My Grandfathers

When I was 11 years old, I went to college basketball’s Final Four with my grandfather. As we descended the stairs one morning into the hotel restaurant, I saw Tom Izzo, the head coach at Michigan State. Izzo is the real deal. By then, he’d already won a national championship and been named national coach of the year three different times. He’s since been inducted into the Hall of Fame. He’s been so successful in the NCAA Tournament, they call him “Mr. March.” When I saw him, my 11-year-old eyes got really big.

The strange thing, though, was that when Izzo saw us, his eyes got really big. He stood up and rushed over to my grandpa: “Dom? Dom Rosselli?” They exchanged pleasantries as I looked on, dumbfounded. Eventually, grandpa introduced me. I don’t remember much of what Izzo said. But I do remember he finished with something like, “You know... Your grandpa? He’s the real deal.”

I actually did know. In his time, my grandfather, Dom Rosselli, was a college basketball coach himself. He was more than that. He was a legend. In fact, the very day I trembled in the presence of Tom Izzo, my own grandpa had won 357 more college basketball games than him. 

Dom Rosselli coached basketball for 38 seasons at Youngstown State University in Ohio. He collected 589 wins. He’s one of the winningest coaches in the history of the game. Several different organizations named him “Coach of the Year” throughout the 50s and 60s. He was even named, hilariously, “Italian Coach of the Year” in 1958. Not too long after his retirement, Youngstown State painted “Rosselli Court” on the floor of their arena and, several years later, erected an enormous statue of him outside its door. When he died, it was on ESPN. Flags in the city of Youngstown were flown at half mast. Tom Izzo was right. Dom Rosselli was the real deal.

Growing up, both sets of grandparents were just a short drive away. After the Final Four, we visited with my other grandparents. They wanted to know about the trip. My Grandpa Johnny did not move in the same circles as Dom Rosselli. While Dom was becoming a legend for the city of Youngstown, John Slovasky was making it smoke. For 35 years he worked in one of its famous steel mills. As a kid, I was just told that Johnny had “worked at the mill,” and so I pictured him as a man of the blast furnace and of molten iron, a hardened laborer. It turns out he did bookkeeping in one of the offices. But when the Youngstown steel industry was decimated in the late 70s, Johnny was one of the now unremembered 40,000 who lost their jobs. For years afterward, he wallpapered homes to make a living. 

I knew my Grandpa Johnny as an older man and, as I knew him, there wasn’t much to him. He was a quiet man, a calm man. He was a Buick man. He liked to talk about routes and avenues, about “the construction over on Tibbetts Wick.” He could always remember a good restaurant about halfway to someplace, but he could never remember its name. He hated the New York Yankees, but let his wife do the yelling at the TV. He had one of those senses of humor where you really wanted to be certain your girlfriend liked you before you let her meet him. He liked John Wayne. He fixed things with duct tape. When he died this week, it was not on ESPN.

Neither of my grandfathers were the sit-you-down-and-teach-you-a-lesson type. They weren’t going to leave you a book of aphorisms. The lesson was in the very doing of their lives. Simply moving among my grandfathers ― passing one the chocolate, losing to the other in chess ― was the lesson. It was on you to observe it. 

A few years before his death, Youngstown State made bobblehead dolls of Dom Rosselli. They were pretty hilarious. When I opened up the box, I noticed that Grandpa had actually written on the back. It was autographed. “Coach Dom Rosselli.” I was surprised by it. I’d never seen him autograph something. But it made sense. Dom Rosselli was, after all, a sportsman. Grandpa’s living room had more cups and plaques than did my small college’s trophy room. But even after spending hundreds of hours with the man ― after playing countless games of chess with him in that very living room ― I’d never heard him tell a single story about even one of those trophies. Not one story. That’s why, when I met Tom Izzo, I couldn’t attend to the fact that my own grandpa had, at that point, outgunned him by several hundred wins. In my mind, that’s just not who the man was. He wasn’t “Coach Dom Rosselli.” He wasn’t a legend. He was just “Grandpa,” who never held it against me for not improving at chess.

