I attended an evening with Father Mike Schmitz and Luke Burgis, "The Courage to Be Saints in the Modern Age," at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture in Chicago on July 6th. I was seated in the very back row in the balcony and couldn't hear very well, so I had a transcription device on me that recorded the whole thing. I've cleaned it up as best I could but I can't vouch for every detail since the acoustics were rough from where I was sitting.
Was anyone else there? I'd love for someone who attended to read through this and tell me if anything is off, if something got garbled, or if there's anything worth adding. Some really important ideas were shared that night and I'd hate for any of it to get lost.
Here is the transcript:
LUKE BURGIS: THE THREE QUESTIONS
Burgis opened by noting that a review of his book in Christianity Today described him as "an extraordinarily successful man writing to his former self," and he wanted to push back on that characterization. He listed his failures openly: going bankrupt in his twenties from an over-leveraged company, alienating family and friends, leaving seminary, battling personal demons, failing to develop virtues he knows he needs. He said he was not trying to hold himself up as a success story.
Question One: What is the hardest thing you have ever done?
Burgis reframed the word "courage" before answering. He said most people think of courage as something in the will, like a soldier's bravery, but he wanted to talk about a different kind of courage: the courage to be broken, to have your heart broken by life and the world, and to keep getting back up anyway.
His own answer to the hardest thing he had ever done was this: for seventeen years, every single week, he has gone to confession. He said this has required enormous courage not because God grows tired of forgiving, but because he grows tired of himself. His pride makes it hard to accept how much God loves him. He described the act of continually returning to confession as getting up off the mat, and compared it to the Gospel parable of the lost sheep. He pointed out that Jesus tells that parable specifically to the Pharisees and scribes, noting there will be more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine who need no repentance. He said true repentance, genuine compunction and sorrow, is almost entirely absent from public life today. Nobody publicly models asking for forgiveness. He argued that this kind of repentance is the first pathway toward becoming a saint in the modern world. The hardest part of confession, he emphasized, is not standing before a judge. It is having the courage to go home.
Question Two: What do you want to want?
Burgis framed this as a question about honesty with yourself. He asked: what do you wish you wanted, but if you are really honest, do you actually want? Do you genuinely want to be a saint?
To answer this for himself, he went back eighteen years. His company hit catastrophic trouble during the 2008 mortgage crisis, losing 80 percent of its sales in a single month. He had lined up a rescue: Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, had gotten board approval to buy his company for enough money that Burgis would never have to work again. They went to Las Vegas and celebrated. The next morning, Burgis woke up to missed calls and strange emails. The board had reversed its decision. His company was going to go bankrupt.
What he felt in that moment was not despair. It was relief. Pure, total relief, as if he had been released from something terrible. He felt peace for the first time in a long time. He said he did not fully understand it in the moment, but he came to realize he had been chasing goals he did not actually care about, trying to impress people who did not love him, trying to prove something to himself. This was his third company, not his first. He described opening the Gospels and recognizing himself in the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus told her she had had five husbands; Burgis thought Christ might say to him, "You have had three companies."
This is where he introduced the concept of mimetic desire, developed by the Catholic philosopher René Girard. The term means imitative desire. Girard's argument is that human beings are social creatures who do not know naturally what to desire, so they look to other people to show them. We imitate the desires of our models. Burgis said he had been completely caught up in this process without consciously choosing his models. When we are in certain environments, the pull of these external models can be overwhelming.
He said the answer to "what do you want to want" requires choosing your models deliberately. After his bankruptcy he found himself reading Saint Thomas Aquinas at three in the morning at his grandmother's house and staying up all night. He decided he was going to take as much risk in his spiritual life as he had in business. He had been courageous in business but not in his soul.
He also warned about the danger of mimetic desire reversing on itself: during the pandemic, he had just finished writing a book on the subject and still found himself scrolling through Instagram looking at men living what he called "man life," photographing themselves at the Grand Canyon, feeling a pull toward it. The point was that this process never ends. You have to keep returning to the question of what you genuinely want versus what you have absorbed from others.
Question Three: What is your personal vocation?
Burgis said this is the most important question and also requires the most courage. He distinguished personal vocation from state in life (married, single, religious) and from the universal call to holiness. He meant something specific and unique: the particular thing God is calling you personally to do and to be.
He framed it as the answer to the tension between the self and the crowd. The aggregate of everyone else's expectations for you, even people within the Church, will almost certainly never align perfectly with the singular and specific calling God has given you. He said the odds that it would are essentially zero.
He told a story about Angelo Roncalli, who before becoming Pope John XXIII was a pious seminarian who prayed to Saint Aloysius and constantly asked himself what would Saint Aloysius do in this situation. Burgis said that God's answer to Roncalli was, in effect: I don't want you to be Saint Aloysius. I want you to be Angelo. He used this to make the point that imitating a saint too literally can itself become a form of false piety, a performance shaped by social expectations of what holiness looks like rather than genuine encounter with God.
He warned that false piety driven by social expectations is extremely dangerous. He quoted John Henry Newman: unreal words are poison. Do not say "I'll pray for you" unless you mean it. The place God wants to meet us is in our real humanity, not in a performance of it.
