 So thank you all for being with us this evening. My name is Jessica Colligan, and I'm happy to welcome you on behalf of Fairfield's Alumni Relations Office. With me are Father Jerry Blaschek, who is our alumni chaplain and special assistant to the president, and Father Keith Mascoitz, who is a member of Fairfield's class of 2004, and he returned to campus this past July as our director of campus ministry and a university chaplain. Now, before we kick things off, just a couple of reminders. First, I ask that you please keep your microphones muted just to minimize any distractions. And second, I encourage you to use speaker view rather than gallery view in Zoom, just to keep the focus of your screen on Father Jerry and Father Mascoitz. And finally, we encourage you to use the chat feature in Zoom. If you have any questions, and we'll do our best to get to all of them in the time allotted. And now I will turn things over to Father Jerry to get us started. Thanks very much, Jess. And I see many faces, many familiar faces, of our friends and members of our larger community and of our alumni community. Thank you all for joining us for this opportunity to get to know a little bit better, our own Keith Mascoitz. As you know, this series began back in 2020 as part of the alumni offices series on spirituality. One of the aspects that we thought would be a great way to have an entree into Ignatian spirituality would be through opportunities to hear from Jesuits about their own personal journeys. Ignatian spirituality is not a theory, it's a practice, it's a way of life, it's a way of the heart, it's a way of involvement with other people. And so no better way in my mind to come to know better what is at the essence of Ignatian spirituality than to get acquainted with somebody who's been living it. And our interviewee this evening has been living it for a good number of years, but he first encountered Ignatian spirituality as it was being lived. Some 20 years ago, when a young boy from Long Island came up in the year 2000 to join the freshman class at Fairfield University. Keith, how in the world did you find Fairfield or how did Fairfield find you? And what was it like when you stepped foot on our campus for the first time? Well, thanks, Jerry. Good to be with you. Good to be with all of you. I'm looking at the list here. There's a few of my classmates here and a few Jesuits I've lived with over the years. And good to be with all of you. One thing I didn't arrive in the summer of 2000, actually I was a transfer student. Oh, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. No, that's all right. So I actually, I grew up on Long Island and I went to public school and I was a theater major. I thought I wanted to go into theater. So I was a member of the freshman class at Emerson College up in Boston. And I was there for one semester when I realized that my life was not gonna be all cast parties and curtain calls essentially in jazz hands. So I remember this vividly, my father drove me back from Christmas break all the way back up to Boston. I had a great address, 100 Beacon Street. It was a dorm at the time. And he dropped me off. I called my mother as my dad was on the way home. And I said, have dad call me when he gets home. I don't wanna be here anymore. Exquisite timing, Keith. I bet your father loved that. I don't know, I couldn't like screw up the courage in the car to tell him that I wanted to transfer. So I did one year at Emerson, but I knew I was going after one semester. So I remember thinking, I remember using Google for one of the first times and I typed in Catholic college and closer to home basically. Fairfield came up. I didn't even know what a Jesuit was. I had never heard of the Jesuits. Wow, wow. I moved out of the dorm at Emerson on May 1st, 2000. Came straight to Fairfield and I took a tour with all of my stuff in the car. I was just recounting with my staff today because we had a holiday party in Bellarmine. The admissions was up there at Bellarmine. So the tour started in that kind of great room. And it made a large impression on me, certainly. And we took a walk around and my father turned to me. My father doesn't say a lot, but he said to me, I can see you here. Wow, wow. Yeah, that meant something to me, certainly. It's astounding sometimes. We were talking about this at home a few nights ago. I was recounting how occasionally my mother would say something that would be like a stunningly clear understanding of who her son was. And it's amazing when our parents reflect that back to us, your father could see it. Yes, and I think it meant more because my father's German, like born in Germany, German. So he doesn't say too much to begin with. He's very, he's rather stoic. So when he does say things, I listen. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. So I arrived. And did you very quickly discover that your father's intuition was correct that there was a deep fit here somehow? Yeah, it wasn't right away. I mean, I arrived, Labor Day weekend has always been moving weekend. So what is that, September 4th or so? I was here about a week and I still wasn't, I wasn't sure, frankly. You know, I went to class and my roommate was also a transfer student from Loyola Maramount out in LA. And, but his girlfriend was on the volleyball team. So he kind of had his people. And I didn't have my people, right, right from the beginning, but I arrived literally like a week before 9-11. And I have vivid memories of that day being on campus so close to the city. But what I remember most was, I remember going to lunch in the dining room and there were, you know, these little paper tents showed up on the table and it said, there'll be a mass outside of Egan Chapel this afternoon, all are welcome. And we sat on the hill just down the road from Bellarmine. And it seemed like everybody was there. The skies were quiet. Jesuit community was there, probably 30 men at the time. And that was the moment I knew