The Dump: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 20 out of 30

The Gateway Arch

It was July of 2004, when sitting in the living room at the Novitiate another novice turned to me and said “Good God, they are sending us to hell!” We were watching baseball with the novicemaster, and the team that we were watching was the St. Louis Cardinals. Now, this was to say nothing of the Cardinals, old Busch Stadium, or St. Louis in general. All that my fellow novice was commenting on was the reported temperature in St. Louis, 101 degrees (40 for you Celsius people out there) with 90% humidity. This is where he and I were being sent to study for the next three years, and initially, it didn’t have much to recommend itself. The day after vows we loaded up a minivan with all of our stuff and the two of us drove to St. Louis from Syracuse, NY.

            It would be hard not to remember the first time I saw the famous Gateway Arch, it was rising over a landfill on the eastern side of the river. When we came over the bridge into St. Louis, we exited and took a wrong turn into a warehouse district near the train tracks… Was I really going to live here for three years? We had taken the fourteen hour drive with a stop to sleep in the middle at the Jesuit parish in Columbus, Ohio and arrived the next day in St. Louis, and what an arrival it was. It was also in the mid 90’s and the humidity was high at the end of August. In fact, I remember it being so hot that it was actually painful to be outside. I got up to my room and looked out of my third floor window, over the back fence of our back yard to the vacant lot and the abandoned houses beyond and, although our house was very nice, I thought to myself. “What a dump!”

            The next day I walked over to the philosophy department to have a sit down with the dean for Jesuits in studies. As I walked into what had been an old office building that IBM had moved out of years before because the neighborhood was too dangerous, I though very little of the architectural choices that were made when someone decided that a honeycomb pattern in concrete on the outside of the building was an attractive choice. All of this was not to mention, of course, the lack of windows in the building in anything that wasn’t an office. Being used to the Victorian elegance of Holy Cross, SLU was falling short of my aesthetic expectations of a university, then I took a walk up the middle of campus and saw strange statuary everywhere I looked. What the heck was I doing here?

            The next night, one of the guys in the house took some of us out to a bar that he liked for a few beers to celebrate his birthday. He told us it was a good place for pizza and beer. I walked in, and there were dollar bills stuck to the ceiling with God knows what, writing all over the walls, and an incomparable sense of complete and utter dive bar. I was used to fake upscale Irish pubs and drinks at sunset at the Top of the Hub in Boston. Was I really to be reduced to this in philosophy studies??

            Where the heck was I? Only two words adequately describe this reality. St. Louis.

            There was a reason that the blues thrived as a musical form in this city. There was a reason why, during my third and final year there, it was the violent crime capital of the country. There was a reason why a Jesuit who had just arrived from LA said “Compton has nothing on the northside.” There was also a reason why the day that I left to return home to New England three years later that I didn’t want to leave.

            My first few days in St. Louis were rough, not because St. Louis was a bad place, I came to love it, but because the truth was that I spent those first few days and weeks comparing it to everything back home. Ted Drew’s Frozen Custard was ok, but it wasn’t St. Clair’s Annex Ice Cream. The Cardinals were fun to watch, but they weren’t the Red Sox. SLU was an OK school, but it wasn’t Holy Cross. The Blues were fine to listen to, but it wasn’t the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Oh, and the Mississippi River was definitely NOT the Atlantic Ocean.

Dan and I on a scavenger hunt one night.. not even sure
what we were supposed to be getting a picture of. 

            What changed me? The people around me were the ones that did it. I made friends among the Jesuits, like Chris and Brian, who were from St. Louis and could fill me in on the peculiarities of the Jesuits from St. Louis, but also who were able to share with me why they loved being a Jesuit in that city, even if it wasn’t always easy. They introduced me to some of their friends, who in turn became good friends of mine. One in particular, Dan, loves St. Louis so much that it is to him an objective truth that all things holy and good come, in some way, from the city. That enthusiasm helped me to generally get excited about things that were going on. I made friends among the Jesuit Volunteer and Catholic Worker Communities there, who didn’t take those vacant lots and high crime and poverty rates as things which were signs of crushing hopelessness in North St. Louis, but rather as the potential for urban farms and the formation of new communities and a new civilization, literally in the shells of the old one that had failed so many in those neighborhoods years before.

Harry and Chris protesting the Death Penalty

I made friends among the staff at the University, my friend Harry, in particular. Harry was also a Holy Cross alum at SLU, and got it when I spoke wistfully of Mt. St. James. I made friends among the grad students at the University, who kindled in me a desire to walk into that ugly humanities building, because the conversations that I might have in there made it worth it. I made friends among the undergrads, who in their passion rekindled in me a desire to help build up the best, most just, world possible. I even had a professor who, because of his insistence that the third single on Muddy Waters’ chess album was the closest thing to a perfect instantiation of the platonic form of the beautiful, got me listening to the blues.

A group of us in the dive bar in question. 

I even went back to that dive bar, the one that I thought was a complete dump. I got talking one night with one of the bar tenders named Antonio, and it turned out that he was from Boston, and Sox fan. As anyone who knew me during that time is aware that dive bar, the Blackthorn Pub, became the hang out for my friends and I for the next three years.

Sarah Holtz Stout and I in front of the mighty Mississip. 

            The truth is that, as my novicemaster once told me, comparisons are odious. All that they really do, in situations like the one I described above, is inspire ingratitude for the opportunities we are afforded. Even here, in a place as marvelous as Rome, one can easily make comparisons about why home is so much better.  When we let a place, or a thing, or even a person speak to us on its own terms, then we can grow in gratitude for those things in ways that we might not even be able to understand.

Laura, Murph, and I tailgating before a Cardinal's game. 

My earlier assertions were all correct. St. Louis was not Boston, Ted Drew’s was not St. Clair’s, the Cardinals weren’t the Sox, and SLU wasn’t Holy Cross, and thank God for that. Those nights in Busch Stadium with my friend Dan and his wife Sarah are things that I wouldn’t trade for anything. The mid snow-storm trip to Ted Drewe’s with my friend Laura is something I will never forget. The Grad program at SLU and the great faculty there helped me go deeper wit my love of philosophy. Thank God St. Louis wasn’t Boston.  I grew because St. Louis wasn’t familiar or comfortable, God can work in our vulnerability. I discovered things about myself that I couldn’t at home, because I was just unsettled enough to pay attention to the spirit moving around me. I found some of the people who make up some of the most important stories of my life, some of which I take to be too sacred to ever post here, because removed by distance from my friends back home, whom I love dearly, I found a group of people who encountered me not in the past, or the future, but in the only moment that we shared, the present. I found life, and joy, and love, even amidst some hard days and tough lessons, and there is nothing that one can feel for that but gratitude.

            The truth is that St. Louis obviously wasn’t hell. I came to grow to love it, not because it became home, which it did, not because it was better then my hometown, no need to judge that, but because of what it was on its own terms, and the people I was blessed to share it with. So much for that first view of the arch beyond the dump.