How a group of men guided me to success
I’ve taken a ton of great classes over my past five semesters at St. Joe’s, yet there are three classes that have stood above the rest in terms of importance and impact.
These classes were two theology courses, Ignatius and the City and Faith, Justice, and the Catholic Tradition and an English course called Inside-Out: Everybody’s Protest.
Both theology courses were Service-Learning courses, where my partner and I would go to St. Joe’s original campus to help with an all-male soup kitchen once a week. The English course was an Inside-Out course where my class would travel to a minimum-security correctional facility and have class with inside students, which was also once a week.
Many don’t see individuals who are incarcerated or experiencing homelessness as prime stock for mentors or influential figures. In fact, many see them as who we should shun and exclude from society.
My experiences were completely opposite. The men I met during these classes were and are some of the most influential figures in my life. I found unlikely mentors and inspiration from a motley crew of characters.
Each group challenged me to listen and to learn from what they had experienced. The lessons were familiar ones and ones I’ve heard countless times over the years such as, “Be yourself,” “Don’t stop working,” “Don’t give up” and “Don’t listen to the critics too much.” However, unlike the previous versions of these lessons, their advice was much more poignant and stuck with me.
These men offered me an uncensored look into just how hard life can become when you don’t take care of yourself, and for that I am eternally grateful.
By taking care of yourself, I believe they meant make the hard choices that would benefit you in the long run and think seriously about the future. It would be ignorant to not acknowledge that due to systemic oppression society is set up to work against them.
As one inmate Crip told me, “You’re able to make a few mistakes and still get to where you want to be, but I only had to make one to put me where I was going.”
Accompanying this unrestricted view was a prophetic warning which seemed to echo through everyone that I met: “Don’t end up like me.” The quote always came with a similar story, everyone always believes that they wouldn’t end up in the position they were in and resist the temptations which drove their families into similar situations.
These men constantly would remind me that at the end of the day I am not immune to the same vices and temptations that they succumbed to and that I should use their stories as a source of strength to stay away from those same temptations. They wanted me to stay on my own path.
The self-awareness these men exhibited only added to the power that the warning had.
One lesson that didn’t have this warning as a caveat was that life’s blessings are here to justify its sufferings. This was an important lesson which was shared by both groups of men. No matter how hard life was and how unfair it seemed to these men, they all had something that made it all worth it.
For many of the people imprisoned, one example being Gee, was his family and kids and how blessed he was to still be alive for them. The men experiencing homelessness found their blessing in the comradery that formed in old St. Joe’s Church.
This is the one lesson that I felt to be the most critical one anyone can learn. By remembering what we have, we can gain the strength to bear any hardship or as one of the men experiencing homeless told me in reference to Genesis 32:22-32, “be like Jacob and have the strength to wrestle with God.”
The opportunity to learn from those men is a blessing I’ll always remember and be thankful for. These lessons and experiences are ones that no textbook or lecture could teach me.
I encourage others to take Service-Learning and Inside-Out courses in attempts to have a similar experience that I had. You’ll not only grow as a student, but you’ll grow as a person. I thank those men who saw me as an equal and helped teach me those lessons through our various conversations and life stories, because without them I wouldn’t be the person that I am today.
