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As someone
who focuses in significant part on sexual ethics, Fr. Brian
Linnane doesn’t have the luxury of seeing much separation
at all between at least some of his scholarly work, his
pastoral work or from the personal lives of his students:
the connections are clear and constant, and the decisions
students make are not always as well thought out as he
would like them to be.
“I
try to get them [the students] to look at what sorts of
behaviors and choices, generally speaking, are conducive
to human flourishing and the flourishing of community,
and what sorts of behaviors are destructive to human flourishing
and the flourishing of community. That’s a kind of
moral realism that is consistent with what’s best
in the Roman Catholic natural law tradition,” Fr.
Linnane says.
As with
a number of the other Jesuit faculty—most of whom
preach and say Mass in rotation in the campus chapel—Fr.
Linnane struggles constantly, in class and outside of class,
with the issue of how to engage students on these issues
without shutting down discussion by distancing himself
from them and from their experiences—with how to talk
about intimate questions in a way that genuinely spurs
reflection.
“It
seems to me,” he says, “that you have to ask
yourself, Is this relationship—just as someone
pursuing a religious vocation has to ask—is this
what God is calling me to do, what I experience God calling
me to do? Is this authentic? The same way, in any relationship
that you don’t just let it happen because it’s
convenient, but is this really what God is calling me
to in order to make myself and my partner fully alive,
fully human, that our relationship will really generate
life, happiness, peace?”
While
Fr. Linnane is concerned, in his scholarly work, in his
pastoral work, and in his personal relationships with students
with the issue of moral choice, he is particularly incensed
by passivity, by the idea—and the reality—of
people simply drifting toward poor choices.
“I
hate the term, ‘you’ll probably end up,’” he
says. “I hate the idea of ‘ending up,’ or
people thinking about themselves as ending up … When
my students talk about their future—‘well, I’ll
probably end up doing this’—my response is that
that sounds passive and that—especially with this
population!—you have some resources, you have some
time; think about what it is you really want to do.”
He takes
particular pleasure in having the opportunity to influence
students over a period of years and to see the ways in
which some of them change and grow.
“It’s
great,” he says. “I actually speak to some kids
who, a few years later, decide that—the hell with
the expectations—I want to teach. I know I’m
not going to make a lot of money, but this is something
that I want to do; or I want to pursue a scholarly career;
or I want to do something pastoral, I want to work in the
church in some way.”
In his
own life, he evinces satisfaction with the choices he has
made, and the place this has brought him to.
“For
me, I can’t imagine anything that would be better
to do with my life than what I am doing here. Are there
sacrifices, are there downsides, are there times I wish
I were doing something else? Sure. But who doesn’t?
You sort of have this myth that being partnered to someone
or married and pursuing the big income, the big job, that
that’s just perfect. But in the end, none of us get
out of this alive; to use Christian imagery, we all have
to face the cross in our lives.”
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist from Worcester,
Mass.
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