Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Speech at 2024 Ave Maria University Commencement (Transcript)

But that’s how it was right for elementary school: you just like you show up to the same class with everyone else who’s your age, you do the exact same thing. It’s that wide trail.

You know, at some point what happens is maybe you get to middle school and they say, “Okay, you get some choices. You can take Spanish or German. You can take home ec or shop.” That was us back in like the 90s.

Making Choices

And you get to make it in high school, you can make some more choices. What are some of your electives? And then when you get graduated high school, you get to choose.

Here’s the trail really branches out. You could stay in your hometown, go to the community college, you can go to military, if you go to work, you can go across the country to Florida. But you made a decision and it wasn’t wasn’t clear, but you still stayed on the path, right? There’s a sense of like, “Okay, where do I choose to go to college? What’s my major?” All these decisions became less and less clear.

But you at least had a track like you’ve had a path of some sort. If I’m a nursing major, this is the track. If I’m an engineering major, this is the track. If I’m an education major, this is the track. And then what happens is you get to this day, and the track runs out. You get to this day and there’s no more trail.

The only way to escape that is to just go to grad school, which is a great solution. But, but for everyone else, this is the day you start bushwhacking, like this is the day that you enter into the wilderness. Because up to this moment, there’s always been a trail.

Life in the Wilderness

And as of this moment, there will no longer be a trail. Even if you think, “Well, no, I know my vocation,” well, you might know the name of your vocation, but you don’t know where it’s going to lead you. “Well, no, I have an idea.” Yeah, you might have an idea, but from now on, it’s “Okay, here’s the destination; you have some tools, now go.” From now on, life will look like this: life will look like living in the wilderness. That’s what life will be like, living in the wilderness.

So because of that, I just want to, if you don’t mind, I want to go back to the wilderness. I want to go back to, let’s go to the scriptures because it’s important. We’ll go back to the book of Exodus.

What do you have? You have people of God. You have the chosen people of the Lord who are beloved by God, just like you, graduates, beloved by the Lord. And what does God do? God does something for them. He fights for them and He frees them.

God’s Chosen People

He makes them His own. This is so critical for us because every one of you have been baptized and consecrated in Jesus Christ. The Lord God has fought for you, He’s freed you, and He’s made you His own.

But that doesn’t mean that we just relax. What that means is it’s time for wilderness. Again, let’s go back to the Jewish people, the chosen people of God. God fought for them, He freed them, and He led them into the wilderness. Why? I think there might be many reasons, but one of the reasons why the people of Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness is because they were set free from slavery and they quickly realized that it’s easier to live as a slave than it is to live as a free person. They quickly realized, you know, horrible to live as a slave, but easier to live as a slave than to live as a free person.

That’s one of the reasons why if you read the book of Numbers, you get people of Israel, they’ve been set free from slavery, led to the Red Sea, God’s feeding them with bread from heaven, and they start to complain. And they start saying, you guys know this, right? They start saying like, “Oh, but back in Egypt we had like leeks and we had onions and we had melons, we had garlic.” Yeah, and you had slavery too.

Like what? But it’s easier to live as a slave than it is to live as a free person. It’s easier to live on that wide trail than it is to bushwhack.

God’s Purpose

But God didn’t make you and didn’t make the people of Israel. He didn’t make them for slavery, but He also didn’t make them for an easy life. He made them strong.

Why did He lead them into the wilderness? Because they’re His beloved people that He fought for and that He freed, but who needed to be stronger than they were. Because where He was going to lead them, they would need to have a strength that they didn’t yet have.

This is important: where He was going to lead them, they didn’t yet have a strength that they were going to need. And God wanted more for them than they actually wanted for themselves, and that’s why He allowed them to be in the wilderness. That’s why He allowed them to experience so much suffering.

That’s why He allowed them to experience these challenges. You know, I think sometimes, sometimes I’m kind of troubled, not troubled, not the word. I work with a lot of young people from middle school, junior high, high school, college age, and beyond, who their whole lives, they’ve heard that God loves them.

God’s Love and Life’s Challenges

And maybe God willing, you heard for your whole life that God loves you. God knows your name. He cares about you. He’s fought for you. He’s freed you. He loves you. Hopefully that’s true. But a lot of young people I know, if they hear this from their young age, “God loves you. He’s your Father in heaven.” And then what happens is they experience challenge.

They experience suffering. They experience grief. They experience loss. They experience life. And they say, “That can’t be true.”

