Marquette is a pretty ambitious school. Everywhere we go, we can hear “Be the Difference!”, “Men and Women for and with Others”, and “Magis”, “the more”. They’re…not exactly subtle about it. And y’know, it’s kind of stressful, thinking about how you’re going to change the whole world, especially if you haven’t declared your major yet. (I HAVE declared my major by now, but you get my point.) The expectation sure seems high, and we see that in the gospel too. Jesus says: “Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these.” Yeah, no pressure.
This talk of “mission” always made me feel like getting a job and graduating wasn’t enough, that I needed to be saving the world too. So I tried doing that through Campus Ministry, being involved in Mass, leading retreats, going to adoration. Even then, it didn’t feel like I was living up to the standard in the gospel. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I’ve been involved in, but that still didn’t feel like I was “Being the Difference”. So I thought maybe I could find that in my career, I could be that award winning engineer solving all the world’s problems.
When I finally got an internship in the field I wanted, I didn’t exactly get the most glamorous work. It sure wasn’t solving world hunger. But whatever I was supposed to do, I did the best I could, just like my dad always taught me. Unlike most of my coworkers, I spent a lot of time working in the test building, and I got more familiar with the people working there because of it. The environment there… wasn’t religious. And no one there was looking to be converted. One day while we were working, one of them mentioned “You’re a good little Catholic boy, aren’t you?” Kind of unsure where this was going, I said “Yeah, I am.” He said, “Yeah, we can tell. You don’t act like most of the people here. You carry yourself differently.” Now seeing me on Ash Wednesday probably gave that away, but this still stood out to me. I wasn’t DOING anything religious, I was just doing my job. But for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who didn’t all share my faith, day in and day out. And yet, they could tell I was a Christian. The last time I left the facility, one of the test operators stopped me and said “You’re a good young man Matthew. I hope my daughter grows up to be like you.”
When I started my internship, I didn’t find the world changing work I was expecting. But I did see those Ignatian values in a different light. I still want to change the world, but seeing the impact my actions had on people made me realize that what I do isn’t as important as how I do it. Those Jesuit mottoes we hear around campus don’t demand that we outdo Jesus in curing disease and ending hunger (because I think we’d lose that contest). They’re less about being the best and more about being better. We might not all be Nobel peace prize winners, but whatever we do, if we do it with those Christian values in mind, we WILL be living out those Ignatian ideals, of “Magis”, “Men and Women for and with Others” and “Being the Difference”.
The next steps are ours. Guided by our Ignatian values, it’s up to us to discern where God is calling us, to seek “Magis”, to be better. Wherever we go and whatever we do, let’s “Be the Difference”.