I belonged. I was like, if this is the type of community that this is what they do in a moment of crisis and in a moment of import, this is where I want to be. And it was like very clear to me right in that moment. Wow, Keith. Have you, obviously you've reflected on that since. What was your youthful instinct? What did you pick up about this community such that it would gather at that moment with you, Kirst? You know, in the years since I've done a lot of work, you know, I did like a license in theology and in ritual studies, essentially, you know. I think for me, it's this innate sense that like humans are ritual animals, ritual beings, we need ritual. And, you know, it's why there's teddy bears on the side of the road, where someone has gotten into a cataclysmic car accident, you know, and why, you know, families go to the lake for certain holidays, right? There's like, there are rituals that we need just to be human. And I think like that was the moment for me. I look back at it now and said like, that was where my love for ritual was really nourished. And I thought, this is a place for me that I want to be. Well, this is maybe jumping far, far ahead then. So what do you do with that now? You know, now you are not the recipient, but you know, you're not just a beneficiary of some community and some community leaders who understood the importance of ritual. But now that you're back, we will go back to your student days too, but this is too rich a possibility here that I can't resist mining. Now that you're back on campus, you saw a need for ritual immediately after 9-11. What's your sense with this generation of students and the times in which we live? What about the role of ritual now? What is ritual responding to? And what must ritual somehow, what must it do for people who live in the circumstances, especially of our students? COVID, racial tension, whatever, how do you see it in the role of ritual? And what do you do in campus ministry? Yeah, I would say, you know, it's a human need for ritual. So I wouldn't say it's actually moved too much in terms of what the need is. I would say we are less familiar with like the old rituals that we have come to depend on. You know, I've been to some weddings now, people who, you know, they want their friends to marry them. Those weddings are usually very short because, you know, people don't always know how to build ritual, right? We don't want to lean into old rituals because they think they might be stodgy or old or too traditional or whatever, but we crave ritual. You know, I just did a funeral the other day and, you know, it was very clear that deceased didn't, he left wishes. He did not want, he didn't want prayers, you know, like he didn't want them, but the family needed them, you know? And especially in the death, those prayers are not for the deceased, they're for everybody else, you know? And so like we need something to lean into, something to hold on to. And I think for young people today, you know, we've lost so much in the last few years. So like we need these types of things, you know? And they need to be rich. I think I wrote, my thesis was on basically like, you know, impoverished and bifurcated rituals that we've made them, in some ways we've made them less than they should be. And shame on us because we, people starved to death, frankly. And if we just gave people kind of what they're, especially the church's rituals are, we could nourish people pretty well. So that's obviously a big part of what you see in your role now as director of campus ministry, making available the extraordinary richness of our ritual history and tradition, I guess, right? Absolutely, yeah. You know, I think some people say like, well, kids don't want to go to Mass, but we were just talking today in the community, you know, there's this freshman who, he told me the other day, we're about to change the Mass schedule on campus that, Jim Fitz today told me the 1210 Mass has been a 1210 daily Mass since he was a student in the 60s when it was in Loyola Chapel. And the class schedule has certainly changed since then, but the Mass schedule has not changed to kind of go with it. So we're gonna change it from 1210 to 1230 because we've got students who are walking in at 1220 because they get out of class at 1215. Anyway, I said to this kid the other day, student, we're gonna change the Mass schedule. I see you walking in late and he said, oh, I don't care. And I thought, oh, I thought you'd care. And he said, no, I changed my mind. I'm not taking any classes between 11 and two. So I can make sure that I get to daily Mass. Wow, wow. So it's, there's a false narrative that says like, young people are not interested in these things. Like young people are craving these things. Wow, wow. I think sometimes it's a product of an older generation that we don't wanna give it to them for some reason. Keith, this is a good time maybe for a commercial because you've already let us know that there's gonna be some changes not only in the midday calendar, but you're thinking of doing something in the evenings, right, for our students. So does this correspond to what you've been discussing, the sense you feel that our students have an interest and a renewed capacity for a ritual that the church has to offer? Yes, and it's also tied into vocation work, frankly. You know, I think Jesuits get vocations at institutions that have robust sacramental life because they allow young men to see priests being priests. So we're gonna start offering Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, something between eight and nine each night, Tuesdays and Thursdays confession from 8.30 and Mass at 8.30. And then on Wednesdays, we'll do an hour of adoration with confession stirring. Just again, to give students a place to go, a place to plug in and to drive them, you know, to the real spiritual home of the campus, to the chapel. It's very exciting, Keith, and very, very hopeful. So let's jump back 