Everything Matters

This year, we invited the photographer of the Denver Catholic Register (the official biweekly paper of the diocese of Denver) to our CL Way of the Cross in order to have some professional pictures of our beautiful gesture...

This year, we invited the photographer of the Denver Catholic Register (the official biweekly paper of the diocese of Denver) to our CL Way of the Cross in order to have some professional pictures of our beautiful gesture, and to give visibility to what we organize throughout the Diocese. Dan, the photographer, followed us through the streets of downtown, always a bit ahead of the procession, finding the best spot to take a great shot from the perfect angle. Once the gesture was over and everyone was leaving, he came up to me and asked for an extra copy of the booklet. “I want to read it.” It was obviously hard for him to follow the readings and the songs since he was busy taking pictures. And yet, what he saw was enough to ask. A conversation started. Dan works for the Diocese in his spare time. His full time job is at the Denver Post in the sports section. I invited a few friends of mine to join the conversation which very soon shifted towards the Broncos, the Avalanche, and sports in general. It was getting late but we wanted to continue the conversation. After all, as one of us put it, “It is everyone’s dream to be a sports writer!”

A few weeks later, some of us had dinner with Dan and he told us of a recent project produced by the Post that caught unexpected attention. It was the documentary “Everything Matters”, which tells the story of Adams City High School in Denver and its football team. After losing every game for six consecutive seasons, a new coach was hired. The Post, almost fortuitously, decided to start following the team and filming a documentary. We remained intrigued, gathered again a few weeks later, and watched the documentary. We were very struck by the approach of the coach towards the players, his sincere love for their persons through, and yet beyond, football. We were also challenged by watching the many hardships in the lives of the kids attending an inner-city high school not far from where many of us live and work every day.

We decided to contact the coach, telling him that we wanted to better understand his way of educating those players. He agreed to meet us for dinner. We asked him questions about education and about his life. He was the one who talked for most of the night. At the end, he asked us to meet again. And this was the final surprise. “I want to know more about how you live your faith. I want to see you again and talk about faith.”

He understood. Our passion for reality, our passion for the other is not a program that we define a priori. We did not plan these encounters that led us to find out so many things about the city where we live and provoke so many questions in us. Our initiative is totally generated by something else. The experience of faith that we have is what generates our gaze. We found ourselves not to be clowns, but witnesses of an interesting way of living faith that is inevitably apparent to others.

The documentary is available at: http://extras.denverpost.com/everythingmatters/