The 20th century essayist GK Chesterton, in one of his works said:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world.

This is quite true. It is unbashfully true. Growing up in a school that was a K-12 building, where your average grade size is 20 or so, had two effects: 1) I am slightly terrified by the unknowns of cities and 2) I am exceptionally well at making new acquiantances.

1) Unknown Cities

Before I decided on Notre Dame, I visited 8 other schools across the US. From Los Angeles to Baltimore, I learned to navigate airports, talk to strangers, and face the complexities of highway systems and college campuses.

I remember in particular my visit to Los Angeles, looking outside my taxi at the sea of cars in traffic. The graffiti and palm trees reminded me of Mexico, but it was not comforting at all. The air was hot. The vast amount of strangeness, the unknown streets and unfamiliar faces, faces who were unfamiliar to themselves as well. I saw the abandoned warehouses and sketchy grocery stores. Unfamiliar territory. I held onto my Miraculous Medal, bracing myself for the culture shock of Southern California.

Even in the safety of the college campus, looking from a mount towards the rolling, dry hills of LA, the darkness was still there. The orange lights of street lamps were the same orange lights on dairies back home, but they provided no warmth. The pale moonlight on my clothes shrouded me with chills. There were old, scholastic friends with me, but I still felt like a pilgrim surrounded by the strangers in a strange city. How I longed for the site of rolling fields, how I longed for the smell of holy incence and not the stench of green leaves.

The darkness of a pilgrim’s journey. It would be a feeling that would encompass me throughout my high school senior year. The repetitive motions of sleeping in someone else’s room, eating chicken tenders late in the night, clarifying that I was from Idaho, not Ohio, listening to the same Mumford and Son’s album in different airports, planes, buses. It was a long, but necessary trip to find Notre Dame.

2) New Friends

I did notice a developing virtue in the midst of all this. In my constant tent pitching and traveling, I discovered that what my small community gave me was confidence. I could not shake off the darkness of the places I traveled to, nor could I shake off the immensity of them. So instead, I engaged in this large world, bringing my community with me.

I first thought that my Idahoan background would be a cause for awkwardness. The kid from the small, public school, labeled conservative for the state he lived in, mingling with students from charter, private schools, science academies, I felt like I would be a sore subject admist masters of scholastic subjects. However, it was actually my greatest strength. While most of the people I met grew up in cities or suburbs, my experiences of running through country roads between fields of wheat, or shooting a rifle at the age of ten, were apparently captivating. Feeding goats, exploring the Snake River Canyon, and living in a “tiny village” made me stand out from my peers.

So I found a way to navigate the pilgrim’s darkness. I navigated through conversations with admissions officers, students, the uber driver. I took on the large world that I stumbled upon. Yet if it wasn’t for that small community on the edge of a desert, I wouldn’t have imagined setting foot into the rest of the world, and eventually onto Our Lady’s campus. I was never sheltered by my small community, in fact, I discovered that all along it had prepared me for the unknown it opened up to me. Thus it gave me the spirituality of the pilgrim. The pilgrim embraces the darkness, only because the light promised to lead him through it.

 

 

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

-GK Chesterton, Heretics