20 years. So it was the experience of being together in a ritual setting, specifically responding to the tragedy of 9-11 that you felt that you had a connection, that this was a place where you were in communion with other people. What else about the university or your experience touched your heart and made you say, this is not only that this is a home for me, but it gave you values and orientations that you would clearly take and make your own in the years afterwards. Yeah, and that really can be localized, I would say in two very specific people, one of whom was on the call tonight, maybe a week after 9-11. I was at the evening mass, it was late evening, I can't remember what time, but, you know, this woman came over and she said, do you have any questions about campus ministry? And it was Carolyn Rezygous. I should have guessed. Yeah, then I said, yeah, how do you become one of those Eucharistic ministers? And I had never thought that I was interested in that, but I had been an altar server all growing up when I was a kid and it was seemed to be like the next obvious thing, which that gets into a much larger story about who I understand God to be. God is, I think about this all the time, God is the next obvious thing. But I said to her, how do you become a Eucharistic minister? And she said, what year are you? And I said, I'm a sophomore. And she said, good, I have space for you. Come see me in my office tomorrow. And that semester I started training and I was commissioned as a Eucharistic minister and I served in that ministry for the next three years. And I served as a leader of that ministry when I was a senior. So that became, the chapel was like a home for me. You know, it was just, it was the place I spent a lot of time, a place where I felt I learned a lot about my faith. It was, I want to say it was a safe space, but it was a nurturing space, you know, very much so for me. The other person was Terry Devano, a Jesuit who came when I was a senior. I was like a junior. I think I helped interview him when I was a junior. And he came senior year. He was great. He said to me, you know, when I was a senior, he said, you should think about like being a Jesuit. And I was dating somebody at the time. And I thought, no, I think I'm all right. He goes, we're having a day of prayer down at the swamp house, the old Jesuit house. And I said, all right, maybe I'll go to a day of prayer. That's, that seems okay. So I told my girlfriend at the time, and she said, you're not going to that. And I said, well, I did not go to that, but. Oh, so you didn't go? I did not, but that invitation. And I think BC has done research on this that like, unless a man is asked by multiple people multiple times, you know, would you consider being a priest or a Jesuit? You know, but that invitation stuck, you know? So, you know, have you ever thought about this? You should think about this. I eventually, I worked for Terry at the University of Scranton. He was the director of campus ministry and I was working in campus ministry before I entered the Jesuits. And when I got there, he stopped saying, you should think about this. And he started saying, what are you waiting for? And he said it to give me great, he did give me great freedom, but he was just like, this is the next obvious thing, you know? And so I entered, you know, I worked for him for two years and then I entered the Jesuits in 2008. Okay, we'll get back to your vocation story, but you mentioned a name that comes up almost every time we have a Jesuit talk about his journey here. And that name is Carol and Rezykus. There's something about the way Carol and related to students that in my brief encounter with her and my observation and my conversations with alumni and alumni, Caroline had a genius in touching young lives. What, and I'm glad you're, I hope you're listening carefully, Caroline, but what was it? What was, what's Caroline's gift? Caroline is one of the best listeners that I know. So you could just go in there and talk. And she asked very probing questions, always appropriate of course, but she was interested, you know? So she expressed interest, you know? And Katie Burns is also on the call. Katie sees a lot of students as well. She's a colleague of mine in campus ministry. Katie sees a lot of students and it's because she asks a lot of good questions, you know? And students are drawn to that. And it's questions, they're not questions that are vacuous, they're questions about people's real life and people's real faith, you know? And to be able to go someplace to ask and answer those questions or just to sit in the complexity is also like that. I was totally interested in that. I found that a good model for my own ministry, you know, leaving Fairfield, because I basically started working in campus ministry upon graduation. Yeah. Before I ask you to pursue that line of narrative, you said something that I can't let go. You said that you often ask yourself who God is and the way you express your answer is, quote, the next obvious thing. Can you say more about that? I wrote a piece in a book called, it was a book that came out before the Senate on youth a few years ago. And I forget the name of the book exactly, but it was something like vocation in their own words or something like that. And I wrote a very brief piece on it and I called it the quiet obviousness of God because it always seems to me that like, the next obvious thing is where God is like calling me. I don't trust, if I were to, if they were to be like a thunderclap and a lightning bolt, I would not trust it because my experience- You are your German father's son, I must say. But in my experience, it has been God kind of at the end of the hallway going like this, very gentle just saying like, I'm over here and it's like natural and kind of right down the hall. It's, and I'm jumping away ahead, but like when you called me in October of last year and said, hey, I have permission from the provincial