Challenging God’s Goodness

How can God be good and me experience loss? How can God be good and me experience evil? How can God be good and me experience death? How can God be good and we have this, this challenge? How can God be good and we live in the wilderness? And so often the big challenge is this: how can God be a good Father if I’m going through so much pain and He doesn’t come and save me?

And so often we find ourselves in this place where like, maybe He isn’t a good dad. Maybe I can’t trust Him, and so many people find themselves in that place. And I have to say that I blame parents.

Sorry, I’m just telling you. Here’s what I mean. Here’s what I mean, because a lot of you have really good parents.

Helicopter Parenting

A lot of us have had really good parents. And so what do good parents do? I mean, especially with millennials and Gen Z, kind of a, here’s, here’s, here’s my take. Here’s my Gen X take. I apologize, but here we are. Is a number of years ago, there was the rise of what you called helicopter parents.

You guys know helicopter parents, right? Everyone knows this. It’s basically the idea of, here’s a child, they’re in trouble, so mom and dad come in and like this, “I’m getting you out of trouble. I’m here to extract, you know, extraction here.”

In fact, we had a deacon who worked as head of housing on our university for 25, 30 years. He retired about five years ago, and he said, he told me at the end of his tenure as being the head of housing, he said that, um, he said, “Father Mike, here’s the thing. When I first started working in housing at the university, I dealt with students because my last five to 10 years, I dealt with parents.”

Parental Involvement

I’d walk into my office and there’d be some parents sitting there. And I was like, “Oh, well, how can I help you?” Like, “Well, my child was having a problem with the roommate.” And he said, “Why am I, why am I not talking to your child?” Like, “No, no, you don’t have to talk to them, talking to me.” They would drive two and a half, three hours just to meet, to resolve the problem.

Because why? They care. Here’s a parent who loved their child. My child is in distress. My child is in trouble. I’m going to, I’m going to help them out. Helicopter parenting. We have a new iteration of parenting. I call it Zamboni parenting.

Zamboni Parenting

Now you might not know this because I live in Minnesota and we’re down here. But up in Minnesota, we have a thing called ICE, and we sometimes skate on that ice and the ice gets really, really rough. And so what a Zamboni does is Zamboni goes ahead of everyone ice skating, and this clears the path.

No ridges, no bumps, no, no, nothing in the way. This clears the path, and sometimes a good parent is like, “I’m going to make life easy for my child. I want to pave the way. I want to make it so that they can maximize their potential by setting up them in the ideal circumstances.” Zamboni parenting.

And so here’s the thing: if that’s what a good mom is, if that’s what a good dad is, if that’s what a good mom is, if that’s what a good dad is, is the one who, when you’re in trouble, comes and rescues you. The one who, like when you, before you set out, is the one who makes everything easy. Then who’s God?

Because here we find ourselves in challenge. We find ourselves in the wilderness and God doesn’t rescue us.

God’s Parenting

We find ourselves in a place of, we find obstacles and grief and real loss and God doesn’t pave the way for us. What’s that mean? Well, it means is that God wants more for us than we want for ourselves.

It means that God actually knows what it is to be a good parent, and a good parent is not one who takes their child out of suffering or out of pain. A good parent is not one who paves the way and makes life easier. The good parent is the one who says, “My job is to make my child stronger.”

The idea is this: a parent realizes, you guys know this as parents, you know, that like I cannot make life, I cannot make this world any safer. What I can do is I can make my children dangerous. I can’t make this world any less dangerous, but I can make my kids strong.

And God is a good dad, and God has placed us in this world that is beautiful and good but broken. And he said, “Okay, and for you to live here, I’m going to teach you how to live in the wilderness.” Because I want more for you than you want for yourself.

Bushwhacking and Strengthening Faith

So that’s bushwhacking. I’m going to help you take that next step. I’m not going to remove the tree. You have to find your way around it or through it. In fact, I love this. In scripture, it’s in Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul, chapter 14 of Acts of the Apostles. It says that St. Paul, he’s gone out, he’s been on mission and everything. He comes back, comes back to Antioch, and it says, “They strengthened the spirits of the disciples and exhorted them to persevere in the faith, saying, ‘It is necessary for us to go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.'”

Highlight this, one second. He’s there to strengthen the spirits of the disciples, and how he strengthens their spirits is he says, not like, “You guys, it’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.” He says, “It is necessary for us to go through many sufferings to enter the kingdom of God.” And that strengthened them.

Why? Because St. Paul is saying, “What you’re going through right now, this battle, this wilderness, this bushwhack, it’s normal. In fact, not only is it normal, you have to do this, because you have to become more than you are.”

