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Stop Numbing Out. Start Showing Up.

Modern Man

Three Catholic men on the present moment, numbing, and what fatherhood actually asks of a man. Sam Halligan, Brad Pierson and Noah Gilchrist sit down for Modern Man's monthly after action report — the September review of what four weeks of conversation did to the three of them. No guest this cycle. Three hosts, three confessions, and one Latin phrase that turns out to be the argument. Age quod agis. Do what you are doing. It is tattooed on one of them, it cost five hundred dollars more than he expected, and it is a maxim of St. Ignatius of Loyola about conformity to God's will: if you are working, give it all your attention; if you are holding a twelve-week-old at two in the morning so your wife can sleep, do that; if you are washing the dishes, wash the dishes. The episode is what happens when three men hold their own lives up against that sentence and find out how rarely they are actually in the room. Because the honest version is that a working Catholic man has four things — pray, work out, work, love your family — and no margins left over. There is a Navy SEAL in this file, brought in to speak at a Damascus Forge event, who was asked where the margins are and answered flatly that there are none. And the thing a man does with that gap is numb. One of them plays a guitar loudly enough in the evenings that he cannot hear his children, and says out loud on the recording that he needs to repent of it. One of them listens to podcasts through the dishes so he never has to be alone with the sink, then tries it without and finds himself struggling to stay for four minutes. One of them left a group text deliberately ambiguous so he would come out of the story better, and texted the correction from the dinner table rather than carry it another hour. Then the retreat. One of them was asked out of the blue to speak at the parish he grew up in, wrote the message between midnight and three because his newborn does not sleep, walked in with a talk full of young-dad jokes and found twelve men waiting, eight of them between seventy and ninety. The talk landed. He was given permission to leave and did not take it, sat down in a small group he did not want to be in, and listened to a man he had never met describe a life that looked nothing like his — and drove home and told his wife he lives in a bubble. Work behind a computer, a show here and there, football, in and out of Mass as fast as possible, go to bed, repeat. The framework underneath it comes from an eighty-year-old on a podcast: shut up, suit up, show up. Stop complaining, because far more people would draw your life out of a hat than their own. Present yourself strongly to whatever you are called to. Then be there — early, on time, engaged — and bring the moment what it actually calls for. Which leads to the hardest question in it: if a hundred people put their worst suffering in a hat, would you put yours in and risk pulling someone else's? All three say no. A life without suffering is a life without love, and none of them would trade the responsibility that is currently wrecking them. Also in this conversation: the British business show one of them watches from one to three in the morning on four and a half hours of sleep; a fifteen-month-old who is now a menace; the farmer with the best crops in the county whose only secret is that he does not fight the weather; a place where it is always winter and never Christmas, and what happens to the snow when Aslan is on the move; G. K. Chesterton on the eternal appetite of infancy, and a Father who never got tired of making the daisy; a deer in Maryland that a family stopped the car for; and the question Fr. Pat Schultz turned back on two hosts in last month's episode — what is it like when you go home and see your daughters — that put both of them in tears on the recording.