John Slovasky never autographed anything. He didn't even sign his checks correctly. His real name wasn’t Slovasky, after all. In the 50s, just after getting married, John decided that his original family name was a bit of a mouthful. He should just be Slovasky. But instead of legally changing his name, he just began to fill out paperwork with Slovasky. Who’s going to know? This isn’t significant, right? Eventually his identity was fudged over and he just sort of became John Slovasky. 

There is something very Johnny about that. There is something very Johnny about the simple shrug he would surely have offered if told he would need to legally change his name. This swings several ways. When Johnny was in the war, he was ordered to swim to retrieve nurses into a lifeboat in the Azores Islands. He didn’t know how to swim. “I was told to do it,” he shrugged just the same,

looking around for more chocolates. Johnny’s life was not very complicated. His business was that which was right in front of him. Johnny was sheer straightforwardness. He just, as the Buddhists like to say, “chopped wood and carried water.”

In reflections like these — recalling fathers and grandfathers — there’s a temptation to reflect on the way they embodied some bygone sense of toughness, how they taught you the meaning of strength. Oddly enough, my grandfathers taught me far more about weakness and about losing than they did about strength. Grandpa Rosselli had not a word to say to me about his 589 victories. To me, at least, when he talked about basketball he talked about losing at it. There were a few seasons when Dom Rosselli could have won a national championship. Across a few different divisions, he

coached in 13 postseasons. The year they were the tournament’s overall #2 seed, they were upset in the Elite Eight. There were seven times he coached in what is now the equivalent of the Sweet Sixteen. But a national championship never came. “Grandpa, how many games did you win in total?” I once asked him. He never gave me the answer. “I lost several hundred.”

When he was drafted, Johnny told the sergeant at the draft board that he had no interest in combat. His older brother had been killed in the Army while in France. When the letter came, he had to read it to his mother, who didn’t know English. He had no reverence for war. War was not a moment of strength, but of fear and of trembling. War killed his brother and broke his mother. He never told stories of the war. My aunt had to press the story about the nurses in the Azores out of him some 65 years later. [1]

One of the unspoken lessons of my grandfathers, as I gather it, is that strength is far less meaningful or important than we often think — that the real contours of who we are are formed, not in our strength, but in our failure, our fear, and in our trembling. 

At heart, I am an academic. And as an academic, one of the last things I would ever give up is my narcissism. I’m certain of my call to do extraordinary things with my life, convinced of the exceptional urgency of my projects. But this puts me at odds with everything my grandfathers taught me. Dom Rosselli was one of the best coaches in the history of college basketball. “They wanted to fire me,” he once remembered in an interview, thinking of a bad stretch. “Eh. I could find another job... maybe make more money. Maybe they would’ve been doing me a favor.” As an academic, I’m desperate for everything I do to be taken seriously. Johnny didn’t want to be taken seriously. He wanted to be at home near his wife. He wanted to read the newspaper. He wanted Derek Jeter to strike out.

We live in a meritocracy, a society that insists we must hustle to do singular and exceptional things. A central dogma of modern life is that we have to be strong and independent. Johnny’s later life, on the contrary, was one of physical weakness and radical dependence upon his wife. His world was one where even just sitting and standing were extraordinarily difficult. The insistence that we “not mention those kinds of things” is precisely the lie of the meritocracy, the false dogma that the only beautiful part of life is the part that’s lived in strength and health. On the contrary, Johnny’s weakness was precisely the space in which it became all too clear how much he was loved. In the last months of his life, as my Bubba would help him get situated around the house, she’d sometimes stop for a hug. “Why do you want to hug me?” he’d ask. Screaming, because he could hardly hear: “because I love you!”

