On the Meeting of James O’Donovan

There probably will never again be a time to enter college like the one the Class of 2024 experienced, never again that bewilderment within bewilderment that, having compounded, gave way to sense. So drastic was the change in life at that time, so heavy the weight of isolation that no one could have suspected the unity and depth for friendship that grew in spite of it like grass growing in the cracks of concrete. We, who were cut from high school at our zenith and dropped hard to the nadir of college were, by necessity, bound together in such a way that even after the mold was removed, the true form of true brotherhood remained.

In those earliest days of August, we arrived and were directly isolated. The second night of move-in, most people had gotten back the negative result and were congregated in the upper quad. There were a few tents set up near O’Connell handing out bamboo and stuffed animals. 

I set out, miserable, from Fenwick, and I looked out over the swaths of people under the dark sky. I had not wanted to come to BC: it was my last choice, I had put it by random because my father had said something good about it, I had hoped that it would be moved online entirely, I had heard that there were no real Catholics here, I had seen the watered-down and hollow Catholicism in the orientation videos, the safe-consensual-sex videos on Canvas.

I had related as much to my parents on the phone before I left Fenwick 206, who, I later learned, hung up the phone and prayed a good old-fashioned prayer without ornament, just the two gathered in His name sort, asking for daily bread. It was not a prayer for my great edification or my health or even my salvation, but just a prayer for help in a rough spot—“They have no wine.”

And at that same time I who walked into that mass of people told myself that I would make two laps around O’Connell and then give up and go to St. Joe’s. One lap and nothing stood out, the sound of east-coast frat boy voices and scantily clad girls giving their snapchat, with the conversations I had joined empty and false.

As I rounded O’Connel the second time I saw a fellow holding a box and looking disposed to talk, so I asked him where he got that box. As providence would have it, it was James O’Donovan, who is now my roommate and one of my closest friends.

And I’ve found since that this is the way prayer works. Where two or three are gathered in His name with a simple honest prayer, it is, in fact, answered. There is no figurative speech, no hyperbole when Jesus says that the door that is knocked will be opened, that those who seek will find, that he who asks will receive. He is a good father, not of the sort that hands his son a scorpion when he asks for an egg.

The truly great thing about asking your Father in Heaven for what you need is that it gives order and reason to the chaotic world. If I worked hard studying for a life-changing test, truly gave it my all, and trustingly prayed that the Lord help me and I still do poorly, I may feel like a failure, but in my heart of hearts I know that the Lord’s will has been done, and that it was I who had the wrong idea of what was up and what was down. This is the simplicity of Jesus in Gethsemane, this is simplicity that gives that peace which the world cannot give.