Anti-Fragility

There’s a man, his name is Nassim Taleb. Some of you maybe read some books by Nassim Taleb. He has a book, one of my favorite books of his, is a book with a title that he discovered there wasn’t a word for it in any language.

So he said this, he said, “You look at the world, you look at nature, look at human beings, look at organizations, and you have some organizations, you have some people, you have some things that are fragile, right? So things that are fragile, they encounter some obstacle and they break. Duh.

So some things are resilient, that they are an organization or an organism, a person that encounters opposition, and they don’t break. Like an anvil. You know, an anvil gets hammered by a hammer and doesn’t break, but it also doesn’t become stronger.” As we said, we look around, we think like, “Okay, don’t be fragile, be more resilient.”

But he said, that if you look around at nature, at organizations, you look around at human beings, you look at the world, there are some things that are fragile, some things that are resilient, and there are some things that are more than resilient. And the word that he came up with, he had to invent the word, is there are some things that are anti-fragile. What he meant by anti-fragile is you’re not just resilient, you don’t just get beat up and you stay the same.

There are some things that when they encounter obstacle, they don’t break, they don’t remain the same, they get stronger. There’s some organizations that are like that. I would venture to say the Catholic Church is one of those organizations, that as we get up, it’s when we’re opposed that we become stronger. It’s when we find opposition that we become holier.

Personal Growth through Challenges

I would say this: you are an organism that is anti-fragile. I mean, just in your very biology. If you want to get stronger, what do you have to do?

You have to encounter obstacle, and that doesn’t break you down, it actually breaks you down to build you up. When you study, you study and you tax yourself, you test yourself, so that now you’re smarter than you were before. Your faith, it doesn’t grow when you’re in comfort.

Your faith doesn’t grow when you’re in your living room. Your faith doesn’t grow when you’re in a place without opposition. Your faith grows when you’re in the wilderness.

Your faith actually has the opportunity to grow when you’re bushwhacking and saying with every step, “Okay, God, this is opposition, this is an obstacle, you’re making me more and more the person I’m supposed to be.” Why? Because God wants more for you than you want for yourself, because it’s easy to live as a slave, easier to live as a slave than it is to live as a free person. So God is going to lead you into the wilderness, not to beat you down, not because He doesn’t love you, but because He loves you so much, He wants you to be stronger.

Learning to Trust God

And now as he teaches that, he teaches that the way he taught the Israelites by saying, “Okay, one step at a time, one day at a time.” I hate that, you guys, I’m just honest, full disclosure, hate it. I want to know, “God, what’s the plan for the year? God, what’s the plan for the next 20 years? I want to know, God, what’s it going to look like when I get to the end?”

God’s like, “No, no, no, one day.” God leads the people of Israel into the wilderness, and what does He do? He says, “Okay, I’m going to feed you.” “Awesome, thanks, Lord.” “Okay, only one day’s ration.” I’m like, “God, come on. No, we’ll feed you one day at a time.” “Yeah, but just get a little something extra, you know?” “Okay, on Fridays, we’ll give you something extra for today into tomorrow. Other than that, I’m going to feed you one day at a time.”

Why? So that you can learn to trust me. You guys, how many of us, we find ourselves in a place that’s like, “No, no, no, I can trust as long as I know the future. God, I promise, I just need to look at my bank account.

Okay, there’s something there. Now I can trust you, God.” But God says, “No, actually, in the wilderness, this bushwhacking plan, just trust me today. Right now, just take this next step.”

Trusting in God’s Plan

We have a bishop. My bishop is Bishop Daniel Felton. He’s awesome, and he reminds us of this every single time I talk to him, because he’s a person who’s like, he wants to know miles in advance what’s the plan.

But he always reminds us, he says, “No, no, God only gives us enough light for one more step.” And that’s what God has done for you. He’s given you enough light for one more step.

Now, when we’re on that track, we’re like, “Okay, I’m done with ninth grade, go to 10th grade. I know where I’m going.” But now in the wilderness, it’s time to bushwhack, and what’s going to happen is God is going to teach you in the wilderness, not only can you handle opposition to become stronger, not only can you handle this obstacle and grief and suffering become even holier, but also he’s going to give you one step at a time.

Even if you know, “Oh, my next step is I’m getting married.” Great. You have no idea what that’s going to look like.

Next step is I’m going to religious life. Yeah. Awesome. No idea what that’s going to look like. Go to the seminary. Praise the Lord. We have no idea what that’s going to look like. He will give you enough grace for one step so we can learn how to bushwhack, so we can learn how to trust him in the midst of this life.