Neither of my grandfathers were the sit-you-down-and-teach-you-a-lesson type. They never really told me a lot of stories. They told their stories in the very doing of their lives. It was on you to observe it. As I look back, it seems like their lives taught me the odd lesson nobody ever wants to tell a story about. My grandfathers taught me that the far more significant moments in life are the moments when you lose, when you never win a championship, when you get laid off, when you’re not the real deal. They taught me that, compared to the family itself, a family name is interchangeable, that it deserves nothing more than a shrug, even if it’s memorialized on an arena floor. They taught me that you come into contact with what’s really important when you’ve been humbled, or when your body is broken, or when you’re afraid, and not when you’ve won by 20. Life is very rarely about the impressive stuff ― about blast furnaces or 589 wins ― but is more often about straightforward humility and about weakness. Neither of my grandfathers were the sit-you-down-and-teach-you-a-lesson type. The lesson was in the very doing of their lives. It was in the sitting and in the standing. It was in John Wayne. A good restaurant about halfway to someplace. In 589 wins. 388 losses. 0 national championships. It was in humility. Weakness. And it was on you to observe it.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Endnote:

[1] Maribeth Slovasky, Of Lessons Learned: An Interview with My Father

What Makes a Family Holy? - The Feast of the Holy Family

Note: Through Advent and Christmas, I have decided to focus these reflections on the Virgin Mary and not on the weekly Gospel reading.

What Makes a Family Holy?

There is a funny and somewhat surprising story tucked away in Mark’s Gospel. After publicly healing a man of his withered hand, Mark reports that an enormous crowd began following Jesus (Mk 3:8). Many brought their sick relatives to be cured (3:10). The crowds pressed thickly upon Jesus and he was unable to rest a moment that day. We read that it became “impossible for him even to eat” (Mk 3:20). But amidst all this fervor, we learn of an odd detail. Jesus’ own relatives had caught wind of the commotion and were ― of all things ― embarrassed of him. The text says that “when his family heard about this they set out to seize him, for they said, ‘he is out of his mind’” (Mk 3:21). The Son of God was apparently acting in a way unbecoming of the family name. 

We should not be imagining that it was Mary or Joseph who were ashamed of their son. Indeed, most scholars suspect that Joseph ― not mentioned at all once Jesus begins his public ministry ― had by this time passed away. And it was Mary who once prompted Jesus to turn water into wine at a wedding in Cana (Jn 2). Mary was not ashamed of Jesus causing a commotion. Indeed, in the story from Mark’s Gospel, we learn just a few verses later that it was probably Jesus’ cousins who came to protect the family’s reputation from any further embarrassment (Mk 3:31). 

When we celebrate today’s “Feast of the Holy Family,” we don’t usually think of Jesus’ broader family. We’re even less likely to imagine that Jesus might not have been well-liked by all the cousins. And, more than that, when we think of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph we often think of their family life as the kind of thing that should be depicted on an ornament, as something quite cozy. We imagine them gathered around a warm hearth untroubled by the sinful world around them.

On the contrary, part of what makes the Holy Family holy is that it wasn’t the kind of thing that could be depicted on an ornament. Indeed, no real family’s daily life is the kind of thing that should ever be depicted on an ornament. And the Holy Family was a real family. That means they had real relatives who really were whackos. Just like your family. Part of what makes the Holy Family holy is that they didn’t isolate themselves from that whackiness, but were in the fray.

An important detail: when Jesus’ relatives came to collect him, Mary was right in their midst. Someone from the crowd even told Jesus: “your mother and family are outside looking for you” (Mk 3:32). Whackos or not, these were Mary’s people. This was her family. She was in the fray with these cousins who were embarrassed of her son. Did she have to listen to them apologizing to those who’d gathered? “I’m so sorry for this. He’s out of his mind.” Was she admonished by her relatives? “Didn’t you teach him better than this?”

This was the Holy Family’s family, and ― odd as it may seem ― that family was embarrassed of Jesus. But Mary did not cut them out of her life, safely retreating to those people who accept her. The Holy Family would not have been very holy had it remained walled-off from the world’s unholiness, had it remained contentedly around the hearth at Nazareth. Holiness is not closed in on itself. It wants to go outside itself, even into very dark places. Indeed, the holiness of the Holy Family was not for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph alone. It was also for those cousins who were embarrassed of Jesus. 