to talk to you about possibly coming here to be the next director of campus ministry, that was not a lightning bolt to me. That was, I've been doing this work a long time. Maybe this is the next obvious thing. It certainly was to me, Keith. And I'm glad it was to the provincial as well. But I can go back in my story and find all of those moments like this is the next obvious thing and God kind of the interwoven piece there for me. So God reveals God's self in the next obvious coherent move in your life. Yeah, it's always been linear for me. So the point that like, when I told, when I was ready to apply to the society, the vocation director said, what do your parents think? And I said, oh no, I haven't told them. And he said, okay, you have to tell them. I can't have you apply without telling your folks. So I called my parents and I said, what are you doing this weekend? And they said nothing. And I said, can I come home and buy you lunch? Which they thought was very strange. And we went to the Red Lobster, I'll remember, because if they were gonna yell, I wanted it to be in a public place. Right. And I said, staring across breadsticks or whatever, I said, I'm gonna apply to the Jesuits. And my mother, they were sitting across me. She hit my father and she said, I told you. And it was just like, it was obvious to them. You know, it was just kind of natural. So when you left Fairfield, what was your major by the way? I was a history and secondary ed, history major, secondary ed minor, American studies minor. My last semester, I did student teaching at West Rocks Middle School in Norwalk. Okay. So what was the next obvious thing after you, after commencement? So I was interested in doing post grad service, but my parents were not too keen on that. So I ended up applying to the Providence Alliance for Catholic teachers, which is through Providence College. It's a two-year master's program, but you live in an intentional community. You make a little bit of money that you pay back and you do a master's degree at the same time. So you're working full-time. I lived in an old convent with seven other volunteer teachers basically. So I applied to this program and I was gonna be a social studies teacher. But social studies in Catholic high schools in New England, that's the department where like the football coaches take up space and never retire. I hope we don't have any alumni or friends who are football coaches or retired athletes, but go right ahead, Keith. They alienate some more people. Go right ahead. So I graduated, I don't know, whatever day it was, Michael Chevalier might know here on the call, May 20th, maybe. The next day, this Irish Christian brother who was running the program called me and said, Hi Keith, I am sorry to tell you there are no social studies placements in any of the schools. So if I can't find a slot for you to teach, you can't do this program. And I thought, oh no, that's not good because this was my, I had gotten into that program in March. So like that was my whole plan. I had no other plan. So he called back a week later and he said, I don't have any social studies placements, but I know you have done a lot of campus ministry as a student. I have a director of campus ministry in a high school. Is this something you'd be interested in? He's recounted it to me later. We've stayed friends and he was at my ordination. He said, you didn't say yet, yes, out of desperation. You said, I'm really excited by that. Wow, yeah. He said, he said there's a lot of data in that answer. That's not, there was not desperation there. There was excitement and vocation. And so like I started working in a high school campus ministry six weeks after I graduated from Fairfield. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. What was it like? It was challenging. It was a diocesan school. So, you know, some limited resources. It was up in Springfield, Massachusetts. It had been a huge school of 3,300 students at one time. Wow. It was massive. It was down to about 800 when I was there, but still in the building for 3,300. We were swimming in space. But it was a challenging place in some ways. Campus ministry in general, 42 minute increments because the bell rings every 42 minutes. It was a challenge students had after school jobs. And I was like learning on my feet because I was 22 years old. I was very cocky, thought I knew everything, but yeah, it was a challenge, you know? One of the nice things about it is so Terry Devon, who I mentioned before, before he was a Jesuit, he was a diocesan priest of the diocese of Springfield. And so he knew all these people. And so anytime I got into a scrape or something, I needed advice. I called Terry and said, who do you know up here who does whatever? And he knew all these people. He really helped me out. What were the most important things you learned about yourself and you learned about campus ministry for teenagers from that period? Young people don't like change. So I was taking over from someone who had been there a while. We had some growing pains together, but students also respond. They responded to authenticity. That's something I have learned over time. I'll tell a brief story. When I worked at Holy Cross before I came to Fairfield and there was a Jesuit there who I loved. I loved all the men and there's a few of them on the call tonight. But we were giving a retreat and he pulled out his guitar and he put it around his head and he strummed. And I have written about this publicly on the web so I'm not embarrassed to say it, but he strummed this note and he said, I wrote this in 1980 and I thought, oh God, this is gonna be horrible. And I just like buried my head in my hands, because I'm thinking this doesn't speak to young people. What are you, this isn't gonna work. And when I looked up, the students were totally enraptured. And part of it was the atmosphere of being on retreat. That was definitely part of it. But the other part is he was being