The Fenwick Review would like to thank Peter Fay , formerly of the Holy Cross Religious Studies Department, for asking us to be one of the media groups on campus to publish this letter :
I have always lived for summer. Growing up, I couldn’t wait for the end of June to arrive, for with it came liberation from the exacting schedule of the school year. The rituals of freedom awaited me: warmer weather, days spent at the pool, trips to the beach, endless baseball games, dinner outside, later bedtimes, and, of course, the joy that comes with crafting and consuming the perfect smore. Autumn was the enemy: the return of structure and colder weather, the end of uninhibited fun, the grimaced awareness that life would soon sink back into greater restriction.
As I’ve gotten older, my love for summer has remained, but something else has changed. I no longer conceive of autumn as the enemy. In fact, I’ve grown to love autumn. I find the cooler weather a welcome relief from the heat; I love the fall foliage; and if I drank coffee, I’d like to think that I would thoroughly enjoy a pumpkin spice latte as much as anyone else does.
But the greatest reason I’ve grown to love autumn has nothing to do with these typical cultural markers. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that, for those of us who work in higher education, autumn means the start of something new.
College campuses are relatively quiet during the summer, but once the calendar flips to August, students slowly begin to trickle back onto campus. First-year students wonder what this new adventure will entail. Sophomores can’t wait to be reunited with friends who were total strangers a mere twelve months ago. Juniors excitedly plan for internships and semesters abroad. Seniors vow to savor every bit of their last ride. Whether they realize it or not, all students are wondering: whom and what will this new year bring? The class that changes my life? The mentor who sees in me promise that I don’t yet fully see in myself? The friends who will become my people? A new love? In August the campus brims with so much potential, teems with so much energy. If you don’t believe me, go for a walk around campus the week before classes start. Watch the sunset as the marching band’s drummers practice. The rest of the world might associate autumn with endings, but, on the contrary, the start of the new academic year is an invigorating rush of energy, of possibility, of new life.
I’ve been thinking about this paradox a lot the past few months, as this autumn in particular brings to my life even more newness than the fall usually does. For the first time in several years, I am not at the College of the Holy Cross. I have begun a new position in the Ethics Program at Villanova University. This change is incredibly bittersweet for me. It is sweet because it represents an exciting opportunity and the next step in my career, and I am happy to report that I am settling in very well at Villanova; it is bitter because I loved being at Holy Cross. For five of the past six years, I had the unbelievable privilege, honor, duty, and blessing to be able to teach what I love – Christian ethics – at Holy Cross. I offer this reflection to convey my gratitude and to offer some words of encouragement as the new academic year begins.
Mindful of St. Ignatius’s belief that ingratitude is the greatest sin, I start with an expression of my gratitude. I quickly realized during my first semester on campus that all of the love that the College engenders in its students and alumni is entirely well-deserved and more. Holy Cross is an incredibly special place. Especially deserving of my recognition are my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies, who always welcomed me as one of their own; the Department Chairs under whom I worked (i.e. Drs. William Reiser, S.J., Mary M. Doyle Roche, and Caroline Johnson Hodge), who entrusted me with covering the Department’s existing Ethics offerings and with designing my own seminars; Presidents Rev. Philip L. Boroughs, S.J. and Vincent D. Rougeau, who have led the College with excellence, especially during these challenging years in higher education, our nation, our Church, and our world; Provosts Margaret Freije, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Elliott Visconsi, who have ensured that Holy Cross is and remains a world-class institution for undergraduate education; countless other administrators and staff, without whom Holy Cross would grind to a halt; and Kathy Barrett, who, as Academic Administrative Coordinator for the Department of Religious Studies, saved my bacon time and again.