Yes, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived lives of extraordinary holiness. They were the “Holy Family.” But we should not imagine that the coming together of their lives formed some sort of impenetrable bubble around their home. The bitterness of the world broke into their lives. It crucified one of them. And he left his home knowing it would. 

The world is as embarrassed of Jesus today as it was when he was causing a commotion in ancient Israel. This is no reason to cut those cousins out of your life. On the contrary, it is reason to model your family after the Holy Family, to remain close to those who are convinced you all ― like Jesus ― “are out of your minds.” Click here to subscribe to these reflections by email

Hating Your Father and Mother - 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 14:25-33
Great crowds were traveling with Jesus,
and he turned and addressed them,
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me
cannot be my disciple.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion? 
Otherwise, after laying the foundation
and finding himself unable to finish the work
the onlookers should laugh at him and say,
‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’
Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? 
But if not, while he is still far away,
he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. 
In the same way,
anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple.”

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Jesus’ words this week are extraordinarily strong: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” It’s very difficult to water down Jesus’ language. The Greek word the passage uses for “hate” is misein. It means, quite simply, “to hate.” There’s no translating our way out of it. But this assertion, if we take it wholesale, conflicts with so much of what Christians value. One of the Ten Commandments insists we “honor our father and mother.” And Jesus, earlier in his ministry, commented that he has not come to abolish those commandments (Mt 5:18). So what gives? What is Jesus actually asserting in this week’s gospel? Should we really not love our families, but hate them?

I’d like to get at this in a somewhat roundabout way. I think what Jesus is doing here is similar to what a very strange man we now call “Saint Symeon the Holy Fool” did with his whole life in 6th century Syria. In his youth, Symeon had a profound desire for humility. He confided to a friend that he longed to be a saint, but in such a way that nobody could publicly recognize him as such. To that end, he entered a desert monastery in western Syria, hidden away from the eyes of the world. But after 29 years of this life, Symeon felt urgently that God was asking him to leave the monastery for life in the city. He was called, as he put it, “to mock the world.” And mock the world he did. 

The residents of Homs — the city in which Symeon lived out his days — were shocked by his extraordinary and offensive behavior. He arrived at the city gates dragging a dead dog by his belt. He was supposed to be a celibate monk, but spent most of his days hanging around the city brothel; several of the women even had reputations as his “girlfriends.” He often turned over the tables at the public market. At Mass, he would extinguish the candle lights and throw nuts at the congregants while they were resetting the sanctuary. Throughout Lent, he wore a chain of sausages around his neck like a priests’ stole. 

Symeon was, on the surface, an obnoxious madman; he was the town fool. Surely he got his wish: no one publicly recognized him as a saint. It’s hard to imagine even calling him a Christian. So why does the Church today honor him as “Saint” Symeon, just as much as it honors Saint Mother Teresa or Francis of Assisi? It might be easy to suggest that Symeon suffered from profound mental illness. But those who intimately knew him bore witness to his clear mind. Symeon knew very well that his actions were absurd. But he acted from the firm conviction that what he was doing was needed. Remember why Symeon left the monastery ― God had asked him to “mock the world.” But what is the meaning of Symeon’s mockery?

There is always, of course, more to the story besides Symeon’s public reputation. He went to brothels, yes, but only to gift the women money so they could avoid working. He publicly mocked the Church’s Lenten fasts, but then abstained rigorously from meat in his private life. But what explains his outrageous behavior generally speaking? What is motivating Symeon’s mockery? What Symeon sought, above all, was to disrupt the conventional ways of ordinary religious existence. In his city, people went to church and lit candles. They kept the Lenten fasts. But these were simply popular conventions. Symeon’s life forced people to really ask themselves why all of this mattered. Why do I need to abstain from meat? He brought liturgies to a screeching halt, but only because he wanted to stop people from merely going through the motions. Why, after all, do we need all these candles? What are we really doing at Mass?

