College Students, Friendship, and Carmelite Spirituality: A Reflection on SEEK24
Editor’s note: Last week, eleven friars from all three US provinces of Discalced Carmelites attended SEEK24, the annual conference of FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) held this year in St. Louis, and attended by over 20,000 mostly college students. In this blog, Fr. Pier Giorgio, OCD, reflects on his experience attending the conference and sponsoring a booth with ICS Publications, the English-language publishing house of the Discalced Carmelite Order and ministry of the Washington Province.
Working with college students in ministry is a humbling experience. Looking back at my college years, I can’t help but notice the stark differences between the spiritual lives of many FOCUS students in college today versus my own experience some years ago. I can’t help but rejoice at the many opportunities for authentic friendships, faith sharing, and formation provided by FOCUS and its missionaries today.
God’s mercy and providence guided me through a significant conversion when I was 20 years old and living alone in a nearly empty dormitory one summer at Rice University. Alone and confused, sitting in my dorm room, God was leading me to an experience of faith in him. For nearly a year after that summer, I stumbled along a divided path of trying to live faithfully while simultaneously continuing my self-serving attachments and entertainments. I lacked the support of authentic friendships, and without them, I was struggling to follow the path God had shown me in that initial conversion.
I can see clearly now that the support that inaugurated my formation towards giving my life to Jesus did not begin upon entering seminary or beginning the Carmelite novitiate, but rather in those earliest authentic friendships—friendships I discovered with my Catholic peers and ultimately with Jesus.
The purpose of FOCUS is to form and equip Catholic students to become life-long missionary disciples. To be a missionary means to be sent by God. To be a disciple means to be a friend of God. Both go hand in hand. FOCUS models formation toward missionary discipleship on a framework of win, build, and send. “Win” means encountering others and simply beginning an authentic friendship with them. To “build” is to help others live authentically in faith. Finally, to “send” is to send those won and built to go forth and win and build. It is a model of spiritual multiplication.
Our Holy Mother St. Teresa of Jesus speaks of the spiritual life under a congruous model of friendship:
“All my longing was and still is that since He has so many enemies and so few friends that these few friends be good ones.” (WP 1.2)
“For mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.” (Life 8.5)
“All must be friends, all must be loved, all must be held dear, all must be helped.” (WP 4.7)
“But a good means to having God is to speak with His friends, for one always gains very much from this.” (WP 7.4)
Founded upon a spirituality of authentic friendship—modeled upon friendship with Jesus in prayer—it ought not to surprise us that the Carmelite tradition finds hearts seeking nourishment among the students of FOCUS and their missionaries. This has become increasingly apparent over the many FOCUS conferences we have attended over the years.
Last week, several other friars and I were able to attend SEEK24, the annual conference of FOCUS, held in St. Louis this year. Once more, we were given the opportunity and grace to talk to thousands of students about the Teresian model of prayer as friendship.
Once more, we discovered in the present generation of college students an impulse towards authentic friendship with God and his adopted sons and daughters cultivated by FOCUS’s model of missionary discipleship. We were delighted to discover how many of them had found friendship with the Carmelite saints and were now seeking to encounter them in their writings. Hundreds of students, missionaries, and their mission partners left St. Louis with over 850 books from ICS Publications.
Of course, we don’t attend this conference merely to sell books. More important were the thousands of occasions we had to share our discipleship with one another. It would be a mistake to think of our conference booth only as a place of ministry, as if we were only sponsoring the conference to share the writings of our saints with those attending. Instead, our conference booth and the convention center were a place of friendship. By setting up our booth and displaying the relics of our saints and their writings, we were able to facilitate the physical presence and written testimony of the saints of Carmel to be included in this weeklong encounter of friendship with God and one another.
In our present times, God is calling each of us to missionary discipleship. He is calling us to win, build, and send his adopted sons and daughters. Our Holy Mother St. Teresa says, “All my longing was and still is that since He has so many enemies and so few friends that these few friends be good ones.” (WP 1.2) Let us fulfill her longing that as friends of Jesus, we all might be good friends of him and one another.
By being a good friend of Jesus, you may be blessed to encounter someone God has claimed and begun along the path of conversion and formation. You may be the support that person needs to give themselves entirely to Jesus.
Postscript: Every summer, some of our friars serve as chaplains for FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students). Back in 2020, we recorded conversations with some of the students we served that summer. You can watch that video here:
