A friend of mine shares, “When you talk to God, you are praying.  When God talks to you, you are schizophrenic.”

If that’s the case, then I wish I were afflicted.

I help teach two sections of Confirmation classes for my parish.  And in the two year course, our teenagers are given many opportunities to attend retreats and religious conferences for youths.  A usual component of these events is Adoration.

As their teacher, I have been privy to many instances of God personally revealing Himself to my students.  It happens during Adoration, when in that silence before Him, they hear His voice or they come to realize His true presence.  Overwhelming, it is.  I have seen many keel over, unconscious.  Many uncontrollably weeping.  Others would laugh hysterically with joy.  Even the toughest nuts to crack… shattered.

The strangest part is this: I have only seen it happen to the teens.  I look around the room and all the adults–priests, religious brothers and sisters, seminarians, teachers, parents–remain to see to them.  My very first experience of this, I was discombobulated, running around picking kids up off the floor, making sure they were okay.  Amidst the chaos, I looked over at Him in the monstrance and, with much humility, I said, “You are so mean!”

A few of us teachers have processed this experience amongst ourselves: how come we don’t feel anything?  We were in the very same room, we were standing right next to them.  And inspired by Him, we have all come to agreement on the answer, which in His wisdom was in the form of a question.

Did we need to feel Him to know He was truly there?

All this reminiscing about the clergy who taught me got me thinking about all the other funny encounters I had with them while in school. We always saw them as superhuman because of their spirituality—compounded more so by their superhero costumes. But looking back, I realize they’re very much just like us: they like to enjoy themselves, too.

There was this Brother. The disciplinarian on campus. He walked around with a ruler and made certain all the girls’ skirts were not more than two inches above their knees. Collared shirts tucked in. Appropriate shoes. Clean shaven. Proper haircut. He received the nickname Brother Darth Vader because on top of the robe of his Order, he wore a thick black cloak with a hood. We’d make the distinct “Darth Vader breath” whenever he’d walk down the hallways to alert others of his arrival.

It was during this time of year—Lent—fifteen years ago. My buddies and I went to a dance. It was a Friday night. Of course, Brother Darth Vader was present, making sure there wasn’t any hanky-panky going on. And yes, he did bring the ruler and enforced the one-foot between guys and gals dancing rule.

After the dance, we made plans to meet up with some other friends at a diner a few miles across town from the school gym. We were loitering outside looking to hitch a ride with anyone heading that direction—when Brother Darth Vader walked by. Concerned about us loitering late into the evening, he offered us a ride. Not wanting to hassle with taking the bus, we accepted.

We all piled in to Brother’s jalopy hatchback. He was blasting Christian rock music on the radio. We sat in the car in silence, just looking at each other and thinking to ourselves how eerie the situation was, to be cruising down the main drag of the town on a Friday night with our buddies and a religious at the wheel, pumping Christian rock music into the evening air in a rickety, rusty hatchback.

We got to the diner and Brother came in with us; I guess he was hungry, too, and wanted to get a bite to eat. So we got a table with Brother Darth Vader. We all ordered cheeseburgers—when suddenly, Brother remembered that it was Lent and it was a Friday. We were to abstain from meat. He looked at his wrist watch and assured us that it wouldn’t be long before Friday would be over with.

Imagine walking into that particular diner at that particular moment. A bunch of high school boys sitting around a table with a Brother in a thick black cloak, all of them staring hungrily at their cheeseburgers getting cold before them, all of them watching the second-hands of their wristwatches, waiting for the exact stroke of midnight—at which they all received the go-ahead signal, all simultaneously lifting their burgers for one gigantic first bite.

Yesterday I attended the Religious Education Conference. It reminded me very much of those Comic Con events that come into town where we’d see fanatics show up in costumes—but for this it was habits and robes and Roman collars galore. There’s something so adorable about a group of nuns, all of them only four feet tall, sitting at a table eating cheeseburgers.