Becoming Stronger through Training

One of the reasons I think is because we need to be stronger. So my mom, when we were kids, my mom could swim, but my mom was always afraid of the water. And so when we were kids, she didn’t just sign us up for swimming lessons, she put us in on the swim team.

Because here’s my mom who, yeah, she could swim, but she was afraid of the water. And she said, “I don’t want any of my kids to ever be afraid of the things that I’m afraid of. I don’t want my kids to ever be held back by the things that held me back because I want them to be stronger than they are. I want more for them than they want for themselves.” And so I need to put them in.

You guys, here’s the thing: I was the slowest kid in the slowest plane on the one swim team in my hometown, which means I was the slowest swimmer in the entire city for years. Well, my mom was like, “No, you need to because you need to be stronger than me. You need to be braver than me.” When God throws us in the deep end, he’s not trying to punish us. He’s training us. So one step at a time.

Of course, at some point, no matter what the step is, at some point, you and I are going to have to pick our spot. What I mean by that is this: I’m sure everyone here at Ave Maria University has heard of St. Maximillian Kolbe. Amen.

Okay. Some people are like, “I don’t know who.” Okay.

St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Story

So we all know the story. I knew the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe since I was a kid because I had been marveled St. Maximilian Kolbe comic book as a child. It exists; it’s awesome.

So I’ve known about Maximilian Kolbe my entire life. He’s been a hero of mine my entire life. So I know the story, right? Franciscan priest who goes to Auschwitz. Someone tries to escape, and so they select 10 random men to be starved. And the last man that gets selected is a father and a dad.

He begs the guards to spare his life. And so Maximilian Kolbe stands forward and says, “I’ll take his place.” And they ask him, “Well, why would you take his place?” And his simple answer was, “Because I’m a Catholic priest. This man has a wife. He has kids. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have any kids. Take me.” I remember thinking, that’s awesome. And it is awesome.

Maximilian Kolbe’s Legacy

I did not realize until just a couple of years ago. St. Maximilian Kolbe had a lot to lose. If you know anything about his actual life, more than just Auschwitz, you realize this man not only started a movement in the Catholic church that was unparalleled at the time in Europe.

This man at the time was a missionary to Japan and brought the gospel to Japan with others that was unprecedented in the past. At this point, before he got into Auschwitz, Maximilian Kolbe, he was basically the Fulton Sheen of Europe of his day. I mean, this guy, he had a magazine that had more subscribers annually than the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe combined.

This man had so much to live for. It’d be so easy for him in Auschwitz to say, like, “Yeah, well, it stinks to be those 10 guys.” Or even easier to say, “Oh, I feel so badly for them, but I’ve got a lot to live for.” It’d be easy for him to say, like, “Ah, poor guy, but, like, I got to stay alive because you guys, I have more to contribute. I have more to do.

I have further to go. I have more to offer this world.” It would have been really easy for Maximilian Kolbe to say some other place.

Choosing Your Spot

But here’s what he did. He chose his spot, and he said, “This is where I’m going to pour myself out.” And he died at 47 years old, which might to you sound super old.

To me, sounds like two years ago. But he chose his spot. He chose his spot and said, “This is where I’m going to pour myself out.” God only gives us enough vision for one step. But the day is going to come when you realize, “Okay, this is the spot I’m pouring myself out.” Some of you, it’s when you meet that spouse and say, “Okay, you’re the one. I’m pouring myself out in this relationship or with your kids.

These are the ones. I’m pouring myself out for these children.” Or “This is my parish; God, you called me to pour myself out for this parish or this religious community.”

And some of you, I’m telling you, some of you will be called to pour yourself out all at once, like Maximilian Kolbe. To give witness to the Lord Jesus Christ by your death in martyrdom. He will, my guess is, he’ll ask some of you to do that.

Most of us, he’ll say, “Just pick your spot and pour yourself out drop by drop by drop every day,” because that’s life in the wilderness. That’s life bushwhacking. We’re coming to the end.

The Purpose of the Wilderness

And that’s life day by day. There’s, you realize, the wilderness was for what? The wilderness was because these people, God’s chosen people that he fought for and he freed, he had a destination for them.

And the destination was the Promised Land, right? Amen? Yeah, you guys know this. The destination was the Promised Land. But you also know this. He trained them in the wilderness.

He trained them through bushwhacking to get to the Promised Land. Not because the Promised Land was an all-inclusive resort. It’s home now. It’s where your destination is. Yes, but do you realize this? We all know this, right?

That when they got to the Promised Land, what did they have to do? They had to fight. It wasn’t like, “Cross the Jordan. We’re home, everyone. Set up shop.” It was, “We’re home, everyone. Let’s go to battle.” That time in the wilderness wasn’t just preparation to go into the Promised Land to rest.