totally himself. And that was enough. It was totally, it was more than enough. Students were like, this is who this guy is and he's just giving us his authentic self. And that spoke to them much more than anything that I was trying to like dress up or what, impress or that. So that I have been taught that over and over and over that students just respond deeply to authenticity. I know some of the people who were on the call were at Bass, which I celebrated on Monday. And that's exactly what I ended up talking about. Where is real authority? Real authority is from authenticity. And people can smell it a mile away if you're trying to exercise power without authenticity. Wow, wow. Well, how long did you stay in that position, Paul? I was only there for two years. I had made a pact with the Dean of Students that we would stay five each. And I ditched after two because I was feeling the draw to work with older students. I had broken up with my girlfriend and I was thinking about the Jesuits, that invitation was, you know, you should think about this. And I was working with a lot of priests. There was no priests in the building. So I had to bring in men to celebrate mass and whatever. And I was just like, I think if I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking about the Jesuits. I think what I would want to do is work in a Jesuit apostolate to see if that's a good fit. So I applied, I applied three places, Fairfield, St. Joe's U and the University of Scranton. I came and interviewed at Fairfield and I interviewed at Scranton and I took the job with Terry Devano at Scranton. And I started there in 2006. And what kind of, what transition was that like? I mean, you had been in a high school and clearly you had had the experience of a Jesuit colleges and university and now into Scranton. So what was Scranton? Did it feel like a familiar setting for you or was it very different from what you expected and what you had experienced here? If anyone's ever seen the office, Scranton is just like that, frankly. I hated it there. For the first 75 or the first 90 days I lived there at Ford, it just rained. And I found the place so quirky and odd. And I'm a New Yorker, so I think I'm like cosmopolitan or whatever. And I just thought I was kind of too cool for school and I knew everything. And once I like embraced the place that I was like, this place is quirky and I'm just going to like go to a place that advertises itself as the world's second best wings. Because that's what they have on the side. I mean, you're from the area, you know, it's like a quirky, quirky place, but- Oh, it is quirky. Quirky, but the people were so good. And I have great affection. I actually have great affection for Springfield where I lived for two years and Scranton where I lived for two years because I really feel like in both of those places I put down roots. I'm like Godfather to people's children in those places. I baptize their kids in those places. I have great affinity for the people, the culture and the work and the apostolates of those places. And I feel like I really got invested in those places. So did you apply to the society from Scranton then, Keith? I did. So I did two years at Scranton and then I joined the society in 2008. All right, so how about Novichy? So what will you allow yourself to say about your Novichy experience? I like- Everybody knows that Novichy is, not to have too much in-house talk, but Novichy are the first two years of this long formation of a young Jesuit. And it involves various experiments that St. Ignatius set up that would be both an opportunity to verify whether a young person was indeed called to the society and at the same time to form the young people who came to the society. And all the experiments replicated different experiences of the early Jesuits as they were coming to be and as they were discovering what it would mean for them to be a new religious family in the church. But all these experiments are helping both to form and to evaluate a young person. And the person's mind and also in the society. So during the Novichy, it's a very intense time filled with a great deal of discovery, of service, of building of community. Well, for you, Keith, what stood out? What would you be willing and like to share with us about that experience? I think for all Jesuits, it's a time of great blessing and great challenge. Yes, I think the greatest blessing I think of that time, in addition to the exercises, of course, and really solidifying my vocation to the society is my class. We entered 10, one man left six days in, but eight of us took vows and eight are ordained. And we are a very strong class together. I'm in contact with most of those guys every day. It's one of the great, and I look on both sides of me, the class ahead and the class behind. I'm not quite sure I would have done as well if I hadn't been in the class I'm in. You know, as you said, there were all these experiments. I worked in a kindergarten classroom, which I loved, and I was also terribly suited for, not suited for because I laugh, I'm an easy laugh. So I laughed at everything. And in a kindergarten classroom, everything is teachable. So I remember at least five girls, they turned to each other and one said to another, your voice is funny. And I just busted out laughing. And the teacher, she sent me out of the room. And she said, afterwards she said, you can't do that to me. I have to teach them, you can't do that. And it happened multiple times that she sent me up. I was a hospital chaplain in a big hospital up in Syracuse, where I saw everything from gunshot victims to tractor accidents, frankly. I was an orderly into cancer hospice, that was very difficult work, that was very hard. I worked at Georgetown in campus ministry for a semester, that was what we would call the long experiment. And then different, we would say low and humble works. So just pitching it around the house and doing whatever. At the conclusion of the