Free, Found, and Purposeful: The Students I Encountered

“How do you know?”

That’s what one junior asked Dr. Aaron and Melissa Riches at one of the recent meetings of the John Paul II Fellows at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

The Riches had just spoken to a crowd of about 40 young fellows on the story of their marriage up to this point — their love story. Sitting in a circle, eating bread and soup, they spoke of meeting in the independent music scene in New York, their conversions, and the common life they’ve built.

Deeper questions come to mind in hearing a love story, questions which the human heart considers naturally: What is love, and how do you love? What does it look like, and how do you find it?

I am newly employed at Benedictine College, after graduating from a different kind of university, and it has been fascinating to me to observe student life here up close.

The fellowship, sponsored by the Center for Family Life at Benedictine College, turns on encountering these questions. Fellows study the theology of St. John Paul II, tutor local schoolkids on human dignity, and contribute to Catholic formation for Atchison families. But St. John Paul II is their patron for reasons that go beyond the reading material. The openness, itself, to such questions, and the ache to answer them, is the disposition one finds in the saint.

It makes him attractive: There’s a demeanor in a room of JPII Fellows of a simple and unabashed curiosity about love.

That’s pretty consistent with what I’ve found among Benedictine students. I hadn’t even heard of Benedictine College until I met several students at once, thrown into missionary community alongside them in the summer of 2023.

We grew close, all of us missionaries — and each of them is individually astounding to me. I can still remember that, of the several different colleges to which we belonged, a distinct character of Benedictine College stood out to me. This place, of which I had no experience beyond stories and personal witnesses, became a place of legend. From the crop of students I knew, it was theologically expansive, unique and proud, and a place of genuine friendship.

They did the sort of things I liked and wanted to do, except it felt too late for me to do them. It wasn’t – but there is something to receiving such formation at just the right time. Some of my newfound Benedictine friends grew up immersed in Catholicism, some more nominally. Upon entering college, though, they came together. To me, they represented ‘The Benedictine Student’: free, found, and purposeful.

First: Free. In freedom, they were unafraid. Unafraid of messing up, unafraid of exploring, and unafraid of being themselves. Essentially, unafraid of who they are. Such faith is an attractive thing.

Second: They’d been found, and they knew it. The number one characteristic I noticed is how they identified with Jesus, and how I was able to identify Jesus with them. That’s real community.

Third: their purposeful attitude was one of curiosity. Their curiosity was towards Jesus, towards others, towards the topics they studied confidently and devotedly. This was scholarship.

Along with my other missionary friends, they presented Christ to me. The more I knew of their persons, the more I knew about Christ — how he is, who he is, and how I can relate to him.

Funnily enough, Aaron and Melissa Riches answered the same way: “You don’t. You don’t know until you’re married to this other person. But there’s this feeling, of looking at the other person and seeing Christ and knowing you’re just going to follow him.”

By Emma fuentes