The value of community

Joseph Carlson
MSMU Class of 2025

(4/2022) I imagine that you have had the experience where someone is so outright happy that you think they must be joking? That is what I thought of Harry when I first met him, and it was hard to understand why he would be so happy. I asked him that question, and, after looking far more perplexed than I was, he said that it was because he is simply overwhelmed with gratitude. He knows that everything he has was not earned nor merited by himself or his own efficacy, and for that, he cannot but be thankful.

This sort of gratitude is what inspires his enamoredness with life, and with human beings. There are so many folks that we go around within our intellectual settings, people who we enjoy, who are enamored most of all with ideas. I often find myself caring more about ideas than people, and that scares me. I even find myself caring most of all about the idea of caring about people, but it is all one big rouse to not have to do the hard, tedious work of loving the person in front of me.

Harry strikes the balance between loving ideas and loving people. He is very accomplished, but, like so many of the people who’ve truly had an impact on me, he finds the time to be what you need him to be. Yet, he still is himself. It’s astounding.

Harry Scherer is the senior editor of the Emmitsburg News-Journal, but he also happens to be my RA. We share a lot of common life together, although he exists, for me, in that space in-between the professional and the personal, between mentor and friend. So much good happens in that space. Still, friends are called to something even deeper. There are some lessons we can take from my relationship with Harry and his life, namely how no matter how interesting one’s friend is in conversation or how much you learn from them, the most important part of any relationship is that both people involved call each other to be better human beings.

Like I said before, Harry strikes a balance between loving people and loving ideas. So many of our conversations have been his engaging me where I was in the topics that I wanted to talk about. He had enough care and humility to, even though he knows more than I do, let me articulate how I understood those topics. After I had explained my understanding, he called me forward, deeper into those ideas, with an eye to the state of my soul. A good mentor can encourage your good ideas and critique bad ones, but most of all encourage you toward virtue and warn you against self-destructive habits. This has been my experience of many of my professors at the Mount. They encourage me to learn and pursue excellence because most of what these particular professors do is encourage me toward good ideas and virtue, rather than simply correcting me. Perhaps it is only my hubris that doesn’t like being corrected, but I think that the best way to draw anyone to like anything is to at once affirm them and show them how they could go even deeper into the good that they already understand. That is the job of the mentor. The friend has the same goal of the other person becoming more virtuous, but does so by walking alongside her. Friends are two people who share a common life and desire each other to be better off, to be more human, to be more virtuous. I have learned so much from my friends, even more than what I’ve learned from mentors, and this is because mentors sometimes walk too far ahead of me in life for me to really garner the lessons I ought from them.

Friends are right beside me through the whole journey, and I am able to share so much more with them than with a mentor. Granted, there is some information which friends simply do not have access to that mentors do. But that which makes friendship unique is that they not only are completely interested in your wellbeing, but they have the means to be with you through it all. A good mentor can council me as much as he can about the trials I am going to face, but only my friend will be with me in those trials. Some marvelous people qualify as both mentors and friends, and these sorts of people are often responsible for the greatest mindset shifts. My life has had many of these, friends who are much better people than I, but really do share a common life with me and are with me in the thick of the difficulties that I am undergoing. This is the benefit of community: it turns mentors into friends and allows people far ahead in the path to virtue to travel alongside me. They sort of draw me up to their status of virtue, even if I am not there myself. In a good community, this is what happens; rather than all people involved being brought down to the lowest common denominator, everyone is almost lifted up to the highest point among the friends. So long as that individual is pointed at virtue, it is difficult for the community to fall in the other direction. Furthermore, among friends, it is known whose strength is whose, and so everyone finds a place, where they at once feel useful, but are called to something even greater.

It is sometimes difficult to find such groups of people, and many, if not most communities keep their members in complacency. What so often happens in college is that people get caught up in the wrong groups of people out of a fear of being lonely. The message that they are not made for comfort, but made for greatness, is a difficult one to give, but thankfully, the men on my floor have had an RA who is able to give them that message by simply loving them where they are, and calling them deeper.

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