The bad guys can't get you anywhere.
When Ian and Kelly Lindquist attended Mass together on the first of May last year, they both knew it was likely Ian’s last. A young and energetic father just 35 years old, Ian was now in a wheelchair as his battle with leukemia neared its end. He would pass less than a week later.
As Kelly sat in one of the well-worn pews of St. Francis de Sales Church in Washington, D.C., the same parish where four of their seven children were baptized, the familiar feeling of sanctuary embraced her. “I wish we could stay here forever,” she whispered to her husband. “The bad guys can’t get us in here.”
This feeling is familiar to many Catholics. Inside the silence of an empty church there is a sense of being outside of time and space, uniting the believer with what is infinite and beautiful. This same feeling led to my own conversion nearly a decade ago, when I sat alone for the first time in the back of St. Joseph’s Church on Capitol Hill, whose cornerstone was set in 1868 as the nation was binding up its wounds.
Sporting a handsome façade of Pennsylvanian brownstone, St. Joseph’s is a short walk from the United States Capitol. Once inside, visitors are greeted by an arched ceiling featuring a deep blue sky blanketed with golden stars. The beauty of that church immediately arrested me — doing more to compel me towards Christ than any amount of deep reading or close instruction ever could. I left that sanctuary with my own cornerstone of faith firmly set.
That same year, I met Ian Lindquist through the Public Interest Fellowship, a unique program focused on meeting America’s moral and political challenges through a combination of professional work and academic study. Ian was only a handful of years older than me but had already built for himself a beautiful life grounded in faith. As a recent convert, I looked to him and admired the depth with which he approached the most important and difficult of questions. And as a former assistant headmaster with a background in classical education, Ian often had more to teach me than I did him.
We eventually traveled to the Holy Land together in the spring of 2016. Of all the sites we visited, the one that struck me most was the Basilica of the Agony. A Catholic church, the structure is situated on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, next to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed before his crucifixion. Like St. Joseph’s, the vaulted ceilings feature an evening sky ornamented with stars and iconography, a testimony to the night sky that overlooked Christ during his solemn night of prayer.
I saw Ian stay behind to pray while the rest of our group made its way toward the exit. Following his lead, I knelt beside him. I sensed that we both meditated on the prayer Jesus made in the garden just outside, 2,000 years before: “My Father, if it is not possible that this cup pass without my drinking it, your will be done.”
We could not have known that years later Ian would be making a similar prayer as he battled a rare and aggressive form of cancer. As a young husband, father, and educator, he had much to live for and much to offer. Intercessions and novenas were prayed in hopes that God would miraculously heal Ian of his sickness. But God had other plans, plans whose design Ian trusted completely by virtue of a faith whose cornerstone was firmly set long ago.
That is why, when Kelly told her husband that she wished they could stay inside the sanctuary of their church forever, where the bad guys couldn’t get them, Ian simply replied, “That’s the secret of Christianity; the bad guys can’t get you anywhere.”