two years of novitiate, Jesuits pronounced their first vows, which are perpetual vows. You felt based on the experiments and on your long, on your spiritual direction and on the long retreat, the full exercises of St. Ignatius. You're here and your history bears witness to the fact that you felt ready to make that move, to consecrate your life in this way to God's service and God's people. Yes, I mean, to use a hackneyed phrase at this point in our interview, it was the next obvious thing. And like the vows say like, with God's grace, and that's my definition of grace in general is like, the things I desperately want that I can't make or get from myself, like God is gonna have to give me some of these things. So like the only way to live poverty, chastity, and obedience is with God's grace. This is the only way to do it. I'm gonna do something different than we've done in our past interviews, Keith. I think you've said so many important things and I think you've touched on so many deep experiences. But I think I'd just like to stop for a second before we go any further or give people the opportunity to ask for any clarification or to ask any questions of Keith at this stage. Jess, do you have access to questions? Yeah, so it looks like we did have one question asking how you feel about Zoom rituals. And I'm not sure if that mass over Zoom perhaps is what he meant, but just in this time, being able to do or not do things based on your caution in the pandemic and age and all of that. Yeah, thanks, Jess. And thanks for the question, Harry. Yeah, Zoom rituals, there's a whole manuscript out there from Teresa Berger who teaches at Yale Diminity School or Yale, Yale Diminity School, I'm pretty sure. She, it's called at, the at sign, at worship. And it's on digital worship. It's a fascinating manuscript. I'll speak from the Catholic perspective, like the liturgical life of Catholics is a corporeal experience and it demands an in-person, an in-person experience. So can you celebrate the Eucharist through Zoom? I would say you really can't. You can celebrate it, you can witness it and you can unite yourself to the worshiping body, but can you celebrate in the way that the church intends and totally understands? Not really. Which is why Mass on TV for shut-ins is an alternative. It's become necessary in COVID because it's what we got, but getting back to in-person feels super important. And I found when we were able to start doing that, it was very emotional. And part of that is because it's a corporeal experience that we're meant to be together. Even like, it's odd, Jerry. I don't know if you have this experience. We all live in the same house for the most part. We're sharing meals and stuff. Both Jerry and I live in the residence halls, but we're still not shaking hands in the Jesuit community at the sign of peace, which I find very odd. And I go to the 1210 Mass soon to be 1230, a fair bit and everyone waves, right? So I see Joan Bolger on the call, we wave, because that's what we got right now. It's not great, it's what we have to do. But until we're back to like the full corporeal experience, it's a poor substitute, is the best way to answer it. Thanks, Keith. Keith, one of your colleagues from my campus ministry presents a wonderful question. What do you most love about your ministry in campus ministry? What do you most love about it? Yeah, I mean, watching self-discovery and watching people understand that they are beloved children of God is always very moving to me. What's hard I find about working in higher ed, I don't know if others on the call would agree, is that we're getting older. Every year we get older, students are always the same age. They're always 18 to 22 essentially, but we're getting older and older. But to watch the discovery that happens between 18 and 22, the pandemic has thrown that off a little bit. I usually say, first years arrive and they're four years out of the eighth grade. This year, first years are kind of four years out of the sixth grade we're finding. Like they're a little developmentally delayed, but watching the self-discovery that is appropriate to the age is I find just awesome. I've done a fair bit of spiritual direction and retreat work in my life as well, both with students and with adults, with other people. And some of my classmates will give me, they give me a hard time. I've spent multiple summers doing the same type of work. And they'll say, shouldn't you do something else? And I say, it's really selfish work in some ways because I get to see what God is up to. When you sit across and you understand this very well, Jerry, when you sit across from somebody in spiritual direction in retreat ministry, you get an insight on how God is working individually with an individual person. And that is more and more data about who God is for me. So like I am totally interested in that question all the time. And working with students and others is great experience and very exciting for me. Thank you, thank you, Keith. That was Katie, thanks for the question. Did you ask her in advance, did you set this up with Katie ahead of time? No, no. Keith, as all of you, I think all of you who are on this call know that Jesuit formation is very long. So I'm not gonna ask Keith to go through it stage by stage, location by location. But Keith, as you think back after Navishit, you were sent to do philosophy studies mixed up with more humanities and social studies. And then you were given an assignment, kind of an internship of what we call the Regency. And then you went to theology. I leave it to you to choose one or other of those periods to talk about or else a continuity through those periods that is important in understanding your and God's story. Yeah, I'll try and pull a thread through. You know, frankly I hated philosophy and I don't think that's an uncommon experience and especially in my generation of Jesuits. I think a lot of us were just, I think part of the issue is you do