It was to go into the Promised Land because this is where we belong. And where we belong, where we live, we’re going to have to learn how to fight.

Life Is a Battle

That’s the thing. This is reality. For the last four years, for some of you, more than that; for some of you, less than that.

For the last four years, this time has been a preparation. Not for bliss after this, not for the all-inclusive resort after this, not for rest after this, but because the rest of this is going to be a battle. And so what we all need to be, we need to be more courageous.

Why? Because life takes courage. Because life in the Promised Land, even like even in your vocation, it takes courage. Why? Because love takes courage. And every one of you is called to love, even if you don’t do it perfectly.

And this is actually the last thing: every one of us is called to love. And love takes courage, even if we don’t do it perfectly.

A Mother’s Love

So, my mom, she passed away about a year and three months ago. And she’s awesome. Her name was Gudrun.

They called her Gudie. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. And one memory of my mom is that every breakfast, every morning, she’d get up and she’d make us breakfast. And every night, she’d make us lunches. We went off to school. And every night, she’d make us supper.

And so every morning, she’d go into the kitchen, and we had a fireplace in there. She’d go into the kitchen before anybody else got up. She’d make a fire in the fireplace, and she’d make breakfast.

So I grew up with bacon and eggs like a normal breakfast, or waffles, even Belgian waffles. She’s a great mom. Some of you have to wait to go to the Econolodge to get morning waffles. That was my life. You guys spoiled. I know.

In fact, my mom cooked for us so often that I remember going to middle school, and I was opening my locker next to a kid, and he said, he’s like, “Yeah, I just had a pop-tart for breakfast this morning.” I’m like, “Wait, a pop-tart? Did your mom make you breakfast?” He’s like, “My mom never makes me breakfast.” And I was like, “Doesn’t your mom love you? Like, what is…” I just associated that with… So, you know, I always just, she’d make us breakfast.

She’d make a lunch for us, make us dinner. I have to say this. It wasn’t until I got ordained that I was invited to people’s houses, and they were, you know, giving me food.

“Hey, father, come over for dinner.” “Great.” And it actually took me a couple years of going to people’s houses and eating their food to realize how good food could actually taste. Because I didn’t realize this. I didn’t realize that you don’t have to make meatloaf taste like sawdust.

You can actually… It can retain moisture. I didn’t know that.

I didn’t think that it was possible. I didn’t realize… I remember thinking, “Wow, I grew up… My mom’s a bad cook.” I had no idea.

Surprising Revelation

And then… So, I was like, “Okay, coming to terms with the truth, like, ‘Oh, wow, my mom made meals for us my whole life. She was a bad cook.'” And then a couple years ago, my sisters were like, “Oh, yeah, mom hates cooking.” And I was dumbfounded.

I was, “Are you serious?” Like, “Yeah, she hates cooking.” And I just reflected on this the last couple years. So, here’s my mom. Every day, she would get up at 5 a.m. and she would make me breakfast. So, here’s my mom.

Every day, she would get up and make us breakfast. Every night, she’d make us dinner. She wasn’t good at it. She hated it. And I never knew. It’s love, because sometimes love is just showing up.

Love in the Wilderness

In the wilderness, there will be people who need you. In the wilderness, the Lord is going to need you. He’s going to need you at some point, take that step.

He’s going to need you at other points to say, “Okay, this is my spot, I’m going to pull myself out.” You know what he doesn’t need? He doesn’t need perfect you. And the people around you, they don’t need perfect you. They might just need you. They might just need you to be perfect.

They might just need you. And for most of our lives, that might be all it is. Just showing up. Because sometimes love is just showing up. So, what do we do? Well, you do what you’ve done.

Do What You Have Learned

Here’s what I mean. We pray this prayer oftentimes. I hear this word of the Lord all these times.

It says, “Do what you have learned and you’ll be blessed.” On that trail, on that track, on that path, you learned a bunch. You learned that you need to talk to the Lord. You learned that you need to hear His word. You learned that when you fall down, you need the sacrament of reconciliation. You learned that you can’t figure this out yourself, so you need the church.

You learned that you need each other. So, when you bushwhack, remember, it’s easier to live as a slave than it is as a free person. Remember, God wants more from you and more for you than you want for yourself.

Remember, it’s just take one step at a time. Remember to pour yourself out. Remember that love is just showing up.

And remember, simply do the things you’ve learned and you will be blessed. Graduating class of 2024 of Ave Maria University, congratulations and God bless.

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