SEEK21

An edited version of this article appears in the FOCUS Europe Spring Newsletter

Nobody knows of my aversion to Americans better than my dear Spanish friend Juana, who I had the pleasure of living with in Toulouse in the summer of 2019. We were volunteering with ARC as tour guides in the frankly oversized UNESCO-listed Basilique Saint-Sernin, leading all sorts of visitors around the dubiously extensive collections of relics and up the winding staircase to the gallery to take a closer at the mosaics. Having volunteered in Nice the previous year, I was pretty confident striking up a conversation with just about anyone - unless they were a glaringly obvious American tourist. There was something about the white shirt, beige shorts, baseball cap and sneakers which made me look down and pretend I was busy at the welcome desk. No generous tip would make up for the energy expended in essentially giving a French history crash course to contextualise my remarks, or even worse, spending the whole tour being told my British accent was so cute, and that I spoke like the Queen.

A dreamy 12C Romanesque sort of summer - although the hourly tolling and Ave Maria's of the bell tower were not so dreamy after two weeks of living next door...

I know this is an enormous and unfair generalisation, and that the handful of American friends I’ve met in London and in Cambridge, and too in Vienna, have more than made up for these few troublesome past experiences. Yet I think the very reserved British part of me does still internally cringe a little when faced with an overenthusiastic American, or the part of me that has spent the most part of the past few years studying European languages and culture winces when an American refers to Europe as if it is one homogeneous blob. And so, when it comes to something as personal as faith, I was just a little hesitant about four days of American speakers - what would y’all bring to the table?

SEEK is the annual student conference of the American organisation FOCUS - the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, which has missionary teams serving on campuses across the States and also a few in Europe, including at the University of Vienna. SEEK is a sort of a Catholic Glastonbury - headlined by the big names (Fr Mike Schmitz (487K YouTube subscribers), Bishop Robert Barron (389K)) and attended by swathes of overexcited students; a record 27 000 participated this year from 20 countries. Dependent on local restrictions and time-zones, there was a mixture of in person events, live-streamed and on-demand content, as well as plenty of Zoom break-out groups. Despite having followed all the hype around SEEK on the fascinating microcosm which is Catholic Instagram for the past few years, this was my first time attending, and I’ll just say that it is entirely deserving of the hype.

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of us came into SEEK grappling with all the questions and difficulties the past year has raised, and trying to work out where we stand (or where we should stand) as a generation of Catholic students. Not just politically, but in our relationships with our friends, our roles in our universities, in the increasingly polemical discourse we find ourselves in. SEEK did not brush past any of these issues, but dived right into them, and reminded us who we are, what we are made for, and where we are heading.

The keynotes focused on the core tenets of Catholicism and the Gospel Message – starting by looking at who the Person of Jesus is and what happened on the Cross, then moving onto why we need the Church and how we can extend the invitation to others. The final keynote was from Curtis Martin, the founder of FOCUS, who encouraged and emboldened us to share our faith, to be missionary disciples. There was also an extensive range of TED-talk style ‘impact sessions’ available to choose from, which allowed speakers to draw on their own experiences and explore more specific topic areas. I was particularly moved by Chika Anyanwu’s talk entitled ‘Sacred Tension’ which explored the intersection between racism and religion, and Scott Hahn’s insights in his session ‘The Bible and The Mass’.

Online conferences don't lend themselves too well to photos, so here's the double rainbow which appeared an hour before we started the Zoom marathon...

I could write heaps about what I learned over SEEK – and scribbling away in my notebook, indeed I did - but I think what really cut through the impressive tech and social media graphics was the simplicity of the message. SEEK was not about the speakers – indeed one of them even said that if it is your name on the marquee and not Jesus’, then something has gone very wrong – but about the Truth they were conveying with such clarity and urgency. Through their testimonies and words, they reminded of us of our identity as daughters and sons of God and encouraged us to root ourselves in this. They reminded us of the abundant love God has for each and every one of us, of the promise of eternal hope in Jesus, of the beauty of the universal Catholic Church. They reminded us that God is working through the messiness and seeming chaos of the world around us; that He is with us in our difficulties, in our frustration, and especially in our grief. The tagline of the conference was ‘Come. See. Hear. Encounter’, and even though I hardly moved from my sofa in London for four days, I think I did just that.

FOCUS may seem like an intimidatingly enormous American ‘top-down’ organisation, but I think it works because it is precisely the opposite of that. With missionaries engaged in their local communities, forging meaningful friendships with students and bringing small groups together to read the Bible weekly, FOCUS is very much about nurturing those grassroots. What FOCUS brings to the table is not dazzlingly innovative or ultra-modern – and I think this is what I failed to realise at first – what FOCUS does, and what I’ve experienced through the wonderful FOCUS missionaries here in Vienna, is exactly what Jesus does with his own disciples; he eats with them, prays with them, reads scripture with them, and walks alongside them – wherever along their journey they find themselves. There’s a multitude of ways to run chaplaincy events and invite people into our faith, but I’d say that one which follows the example Jesus himself gives us is a pretty solid way to go.