I can’t remember when it occurred to us that putting a foosball table in a college dorm room would be a good idea. What I do remember is that we found one on eBay, and then had to pay a courier company to lug it up Mt. St. James to our dorm room in Lehigh Hall. The day that the table arrived a large green 16 wheeler somehow made its way through the windy streets of campus and to the street behind the dorms known as Easy St., because it was one of the few flat streets on campus, to drop off the foosball table. Once it was dropped in the middle of my bedroom, the assembly happened rather quickly, and the ball dropped for the first game of foosball. My roommate John had a table as a kid, and was already very good. I played my first game on crutches; I was just recovering from a broken ankle the story of which I will tell later on. From then on, however, the foosball table played a central roll in my life for the next couple of years.
Yes, for Junior and Senior year of college, I had a foosball table in my room with all of the immeasurable joy that it brought with it. Thursday nights during senior year, the guys would assemble in my room, drink beer, and play foosball. Rather than hitting the bars or partying, we stayed in my dorm room, and enjoyed each other’s company. Quickly these nights became known as foos and booze (though the sheer amount of booze wasn’t really all that much) and we would often times invite special guests. The games really became a medium for something much more important though, it was an excuse to get together, to talk, to share what was going on in our lives. As the real world began to encroach upon our idyllic existence at college students at Holy Cross, it gave us a few hours every week to stop thinking about the future and just live in the present.
For my friend Brian and his roommate Tim, who would become a Naval officers at the end of the year, it meant that they didn’t have to think about the possibility that they could be deploying to war after the summer was over. For my friend Joe P, it afforded some time off of thinking about his Senior thesis. For my friends Pat and Tom, it was a time when they didn't have to worry about their applications to PhD. programs (Both of them, being super-geniuses, have long since become Drs. Pat and Tom) For my roommate Joe H, it was a time just to enjoy college, and for my friend Matt, it was a time when he just didn’t have to think about the next step. For me, this was a time when I didn’t have to be “the kid becoming a priest” and just be with my friends.
We were often cautious about who we invited, in fact some friends of ours once told us that they were bothered by the fact that they were never invited, but the truth is that this wasn’t ever about exclusion. What these Thursday nights were about a time to be together, and just be. There was a sense that among us, in our own group, we could just be ourselves, and be real and honest with each other, and more importantly just have fun. What made the whole thing so enjoyable, though ,was that in a period of time in someone’s life where their every thought is supposed to be in the future, we were living in the present, if only for a few hours every Thursday night.
There can be something very dangerous about living in the future. Certainly it is irresponsible not to make plans and it is equally irresponsible to not live up the commitments that we have made today tomorrow, but if one lives one’s whole life in the future, one risks missing the most important moment, right now. St. Therese of Lisuex once wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Story of a Soul, that: “When we yield to discouragement it is usually because we give too much thought to the past and to the future.” The truth its that the past is over, and sometimes when it has been, like it has been for most of us, an imperfect one we can give ourselves over to worrying about it too much. Given where I was heading back then, if I had thought too much of the past and all of the things I had messed up in my life, I am not sure that I would have had the courage to go forward. At the same time, if I had put too much thought into the future, I could have had the doubts that even St. Ignatius had at the beginning, and would have asked myself how I intended to live this kind of life for the next 70 years.
The irony is, that if we can just focus on the present, then we can see our past as grace history, not because it was perfect or that everything went perfectly, but because of the people and experiences that have made it precious. In that moment we can be grateful to God for having brought us this far, even if we are in the middle of a tough moment, because we have made it this far. The other irony about focusing on the present is that we can live in hope, and not in fear, because if we can see how good God is in the present, even in the most mundane of realities, we can trust that that will hold true no matter where we go, who we meet, or what we are to become.
On those Thursday nights, I could be grateful for having met Joe P on a service trip to Narrows, VA. I could remember with joy meeting Brian at the incoming students reception for students from near Hartford. I could put faith in the fact that God could put people in my life who would have been unlikely friends because of the different social circles that we had been in the first three years of college in Matt. I could be grateful for a great roommate like Joe H. This was a graced history. It was also because of those little moments of the present that when that foosball dropped onto the table for the first time every Thursday, the years ahead became all the more hopeful.
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