule-following student, so when the orientation program directed me to attend the welcome Mass for new students, attend I did. I no longer remember the name of the presider at that Mass, but I recall clearly the profound sense of surprise I felt when it came time for the homily and, for the first time in my life, I experienced a priest speaking about faith in ways that seemed intended for 18-year-old me. Until then, I had always experienced liturgy as something designed for someone else, specifically the pious church-goers of my childhood parish, where the average age was about 137.
Captivated by the novelty of that first college Mass, I resolved to learn more, and soon I found myself accepting an invitation from a friend to join the choir despite not being sure when I was supposed to sit or stand or kneel. I was fascinated by the otherworldly elements of the liturgy: the ancient words of Scripture, the music, the ritual movements, the serene expressions of saints etched in glass staring down at me from the windows—they all converged to transport me to a world beyond my every day, a world suffused with beauty and mystery and transcendence.
That forgotten Jesuit who spoke to me as if God knew and loved me helped set me on path that eventually found me abandoning my plan to study political science in order to pursue a degree in medieval studies, my spiritual journey with the liturgy paralleling an intellectual sojourn with Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Julian of Norwich, and other figures from the past who imagined God in song and poetry and vision.
Many years later, I found myself sidetracked by a different Jesuit. This one invited me to consider becoming the chief mission officer of a different Jesuit school where I had been teaching medieval literature. “I am certain that you know,” I replied, “that I am not a Jesuit or a theologian or a campus minister and therefore not remotely qualified for the job.” (I left out the part about being raised a bad Catholic—no need to embarrass him or me.) He persisted, and I relented, figuring that any catastrophic consequences of my saying yes would be squarely blamed on him.
Today, I find myself continuing to struggle with an acute case of impostor syndrome, my inner bad Catholic still causing me to doubt. But what I have come to understand over time is that the God who loved me even when I was a bad Catholic is that God knows me better than I know myself and that I can’t dupe God no matter how hard I try. In his recent homily for All Saints Day, Pope Leo quoted a couple of lines from St. John Henry Newman, the great expositor of “the idea of a university,” who was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church that same day: “God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.” For reasons that remain mysterious to me, God threw some Jesuits in my way at key turning points to deliver that news that God was calling me to undertake a mission that I would never have imagined for myself.
I still have my doubts, but I am learning to appreciate that God has a sense of humor—and that the joke may be on me after all!