CHAPTER 1
Jay
“[T]he Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again.”
St. Ignatius of Antioch (died ca. 107)
Within a few minutes after Jay answered the phone, I knew I was speaking with someone who in generations past would have been thought of as a “man’s man.”
A forty-six-year-old husband and father of two college-age children, he holds no less than three positions at the Catholic high school for which he works—history teacher, guidance counselor and track coach. In fact, the latter is a demanding assignment all its own since there are three separate squads to manage—indoors, outdoors and cross-country. All three, he notes matter-of-factly, “just crush everyone.” And that’s no bluster: His teams have won ten of their state’s last twelve championships; the cross-country team was nationally ranked in 2001.
Like the firefighters and police officers who rushed into the burning World Trade Center towers that fateful September morning, here is a man who prefers to communicate his devotion to God through actions rather than words. “Terse” would be too strong a word to describe his responses to my questions, but he certainly got right to the point on each and, once satisfied he had put it across, let it be known by his silence that he w
