Colleen Shantz is Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins in the Faculty of Theology and cross-listed to the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. Her research explores the formation of Christianity in the first three centuries CE and especially the role of affect, ritual, and religious experience in the origins of Christianity. She teaches a course on the foundations of justice in the gospels, which is where she first got to know Michael Iafrate.
Between the Present and the Hoped-for Future: Reflecting on the Life of Michael J. Iafrate
Last week a memorial service was held on campus (and Zoom) for Michael J. Iafrate who died in May of this year. Michael was a doctoral student at the Faculty of Theology, beloved to friends across the continent, a prophetic voice in the Catholic Church, a gifted singer-songwriter, a father, partner, brother, and son.
Such a list of roles may seem pro forma in a reflection on a life, but I muted it—considerably. Let me add just two more characteristics to illustrate: Mike was also a committed Weird Al fan and the lead author of The Telling Takes Us Home (2015), a call to justice that is intimately tied to the work of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia (CCA) where he was Co-Coordinator. Few lives encompass such breadth of passion.
Mike’s death came unexpectedly. He was just 44 and he left behind his three young children and his spouse, Jocelyn Carlson, after being diagnosed with leukemia about 6 months earlier. But his death violated expectations in another way, simply by being so out of sync with the size and vitality of his life and the work of justice ahead of him. His work with CCA regularly engaged coal mining in West Virginia, especially its effects on the dignity of labourers, care for the environment, and attention to the poor and vulnerable. You may recognize these three themes as central to Catholic Social Teaching. Mike gave urgent voice to their intersecting effects for the people of West Virginia.
Perhaps without realizing it, I think that many of us who knew Mike had invested in the future of his work for justice. Every day that he took up those causes—sometimes in the face of significant opposition—he helped me, among others, to hope that better conditions were possible. When we saw him pursuing justice, we saw a bridge between things as they are now and the world as it should be. Often, we fallible humans don’t realize we’ve been depending on such links between reality and hope until our expectations are violated.
Of course, Mike’s death also came in the middle of an even larger set of meaning violations: a pandemic, for goodness’s sake; a more urgent awareness of the pervasiveness of racism; and here, in Canada, the devastating proof of genocide and the failure of episcopal leadership to respond meaningfully. Many of the links between our values and expectations, and the realities of the world have been fractured during these past months. To borrow an image from Romans 8, the earth itself groans with grief for the children who were harmed as it groans in the degradation of strip mining.
In fact, that section of Romans was one of the readings from the memorial service for Michael. In Romans 8:18-27, Paul talks about the whole of creation groaning as it waits for liberation: “Even we—who have the first harvest of the spirit—even we groan within ourselves longing for our adoption, the liberation of our bodies. …However, hope that is seen is not hope—for who hopes for what they already see?”
To the degree that Catholic universities are formed by principles of Catholic Social Teaching, they can also generate such bridges between the present disorder and what we only hope for. When we foster attention to human dignity, for example, not only in what we teach but how we teach it, we better prepare people to create the pathways between the present moment and the liberation for which the world is aching. I give thanks for the way our brother Michael Iafrate lived into that vision in his particular, powerful, complex, too-short life. May many more like him be nurtured through relevant and hopeful education.
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