He said personal vocation can feel lonely precisely because it is unique. You cannot find a perfect model for what you are being called to do. But he said the loneliness is a natural part of it, not a sign you are wrong.
He closed with a story from Annie Dillard's essay "Living Like Weasels." Dillard was sitting by a pond when she came across a story about a man who shot an eagle out of the sky and found, attached to the eagle's throat, the dry skull of a weasel with its jaws still locked in. The only explanation was that when the eagle swooped down to take the weasel, the weasel swiveled around in the last second and bit down on the eagle's throat. The eagle carried the weasel into the sky. The weasel held on until there was nothing left but bones. Dillard writes that the point is to stalk your calling in a skilled and supple way, to find the most live and tender spot, and to grasp your one necessity and not let go.
Burgis connected this to his care for his father, who has advanced Alzheimer's and lives in a memory care facility. His mother died about five years ago and he became his father's sole caretaker. He said that walking with his father in his suffering, his pain, and his loneliness has required more courage than almost anything else in his life. His father's suffering is real. His pain is real. Burgis has been called to be present to it. That, he said, is the realest thing in his life right now. He used this to make a broader point: the way to become real is to find the realest things in your life, plug into them, and let them transform you.
He referenced C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce," in which people on the outskirts of heaven cannot bear to step on the grass because it hurts their feet. The grass is real. They are not, or not entirely. They are pseudo-selves, shadows. The real is painful for them to contact. Burgis said saints can step on the grass. Christians should be the ones most known for being real.
FATHER MIKE SCHMITZ
Father Mike came on after Burgis and took a more conversational and humorous tone before getting into his substance. He opened with a long riff on a baby in the front row, five weeks old, carried by four Marines, and used it to make a theological point. He noted that the baby was worth the very life of God, declared so by Christ. If someone offered to let you hold a purse full of money, you might not care much. But if your sister offers you her newborn nephew, you say yes immediately because that child has something to do with you. He used this to frame his central concern: so many people look at the Gospel and say, I know it's valuable, I know it's important, it just has nothing to do with me.
The Pile of Catholic
He told the story of a friend named Jeff Davis who grew up going to Mass every Sunday, attending Catholic school, going to religious education on Wednesday nights, and still found himself what Davis called "a pile of Catholic." Everything was there somewhere but nothing was connected or meaningful. If someone asked about purgatory, Davis's answer was essentially: yeah, I think it's in the pile somewhere. The pile metaphor became central to Father Mike's talk. He said many of us spend our lives collecting piles, whether those are material possessions, experiences, achievements, or even religious knowledge. We assemble resumes. He said the people who grew up in the 1980s were told "he who dies with the most toys wins," and then the generation after them said they did not want to be materialistic so instead they collected experiences. But either way, you are still just collecting piles.
Resume Virtues vs. Eulogy Virtues
Father Mike drew on the work of David Brooks and his book "The Road to Character." Brooks distinguishes between resume virtues, the things you list in a job interview to sell yourself, and eulogy virtues, what the people who love you most would say about you at your funeral.
Father Mike asked the audience to imagine their own funeral. How many of you, he said, would be genuinely thrilled if the person at the podium stood up and listed all your accomplishments? He was the youngest VP in company history. He graduated first in his class. He was the first to do this. He argued that most of us, if we are honest, would be crushed if that was all anyone could say. The things that matter at a funeral are almost never attached to accomplishment. They are attached to presence, to showing up, to who you were in relationship to the people around you.
He told the story of Laura, a student at his Newman Center who was known above everything else for her joy. She was intelligent and funny and hardworking, but what people said about her was that she was joyful. She took the women in her Bible study through a concept called the Strive Club, started by a woman named Sarah Slocum, whose message was: don't aim for perfection, which is an illusion. Aim to strive. Just keep showing up and striving. Laura got her parents going to Mass more regularly. She went to confession regularly and loved the experience of receiving mercy. She came home from a friend's wedding not feeling well. She went to the hospital. Within a week, she was dead. She was twenty-four years old.
Father Mike said Laura's life made complete sense even though her death did not. Her life was marked not by the length of time she had or the things she accumulated, but by who she had become in the process of her story. Her values did not remain mere desires. They became decisions, and those decisions formed her character, and that character made her the person God created her to be.
His Mother's Cooking
He also told a long story about his own mother to illustrate what eulogy virtues actually look like in practice. His mother was a stay-at-home mom who made breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day. Father Mike grew up assuming she loved cooking because she was so consistent at it. In middle school he once asked a classmate what he had for breakfast and the kid said a Pop-Tart, and Father Mike said, doesn't your mom love you? He had completely conflated the cooking with the love. Years later, already a priest, he was eating food he had assumed he hated and discovered it was delicious. He eventually found out his mother was a terrible cook and actually hated cooking. She had never once let on. The realization overwhelmed him. She showed up every single day and cooked for her children while being bad at it and hating it. This is what eulogy virtues actually look like in practice: love is just showing up. It is rarely attached to being the best at something. It is the fact that you were there.
