FOCUSed on the Light

Dallas – It’s the Sunday after New Year’s, and the closer we get to midnight the more college students are pouring into the Trinity ballroom at the enormous Hilton Anatole hotel. About 3,000 young people are here beginning the new year with prayer, fellowship, and some intensive learning. As to the learning, more than one participant has described it to me as “drinking from a fire hose.” But that doesn’t mean that anything in this conference is overdone. These students have come here with an insatiable thirst — understandably, given the desert their campuses can be for anyone wanting to know the good, the true, and the beautiful.

And so they pile into the ballroom, and fall to their knees.

Many of them left the room as the prayerful Eucharistic adoration hour was set to begin. Who could blame them after a long day? Except that one only had to peek outside the doors to see where they went: to a long line for confession (more than 1,000 were heard over the five days here). Once the participants were reconciled — reborn in God’s mercy and in hope — they were back in the ballroom giving thanks to the Lord, who gives them new life.

One Harvard student tells me that “relationship” is the word she would use to describe the whole gathering. The purpose is to send students back to campus with a zeal to share what they’ve learned and let people see how they’ve grown in faith and leadership. This is the Student Leadership Summit of FOCUS (the Fellowship of Catholic University Students), and it’s actually the smaller of the two year-starter conferences FOCUS holds in alternating years. Last January’s SEEK — “a gathering of college students on a journey” is the official pitch — brought 10,000 together in Nashville; next year FOCUS is expecting 15,000 in San Antonio.

The Student Leadership Summit is total immersion, sort of a boot camp for evangelization. These students are heading back to campuses where they know there is a need and a desire for people who will walk with others on a path to a deeper religious faith. They leave here with a toolbox for meeting these needs. In hour-and-a-half sessions, they learn and then teach one another methods for enhancing Bible study, such as Lectio Divina and Ignatian prayer. They learn to take time and guide discussions that are fruitful and bring people closer to the Word of God and one another. That relationship is a Trinitarian one, in that it involves the triune God, and it also involves friendship and fellowship as well as a desire to share what you’ve discovered. FOCUS works on a missionary model, believing that all Christians have an obligation to go out and teach the nations, as the great mandate in the Bible puts it. FOCUS has actual missionaries — college graduates who have this as their job (they raise the money for their own salaries through donations) — at a mix of secular and Catholic schools (113 in 36 states and D.C., which currently include Harvard, Columbia, and Benedictine College in Kansas). They aim to be real Christians on campus, making for a renewed kind of leadership in the world.

These students would not stand out in a crowd if it were not for the T-shirts some of them wear, bearing quotations from Pope Francis (one of them is; “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty, because it has been on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security”), and their radiant joy. When I embed myself with Group 101, a small working group of young women testing out some methods of meditation and contemplation for the first time, their welcome embodies the mission: To open doors to a real life of faith.

There’s nothing counterfeit here. In what the Catholic Church is calling a jubilee year of mercy, there is truth unvarnished and also the desire to “meet people where they are” and listen to their questions and their needs. Pope Francis describes the Church as a “field hospital,” and FOCUS is training interns and residents — some of whom are going to become surgeons if the growing ranks of priests and women religious whose vocations were inspired by FOCUS campus mission work is any indication.

“Bring everything to the Lord. Stay focused on the Lord,” Bishop John Quinn of Winona, Minn., urged the students. He does not emphasize the pun, but his comments highlight the mission all the same. “Know who you are. Let Jesus work through you in your humility.”

“Don’t be preoccupied with yourselves and things that won’t fulfill the human heart. Keep focused on Jesus.”

This is very much the name of the focus game — which is no game, but a matter of saving souls for eternity. The participants seek to know no identity but as a son or daughter of God, redeemed by the sacrifice Jesus made for them on the cross, and the promise of eternal life. They respect differences. They also know what joy their faith has brought them and how it has changed them and continues to change them. And so they stay close to God in the sacraments, and they serve, out of complete and utter love, students they don’t know and students who have been hostile to them in the past. They want to live an authentic faith that mimics the generosity that God Himself lavishes on those willing to receive Him — His forgiveness, His Commandments, His Providence.

This is all quite the contrast to the news headlines I’m reading. The survivors at Charlie Hebdo seem to think the assassin who killed their colleagues is still on the loose — that he is God. President Obama seems to think that gun laws will somehow eradicate evil. I simplify what they are saying, but so do they themselves. Perhaps it is because they have not met these young people or others like them. The kindling is being laid here for a creative fire that is going to warm hearts and give courage at a fearful time. Here in the Hilton Anatole, fear seems to have been surrendered. There’s something of a revolution of love here, a fire these students didn’t start but are going to keep going, ever brighter. With these leaders, expect more light and love in the world, even when the fire of faith and hope seems almost extinguished.