two years of Navishit and you are on fire as an apostle and you take these vows and the first thing they ask you to do is to put your butt in a chair and study. Right, yeah. And that is real challenge for men who wanna like change the world. I mean, essentially that's what happens. And you're being asked to study something that feels very esoteric and abstract and not important. One of the things that Loyola when I, Loyola, Chicago where I was sent was they said, find your question. And I didn't find that terribly helpful advice in the moment but it was helpful over time because find your question is the thread here because when I was sent to Holy Cross to do work in campus ministry, I tried to find, I wanted to enter that work and I wanted to get to know the people. And in getting to know the people, I had questions about like their experience that they were asking me but I was asking of them. And then I brought those questions to theology. And so by the time I got back to theology and then I realized that the philosophy study was gonna help me do the theology. That was a long-term lesson. Then I had a lot of questions, you know? Like again, I said, I study ritual studies and like, you know, in the West here there is an increasing amount of people who believe, who understand biologically that wheat is poison for their bodies. What does that mean for us as Catholics who like bread is our, bread is it? Like we are, we celebrate with wheat. So like, what is that gonna mean for us as a gathering body? We've gotta start wrestling with that question, you know? That is a real question, I think. It's a very Western question but like that's where I live and work. So like that's a question I'm thinking about and that is a question that is born of like walking with people and you know, people who come to the sacristy and say, I need a low gluten host, you know? Like these are, that's an interesting question to me, you know? Lots of questions I have about like gender, you know? Lots of questions, just sacramental questions. So again, pulling the thread through, I don't know if this answers your question totally but like what are the people's questions? How can I intersect with the people's questions and what are my questions that I bring to the people? Thank you, Keith. Keith, Terry Devon, I was said to you in the early years of your time at Fairfield you ought to think about being a Jesuit. What do you think now about being a Jesuit? Yeah, I'm gonna butcher this but you know, Stephen Sondheim just died a few weeks ago. He was a famous composer and Broadway legend and he had a song, Katie might actually know it but it was a song about marriage and it said, you know, you see your spouse and you love them and you hate them. And they said, and the answer is yes, you know? There's something true about all vocations in that way, you know, like they are challenging, they are deeply gratifying, they are everything, you know? And a student at Holy Cross asked me, did you always want to be a Jesuit? And I was very close with the student and he just entered the Jesuits in August actually and I said to him, very unguarded but I said, I'm still not sure I want to be a priest but I think God wants me to be a priest and the people want me to be a priest. And if that's true, then I want to do that. But like, because if a man says he wants to be a priest and the people don't want it, that's not gonna go so well. So like, it's not really, it's not that I'm unimportant in the equation but I'm not the most important part of that equation, you know? I don't know, again, I'm not sure that it totally answers your question but like we read in Deuteronomy, like it comes upon you the blessing and the curse and that is what this life is. It's a blessing and it's a curse because this life has given me insight. It has helped me to feel deeply. It has helped me look more broadly but if you're gonna feel deeply and look more broadly you're gonna hurt more and you're gonna see more pain and like that's the cost of doing business if you're gonna be a Jesuit. And if I, I wouldn't want to go back, I wouldn't want to redo it and not do it but there is a cost to it as well. Keith, you know, Keith mentioned that he has this really extraordinary group of confrairs, the young Jesuits that he entered the society with and it's been to our great benefit in our community that they're so close that they come to visit Keith and they hang out in our house and they make our house all the richer and more joyful and louder and that's a delight. Keith, all of you in your time are aware that you entered an order that was vastly diminished. When I go out and visit our alumni and alumni and some of you who are on this call have said this to me, you know, father, when I was at Fairfield there were 70 Jesuits and there are fewer and you mentioned there were 30 Jesuits when you were here. What does it mean for you and your confrairs, your classmates to enter a society that at least numerically is surely diminished and there are no signs that that diminishment has reached its deepest trough. How do you all deal with that? I'll tell a brief story about Tom Regan actually. So Tom Regan, I'm sure many people on the call remember Tom, the longtime professor of philosophy. He left Fairfield to become the provincial of New England province and he was the provincial that admitted me. I have a long history with Tom. When I transferred to Fairfield he was an associate dean in arts and sciences and handled my transfer application, the credits. And then he was the provincial that admitted me and when I got to Loyola, Chicago he was the dean of philosophy. So I've kind of followed Tom along or he's followed me, I can't tell. But when we were novices, he came, it was his last year as provincial and he said something similar, he said, people are always asking about diminished numbers and he said, what I say to them is like the 50s and 60s were the aberration. We never had numbers