I bring up Saint Symeon because I think Jesus is up to something similar in today’s gospel. Notice that, when Jesus says we must hate our families, a “great crowd” had been traveling behind him. This is a key element of the story. Indeed, on account of his miracles and preaching, Jesus had become popular, a celebrity even. The message of Jesus was becoming so popular that even large crowds could embrace it with ease. It is at this moment the text says Jesus “turned and addressed” this large crowd that had been following him with his disturbing words: you cannot come with me unless you hate your family. 

Do you see what Jesus is doing? In the same way that Saint Symeon sought to disrupt the sleepy forms of Christianity with his bizarre behaviors, so Jesus is seeking to disrupt the understanding of those in that “great crowd” who thought it would be easy to follow him. Christianity is not easy; it is no “pop spirituality.” “Narrow is the way,” Jesus says, “and few there are who walk it” (Mt 7:13-14). In order to remind people of this, Jesus has chosen the method of Saint Symeon the Holy Fool. Jesus intends to shock and disturb the crowds. He is the original holy fool. 

Does Jesus really want us to hate our families? Of course not. But Jesus does ― and this is the shocking, disruptive, outrageous thing ― want us to put himself before everything and everyone else, including our families. That claim ― a central claim of Christianity ― disturbs the normal order of our lives. And so Jesus, like Symeon, communicates this by shocking the people around him. He is trying to disturb you. Sometimes being disturbed is the only way we’ll notice.

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Not Peace, But Division - 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 12:49-53
Jesus said to his disciples:
"I have come to set the earth on fire,
and how I wish it were already blazing! 
There is a baptism with which I must be baptized,
and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! 
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? 
No, I tell you, but rather division. 
From now on a household of five will be divided,
three against two and two against three;
a father will be divided against his son
and a son against his father,
a mother against her daughter
and a daughter against her mother,
a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."

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Jesus is often saying disconcerting things. Luke’s gospel in particular, from which this week’s reading is taken, reports many of his most unsettling sayings. “I have come to set the earth on fire…. Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. A household will be divided; a father will be divided against his son; a mother against her daughter.” In light of everything else Christianity has to say about the goodness of peace and the family, it’s normal for Christians to be a little unnerved by this. So what is Jesus doing here? 

It helps to know that, in this scene, Jesus was actually alluding to a set of famous Jewish poems from the Old Testament. Those listening to Jesus would have recognized in his words the similarity to what they’d heard recited in their synagogues. One poem, from the Book of Micah, was meant to depict how broken a generation can become: “the son treats the father with contempt / the daughter rises up against her mother / the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Mc 7:6). By alluding to this passage, Jesus indicates that these days Micah had predicted are happening right now, and have come to pass on account of Jesus’s own life and message. But how does that make sense? Isn’t Jesus the “prince of peace,” the one who said “blessed are the peacemakers”? Certainly Jesus brings peace, but not every kind of peace. There is an indifferent or complacent kind of peace - a way of “making peace with the way things are” - that Jesus has not come to establish. Consider this: the world is filled with evils - Jesus spent considerable time identifying and cautioning us against them. It is not enough to stand peacefully by, say nothing, and ascribe our silence to a peaceable Christian nature. In fact, in these circumstances, Jesus invites us to incite division, even if that unsettles the peace of our households. 

Certainly it is painful - as many can attest - when the tranquility of our families is sacrificed in preference for the Gospel. But the Jews listening to Jesus would also have recalled a second poem from his words, one that introduces a note of hope into the family unrest he’s describing. The poem from the Book of Malachi describes a giant fire that will someday initiate “the great day of the Lord.” Here’s the interesting part: on account of that fire, it was said that God would turn “the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Ml 4:6). It is a fire that heals the division within families. With all this in mind, look again at Jesus’s first words: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” The Jews standing by would have understood the allusion. Jesus is saying that the “great day of the Lord” is here, and it’s here in his very person! Jesus brings a fire that both divides and heals. Yes, his words are meant to stir people into action and out of their sleepy and indifferent forms of peace. Yes, sometimes this will disrupt the tranquility of families. But he unsettles the heart so that it may come to rest on something more worthy. And even if families are sometimes stirred against each other, it is only so that their hearts can be drawn toward each other again in a more perfect peace. 

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