Equally deserving of my most sincere gratitude are my students. Teaching is at its core an expression of the type of love that the Christian tradition refers to as agape, the giving of the self to the other. As teachers we give ourselves to you, our students, and to our content in the hope that you too might discover in it the beauty, depth, and richness that we find in it. In that giving we encounter not only a more educated student body but, in Christian terms, God’s very self, for “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
When we love agapically, we take a risk. We never know if our love will be warmly embraced, received with indifference, or rejected entirely. Having taught hundreds of Holy Cross students, I can honestly say that everything I gave to you, you returned back to me. This does not mean that you had to like or agree with everything I said – how boring would your education be if that were the case! Instead, you considered it, wrestled with it, asked perceptive and challenging questions of it, developed your own insights, and learned and grew tremendously. In this pattern of giving and receiving in turn, of love offered, accepted, and returned, we again gain not only a more educated student body or better relations between faculty and students. Rather, we live in a way that is analogous to the pattern of relationships that Christian trinitarian theology claims is at the core of God’s very self. Indeed, there is a sacredness, a holiness to the work that takes place in the classroom.
This does not mean that religious conversion is the goal of the work done in the classroom but rather that Christian claims about what is ultimately good, meaningful, and worthwhile provide a basis for the teaching and learning to which the College is rightly committed. To have a trinitarian relationship in any dimension of one’s life – whether with roommates, friends, parents, a spouse, one’s children – is a tremendous gift. So don’t let anyone ever tell you that Christian trinitarian theology is irrelevant for your education or for questions regarding how to live life and to live it as well as possible – it just might be the most practical thing of all!
Now some words of encouragement to you students. I hope and trust that you fully appreciate how blessed you are to be educated at the premier Jesuit small liberal arts college in the entire world, just as I’ve always felt blessed to be able to contribute to its work too. With this tremendous blessing comes immense responsibility, which includes especially responsibility to the College’s mission. How fortunate are you to belong to an institution with such a rich mission statement and such a strong commitment to realizing it.
If you’ve not already done so, I encourage you to read the College’ mission statement (available at: https://www.holycross.edu/about-us/mission-statement), to think seriously about how it does and ought to shape your education and your life long after you graduate, and to commit yourselves to striving to realize at least one particular dimension of it throughout this academic year. Our world is desperately in need of people who are formed by the College’s Jesuit liberal arts heritage – that is, people who are educated in both mind and heart; who remain open to learning; who can listen more attentively, read more carefully, think more clearly, write more persuasively, and speak more eloquently; who can frame critical, charitable intellectual challenge as an invitation to growth toward a shared pursuit of greater truth rather than as an attack on one’s own self-worth or as proof that that pursuit is too messy to be worthwhile; who can admit the liabilities in one’s own preferred ways of thinking and living; who can find the assets in the ways of thinking and living that they typically oppose; and who can distinguish effective argumentation from its fallacious counterparts.
Our world is similarly in desperate need of people who are shaped by the Catholic intellectual tradition that shapes the College’s mission and life. How fortunate you are to belong to an institution whose heritage has roots that extend back across the millennia and throughout the world. As any of my students can tell you, my encouragement here is not at all rooted in naivete about the Church’s failings, which an authentic, responsible, life-giving understanding of the tradition rightly indicts. Moreover, I understand that many students do not enter Holy Cross excited to engage with the Catholic tradition.
Nevertheless, critical, charitable engagement with the tradition – the core of which is love – is precisely what is needed today as the challenges of the twenty-first century continue to loom. Whether you are a cradle Catholic who feels at home in the Church, a hardened skeptic, or anywhere in between, and no matter where you are in your own journey, I hope, trust, and expect that you will be pleasantly surprised – and, yes, helpfully challenged too – as you engage with the Catholic intellectual tradition at Holy Cross. Your doing so is important for yourselves and for the tradition alike. At its worst, the Church has many failings to answer for. At its best, it offers so much good to our world. Do not cede the tradition to those who distort it for their own personal gain. Reclaim it.
