He Walked Away from Rome

Around the year 500, a young man in his late teens was sent from his hometown to study in Rome — the place to be, the center of everything. And he hated what he found: a culture that looked impressive on the outside and felt hollow and corrupt up close. So he did something his whole world would have called insane. He dropped out. He walked away from the career, the connections, the status, and went to live alone in a cave in the hills of Subiaco for three years, trying to figure out what God actually wanted from his life. His name was Benedict, and that gap-year-in-a-cave eventually grew into a monastic movement that quietly held Western civilization together after Rome collapsed. The dropout outlasted the empire.

If part of you suspects that the thing everyone is chasing might be hollow, today's saint is your patron. Benedict's entire life started with the courage to admit that and to go looking for something real. His most famous line is "prefer nothing whatever to Christ" — and he didn't mean it as a slogan. He meant: order your whole life around the one thing that's actually worth it, and let the rest fall where it falls.

The first reading shows where that kind of courage comes from. Isaiah gets a glimpse of God so overwhelming he basically falls apart — "Woe is me!" — but God cleanses him with fire and then asks the question that has launched a thousand lives: "Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?" And Isaiah, undone and remade, says the bravest five words available to a young person: "Here I am; send me." Not "let me think about it," not "once I have my life together." Here I am.

And the Gospel hands you the antidote to the fear that keeps most of us from ever saying that. Three times Jesus says "do not be afraid," and then explains why: the Father has counted the sparrows, counted the very hairs of your head, and "you are worth more than many sparrows." You are not a face in the crowd to God. You are known down to the detail. People that loved and that closely watched can afford to take risks. Benedict did. Isaiah did. The question is still open — "Whom shall I send?" — and it is, genuinely, addressed to you.