like that before and we haven't had them since. Ignatius would start a work, he'd send two priests and a brother and then they'd get it going and then they'd kind of arranged to hand it off and then he'd send them to do something else. So like numbers have never, I'm not a numbers person and we have this conversation in campus ministry, like numbers themselves, these are not helpful benchmarks for us. But what I find really moving is like my eight classmates or seven classmates are solid guys and this is not a knock on Jesuits who have come before but like, we came in with experience with backgrounds that like, we're good. And I find with every generation, there is more experience and more diverse backgrounds of people coming in. And again, I'm coming from Holy Cross in Worcester and we sent one student into the society in the Midwest province which I wanted to get him for the East Coast but his mother would have murdered me, I think. But like when I look at him entering, I'm like, we're gonna be fine because like the next generation is, what is the Latin phrase? Spes grigis, the hope of the flock. Spes grigis, yeah, the hope of the flock. Yeah, like that, I have great hope when I look down, when I look to the next generation, I don't worry about numbers or, and we're gonna live the poverty we've prayed for and the poverty that we have vowed and but that doesn't scare me or I'm not worried about that. Keith, when you talk about this young man and his entering and the way you feel about him, that's the way that I and I think all of us feel about you. When we see you and what you bring back to your alma mater and what you bring to our community, what you bring to the church and to the society, we're not worried. The future of the society is in God's hands but humanly speaking, there's plenty of evidence that God knows what God is doing by bringing us the men that God has brought us. I'd like to open up the conversation to those of you who have been dying to ask Keith for clarification or who'd like to maybe challenge him or ask him for more insight, please. Just today, people field questions to you or are they please? Yeah, if anybody has anything, absolutely. Feel free to submit it in the chat. I will say as we're giving people a chance to type things in, Father Mack, as you know, I was a year ahead of you at Fairfield, so I was here on 9-11 and can absolutely echo what you said about that day. I remember being at that mass on that lawn and just looking around and thinking, my God, this is a community and this is what we need to have on Fairfield's campus and on campuses throughout the country and communities throughout the country and it really was, this was, I'm glad this is where I was on that day, for sure. I remember, I don't know if you probably do, Jess, I'm pretty sure it was the same year and Ellen would remember, of course, because it was her colleague, but Elizabeth Dreyer, she was a hostage situation in her classroom. Yeah, it was five or six months later. Yeah. Yes, that same year and I went straight to the chapel to offer a prayer because I didn't know what else to do. It was on CNN, it was a very scary afternoon and I had a friend in the classroom, but it was a moment again for me where I said, this is the type of place and this is the type of place I wanna be and it just drew me, certainly. Absolutely. Looks like everyone's either, everyone's being shy or perhaps you guys have already covered everything and everybody wanted to ask about, but this was fantastic. I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit more about you, Father Mack, and we love having you here on campus and we have, oh, we have somebody who's been attending Mass here humbly on waffles. Interesting, I'd love to hear about that. It was pancakes, but I told a brief story that I had this brunch with a few nuns, the apostles of the Sacred Heart and one of them I just noticed, one didn't use any syrup and the other used a little bit and I like dumped the bottle out when I have these things and I used it as an image of like, what is our commitment, right? Are we kind of a dipped, dunked or a soaked type of Christian, essentially? It was memorable, I guess, so. Really, it was nothing he told his mom about it. That's great. This is where the theater background still can come in handy, like someone asked me that not long ago, like, well, do you get to use it? I said, I just traded in drama of one kind for high drama of another. Yeah, but you don't ham it up. You're a beautiful celebrant, Keith. You let the liturgy and the ritual carry itself. And again, we're all very grateful for that. My son, Billy Fitzpatrick, transferred from Holy Cross, to Holy Cross from a large public university in the South. I don't get the, is the rest of the question? I know Billy Fitzpatrick well. I think he may have signed off already, Patricia, because Jim Hayes was on this call before. Billy was very involved in the chaplain's office at Holy Cross, and he was especially involved with the men's retreat. That became a thing that he was very involved with. So great to see you on here. Good to hear about Billy. Well, Jess, I think if there are no more questions or observations, I wanna thank Keith and say again that I'm not worried about numbers either. If God keeps sending us young Jesuits of the quality of Keith Makowitz. Thank you all for the support that you gave him when he was a student here. Caroline, I think especially of you, and I look at Ellen. You know, thank you, Ellen, for helping create the kind of community that fostered this man's journey into the mystery of God's service. Thank you all, and Jess, thank you, and Janet and all of my colleagues here in the alumni office for organizing this wonderful series. Yes, and thank you all so much for being here. Thank you, Father Jerry and Father Mack and Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy New Year. Everybody stay safe, stay healthy, and we will see you again in 2022.