Anyways, I ran into the order of nuns who taught at my high school up North. I inquired about those Sisters who I had for classes.  They knew them well and shared with me some pictures.

“Sister X still teaches Geometry there,” one of them remarked. Sister X was a tiny thing, which made me think there was a height maximum to become a religious Sister (as there is one to play in the funhouse at McDonald’s). She used to stand on a wooden box when she’d teach from behind the podium. “Matter of fact,” the Sister added, “she still goes to all the football games.”

Ah, yes. That brought back a whole set of memories I had forgotten about. Sister X—otherwise known as the Nun with the Gun.

When I was in high school, I was required to join an extra-curricular activity. I chose to work for the football team as a statistician (which later turned into me writing recaps of the games for the local papers; the beginning of my writing career!). Sister X ran the scoreboard from inside the press box with me. And when a quarter would end, she would lean out of the window and fire a starter pistol to let the officials on the field know that time was up. That’s how she got that nickname.

And throughout my high school years, whenever we would hear that distinct beep from Sister’s control board that the time had run out, the four or five of us in the press box knew to cover our ears because it meant Sister was going to fire her gun. We were so conditioned to doing this that sometimes the fax machine would beep in a similar tone and we would all simultaneously cower. And sometimes at home, the microwave would beep and I’d suddenly flinch. It was bad enough that I was awkward in high school, but to be jumpy at the tone of someone’s wristwatch alarm—that made me seem like I was mentally imbalanced.

Thanks, Sister X.

Yesterday, I was having a chat with one of our parish priests. I had always noticed that behind his long black cassock, just below the armpits and connected to the waist, dangled some black twine. I took that opportunity to finally ask him what they symbolized.

“They’re for those formal occasions when I wear a sash. It’s so the sash doesn’t fall.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I thought they had some other meaning, like how Hasidic Jews have tzitzits on their garments.”

“Yes, that’s right. But no, these are purely functional.” He added, “You can order them from the catalogue with or without the strings.”

I probably should have moved on from there instead of being a smart-aleck.

“There’s a catalogue? Is it called L.L. Priest… J. Clergy… Father Eddie Bauer?”

I am going to leave the names and locations out because they are unimportant. This happened to me about ten years ago when I was working as an English teacher at a private all-boys Catholic high school. It was my first job out of college and was still wet behind the ears, learning the ropes of the profession, learning how to be responsible and take charge of a group of rowdy teenagers—when I myself was in my teens not more than two years before.

I was chaperoning my group on an outreach at an orphanage for children with severe mental and physical impairments. Before we left campus, our chaplain gave a talk to my class of knuckleheads. He told them these children we were visiting have a special place in the Lord’s heart: because they were born without the same mental capacities as us, they did not possess the same ability to commit conscious sin. To wit, these children—if baptized—would go straight to Heaven upon death. And because all souls were equal regardless of the physical or mental state of the body they inhabited, they would recall with full clarity everything that occurred to them during their life. If my students demonstrated compassion towards them, it would be remembered well in Heaven.

At the orphanage, they all unhesitatingly jumped in, not wincing at even the most physically disabled of the residents. They read to them, they fed them, they fluffed pillows and folded blankets, they did all they could to be of service. Though commendable in itself, it did not seem thoroughly genuine. It was like they were doing it only because they were prompted.  Or, to show off.

Then I noticed one of my students had separated from the larger group. He was attending to one orphan in a cot in an isolated ward. I decided to eavesdrop. Perhaps I could finally have a story to share with our chaplain about how only this one student demonstrated true Christian compassion with humility. Sure enough, he was having a casual conversation with his new friend as he spoon-fed him.  I felt warmth in my heart: I knew then what it meant to be a proud teacher.

When he was done, he wiped the orphan’s mouth.  He gave him a loving pat on the head.  He  looked over his shoulder but did not see me.  He leaned in closer and whispered to the child: “Pssst.” He pointed to his own face. “Remember me after you’re dead, okay?”

If it would not have cost me my job, I would have slapped him in the back of his head. Knuckleheads….