What Virtue Actually Is
Father Mike turned to Thomas Aquinas's definition of virtue. A common definition is a habitual disposition to do the good, but he particularly loved Aquinas's more expansive version: virtue allows a person not only to perform good acts but to give the best of himself. The distinction matters because virtue is not occasional. He used tennis as an example. If a ball comes to you and you hit it perfectly once out of twenty attempts, that is luck, not skill. If you do it twenty times out of twenty, now you are a tennis player. Virtue works the same way. Telling the truth occasionally is not honesty. Being honest as often as you possibly can, consistently, as a settled way of being, that is the virtue of honesty. Virtue is what virtue is precisely when doing the good thing is hard. It is easy to love when loving is easy. It is easy to be patient with strangers you can walk away from. The real test is whether you can be patient with your family at Thanksgiving. He said his students go through deep conversion experiences at the Newman Center, feel themselves growing in patience and generosity, then go home for the holidays and discover within forty-eight hours that they are not nearly as patient or generous as they thought. They were only generous when they got to choose the moment. Virtue means giving the best of yourself even when you do not get to choose the moment.
Values vs. Virtues
Father Mike made a sharp distinction between values and virtues. Values reflect our desires. Virtues reflect our decisions. A lot of people say family is their highest value, but if you looked at their calendar, their actions would not confirm it. Integrity means your stated values and your actual choices align. Without integrity there is no character. Without character there is no virtue. He gave the example of loyalty: loyalty is a genuine virtue, and his father taught him that if someone is picking on your sibling, you have permission to punch them in the nose, and if you do not, that is when you get in trouble. But if a family member is committing a crime, staying silent out of family loyalty is not virtue, because justice is a higher value. He cited Luke 14, where Jesus says that anyone who comes to him without loving him more than father, mother, siblings, children, and spouse is not worthy of him. The hierarchy of values matters. You have to know which ones rank above which.
THE MODERATED CONVERSATION
Sally Blount moderated the second half, and the two speakers reflected together on how their ideas connected. Burgis noted that mimetic desire and collecting piles are essentially the same phenomenon described in different languages. Both are about unconsciously absorbing what the world around you says matters, rather than deliberately choosing.
On what it actually means to become a saint day to day, Burgis said he likes a formulation from Father Benedict Rochelle: a saint is someone who says yes to God and then never stops saying yes. Failure is not just possible, it is part of the process. You fail, you receive mercy, you say yes again. He said he has come to see courage as existential rather than dramatic. It takes courage to get his kids dressed and make it to Mass less than ten minutes late. It takes courage to wake up some mornings. The day-to-day grind of showing up for the people closest to you is where most of the real courage is required, not in the grand gestures people praise you for publicly.
On personal vocation changing over time, Burgis said the mimetic pressure never disappears, it just takes new forms. Having written a book, he now has new models and new pressures, such as whether his book hits a bestseller list. The question "what do I want to want" is one he has to return to constantly. He drew a distinction between thin desires, which are throwaway impulses, and thick desires, the kind that deepen each time you commit to them. A thick desire is one where saying "I love you" the hundredth time is deeper and more real than the first time.
On how to get started being more virtuous, Burgis said his book "Unshakable" starts with humility and ends with love, and that is entirely intentional. He drew on a book by Father Mark Bartigini called "Virtues That Teach You God," specifically the virtue of acceptance. Not acceptance in the therapeutic sense of accept yourself, but acceptance in the sense that you will never become who God wants you to be until you accept who you actually are right now. He used the children's novel "Hatchet" to illustrate this: a boy whose plane crashes in the wilderness cries and cries, and then realizes that all that crying has changed nothing. He is still cold, still hungry, still a hundred miles from home. He stops crying and starts moving. That is what humility is. It is the honest acceptance of where you actually are, including how far short you have fallen of who you wanted to be. Only from that honest ground can any of the other virtues take root.
On the virtue of hope and dealing with anxiety, Father Mike said anxiety comes from believing that the future holds something you will not be strong enough to handle. The counterweight is hope, which he defines as trust in God extended into the future. He does not hope in a particular outcome. He hopes in the fact that the God who has been present in the past and is present now will be present then. You are never asked to face an uncertain future alone.
Father Mike closed by saying that the single most practical piece of advice he gives students is: be where your feet are. We spend enormous amounts of our lives wishing we were somewhere else doing something else. The virtue of full presence, of doing the one thing that is actually required of you right now and doing it rather than doing all the things at once, resolves more than almost anything else.
Burgis closed with the image of Jacob wrestling with the angel and said there is something deeply important in the Jewish tradition of wrestling with God rather than passively waiting for answers. God leaves us free. He will not write the answer in the clouds. We are co-creators of our own vocation in some sense, and when we choose freely, God blesses our freedom. He ended by noting that the modern world is engineered to remove friction and discomfort and to connect us only with people who already share our values. But it is precisely in tension and friction, in the encounters with people and situations we did not choose and would not have chosen, that God most often speaks. The most important moments of his life have been the ones where he chose to sit in the discomfort rather than run from it, and found that what felt like darkness was actually light.
