My family group chat was celebrating our late patriarch’s 94th birthday. That’s my grandpa, my mom’s dad, Richard “Dick” Sander Sr.

A critical presence in my life, he passed in 1999, when I was 15 and just starting to get interesting. I was in the hospital room when it happened, got to say goodbye. That was a privilege. I remember — one of those weird details you remember — that the Yankees had just finished sweeping the Atlanta Braves in the World Series on TV, and they were piling on top of each other on the pitcher’s mound in celebration.

Anyway, my family was sharing some great pictures of Grandpa Dick in the group chat. Many I hadn’t seen. Like a pipsqueak shot from his boyhood along the Mississippi River — Mark Twain country.

Another, a family pic of Grandma and Grandpa and their seven adult children from an anniversary or a wedding in the late ’80s. My grandmother (blessedly still with us) is Italian, and, for whatever reason, that Mediterranean element along with the cut and reflective sheen of their suits and shoulder-padded blouses gave the tableau the feel of the family photos they found in the overrun palaces of the Assad family, who brutally ruled Syria for half a century. When I shared this thought with the group chat, my Uncle Gary’s response was, “You’re a sick man, Dan.”

A third pic, the most interesting to me, was of my grandfather as a young man, 19 or 20, in a cassock, outside the seminary where he studied to be a Catholic priest. I’d never seen him at this age and certainly not in vestments.

As I recall the family lore, his own parents, though devout, were not altogether thrilled with young Dick’s vocation. He was an only child, and they wanted him to start a family. That, in fact, was how things shook out. The story goes that the young seminarian was laid up in a hospital with some serious though survivable ailment, and his calling did not survive the tender care of the nurse assigned to his case.

That’s glib and probably not wholly fair, but that’s the story that went around the dinner table.

But he remained a pillar of every diocese he belonged to and marched his brood through the sacraments and twelve grades of Catholic education.

I was raised, as the saying goes, “culturally Catholic.” My father came from a family of Methodists. And while Grandpa Dick was a Knight of Columbus, my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, was a Freemason of some considerable rank. Ah, the American pageant! I ended up a sort of haphazard Christian. And while I dabbled in Evangelicalism as an impressionable youth, I went to more Roman rite Masses than anything else.

Over the past few years, I’ve been spending Sundays in my diocese in Virginia. Anyone who’s been to a Catholic Mass can see and feel the sense of — for lack of a better word — relief that comes over the congregation after taking Communion. The world becomes lighter.

Because I want in on that, I’ve been contemplating making the cultural Catholic thing legit, but I take the metaphysics seriously enough that I’m still not quite there. Perhaps what calls to me most, and the reason I couldn’t make it as an Evangelical, is the relative emphasis on deed over word. The Catholic Church seems to understand that an all-encompassing, charismatic personal relationship with God is not on the table for every Christian every second of every day. But what you can do is go to the place. Say the words. Observe the forms. Do the ritual. Eat the cracker. The deed comes first. Sometimes, if you’re lucky and graced, the transcendent follows.

Incidentally, this is more or less my New Year’s resolution — to commit to the deed. Aristotle says virtue is not an act but a habit, and ain’t it the truth. As a dude and as a political observer, especially these days, you find yourself so often tempted to do a bit, to act strategically and inauthentically in the hopes of advancing your “true” aims, which are honorable even if ulterior. But if you’re not careful, the part you’re playing becomes the person you are.

Grandpa Dick also had an Aristotelian saying he was fond of: “Character is what you do when nobody is looking.” A good thing for me, and all of us, to remember as we head into the teeth of 2025.