Remarks from the St. Thomas Aquinas Mass on Jan. 27, 2022
Like many of you, our children went to Catholic schools when they were young, and that meant they wore uniforms. Sometimes they didn’t mind. Other times, they objected. When they did, we would say the same things schools usually offer in defense: Uniforms have an equalizing effect. They avoid dress code battles. They promote unity among students. They limit distractions.
Running through all of these justifications is a single thread: When you go to school each day, your purpose is to learn. How you live your day should point you toward that goal. That includes dressing for the occasion.
It sounds like an old-fashioned idea, but it’s not. Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck to work every day. He even tried to introduce a uniform for Apple employees. He failed, but his reasons were familiar to Catholic school principals: A uniform limits distractions. It unifies a group. Most importantly, it allows you to focus on your purpose.
Don’t worry. I’m not about to tell you that we’ve decided to require uniforms at Catholic University. But I do want to encourage you to adopt a condign and related virtue. It’s the virtue of simplicity.
There are several ways we speak of this virtue. In speech, simplicity is associated with honesty — it’s a virtue that avoids duplicity. In daily life it is associated with temperance as a means of avoiding excess in our acquisition of things. This is the virtue that has made Marie Kondo famous. She calls it “tidying,” but she says “[t]he true goal of tidying is to clear away clutter so you can live the life you want.”
Today I want to recommend a different simplicity — the kind that gives you singularity of purpose. It begins with remembering every day why you are here — here at Catholic University, and more importantly, here on earth. St. Thomas Aquinas, whom we honor today, can help with that. In his Summa Theologica he considers some 500 questions and responds to about 10,000 objections. That sounds complicated, not simple, and in a way, it is. But the whole of the Summa can be summed up in two Latin words: exitus and reditus. All things come from God and return to God. That’s where we find our purpose — what Marie Kondo calls “the life we want.”
Simplicity requires us to align our lives with that purpose. For most of us that won’t require wearing a uniform or a black turtleneck. But it will require putting prayer and study first; practicing charity in daily life; avoiding too much time on Instagram.
Above all, simplicity requires that we keep our eyes fixed on our goal. There’s a scene in the movie Apollo 13 that I find hard to forget. It shows a moment the crew had to correct course. The problem was they couldn’t access their guidance systems. The only way to do it was to steer the ship while keeping the earth in view in a small window. Steadfastly fixing their attention on their home kept them on track. For us it is not a distant earth that keeps our purpose clear and our lives simple. It’s a heaven that is much nearer than we realize.
May God bless you this semester. May you keep him in view.
Read more about the 2022 St. Thomas Aquinas Mass