How might you begin to do that during your undergraduate years? Start by taking courses in Religious Studies, which will help you to develop a clear, critical, adult, and perhaps even appreciative understanding the Catholic tradition and the other great religious traditions of our world. You would never turn down the chance to learn about song-writing from Taylor Swift or about playing quarterback from Tom Brady; do not turn down the opportunity to learn from faculty who are similarly among the world’s foremost authorities in their field just because you think religion is disastrous or because you think your high school religion course already taught you everything you need to know about the topic.
The more you appropriate the College’s mission by habituating yourselves in these virtues of the excellent thinker, the more you will be able to penetrate the beauty, depth, and richness of the content you study, and the better you will be able to harness your gifts in service to our world. So much for you as persons, for the College, for Worcester, for our nation, for our Church, and for our world hinges upon the formation you undergo during your undergraduate years. Do not waste them. We educators have rightly high aspirations for you. We want you to flourish, to become the people God calls you to become, to grow into your greatest and grandest possibilities for truth, love, and goodness, and to radiate all of these into our world. Your doing so will enrich your own lives and the lives of countless others who were not able to attend a place like Holy Cross. May their lives be better because you committed yourselves to the College’s vision for your education.
To conclude, I’d like to tie together my New York roots with the New England sensibilities that will appeal many in the Holy Cross community. Long before he led the New England Patriots to unprecedented success and cemented his legacy as one of the greatest head coaches in the history of the National Football League, Bill Belichick was an assistant coach and defensive coordinator of my beloved New York Giants. 2009 was the last year the Giants would play in Giants Stadium – the stadium in which Coach Belichick burst onto the scene as a coaching force to be reckoned with – before it was demolished. It was also the year that N.F.L. Films put a microphone on then-Patriots Head Coach Belichick for the entire season as part of its A Football Life documentary. During his last visit to Giants Stadium, N.F.L. Films had Coach Belichick revisit the Giants’ locker room, coaches’ rooms, and offices to reflect upon his professional journey across the decades. When asked to consider where he began as a lowly assistant coach in relation to where he was as a five-time Super Bowl winner at the time, Coach Belichick said, “I was just trying to establish my coaching career, be a good coach, win some games. We won a lot of them here. This is a great organization. It’s hard not to get choked up about it. […]. Oh I loved it here, I loved it here.”
I am certainly not Coach Belichick, nor have I risen in my field to the level of success that he has attained in his. But I would like to think that on some deep level I can understand and appreciate exactly what he meant. What Giants Stadium means to Bill Belichick, the College of the Holy Cross will always mean to me. It’s the place that gave me my start. The first institution of higher education that entrusted me as the instructor of record in one of its courses. The place where I tried to show that I could do an adequate enough job teaching ethics. I have had to root against Coach Belichick for longer than I care to remember, but I agree wholeheartedly with him on this point (and, certainly, he stays awake late at night hoping that Fay agrees with him!): it’s impossible to avoid tearing up when reflecting upon those who have launched you, for you never forget your first love.
Thank you for helping to make my years at Holy Cross so meaningful, beautiful, and amazing, and please rest assured that the College of the Holy Cross will always hold a very special place in my heart. I have certainly taken and will continue to hold a piece of it and of all of you with me as I begin at Villanova and beyond, and perhaps each of you and the entire Holy Cross family will take a piece of me with you as you continue in your journey at and beyond Mount Saint James. My Holy Cross email address will be disabled on September 1, 2024. Please feel free to keep in touch as you see fit – my Villanova email address (peter.fay@villanova.edu) is already active should you wish you to write.
From the very bottom of my heart, I thank you, I miss you, I love you, I cannot wait to see all of the good that awaits you going forward, and I will be rooting for your continued flourishing from afar as I make my way a little further down the road. This autumn and beyond, my hope and prayer for you is this: may the season’s new beginnings bring all of us into fuller, deeper life, and may the entire Holy Cross family enter ever more fully into the radiantly sunlit future that awaits it.
Yours gratefully,
Peter K. Fay
Department of Religious Studies 2018-2024