My first meeting with Agnes proved to be an ethical dilemma, quite a fitting symbol of things to come. I met her on the way to church during my first Sunday at college, a weekend normally spent by freshmen imbibing as much alcohol as possible while starting friendships that will last a lifetime. I, as a new convert to Christianity, was excited about attending church and woke even while my roommate, a Southern Baptist minister, slept. The campus was peaceful on that sunny morning, and there were few distractions as I contemplated God—few distractions, that is, until I saw her. She was beautiful and lost, and I was more than happy to fulfill my Christian duty by showing her the way to church. Little did I know that I would fulfill this role in a far more significant sense.
As we walked toward the university services, I tried to find out what I could about her, but the trip was not long enough for us to get past initial pleasantries. The dilemma occurred when Agnes announced her intention to attend the Protestant services. Though I was non-denominational at the time, I had promised my high school girlfriend that I would attend Catholic Mass once a week. Cindy and I were having problems in our relationship, and so I spent several moments trying to convince my conscience that the joy of sitting next to Agnes and talking with her afterwards outweighed any obligation to a woman who was quickly becoming an ex-girlfriend. This was no time to start sacrificing for principle, and, yet, I could not bring myself to break a promise.
I fidgeted often during the seemingly interminable Mass and got little from either the readings or the homily. My thoughts were more on Agnes than God. After Mass, I failed to catch up with her and lost all hope of ever finding her on the large and foreign campus. I was delighted and reassured when she appeared at my doorstep a week later. I thanked God for rewarding my virtue and assumed she sensed the same attraction I felt. I was disappointed to learn that she was actually seeking assistance with her homework, not her social life. Ironically, Agnes lived only a few doors away from me in the same dorm. We spent hours talking late into the night, she sharing her fears of coming to a foreign country and me sharing my struggles and joy with my new faith.
I told Agnes about my relationship with Cindy, though not even my closest friends had heard of our troubles. From the start, my friendship with Agnes motivated me to honesty and inspired me to share the best aspects of my personality and spirituality. I could not hide things from her or otherwise be deceptive. She brought the bright light of the gospel to illuminate every aspect of my life, highlighting those things pleasing to God and sweeping away the darkness that I hoped would hide my transgressions. Following Christ, wherever he led us, was more important to us than our pride and even the precious friendship we started to share.
That night was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that was to involve many late-night talks, as well as less profound time spent together. We attended the same Christian fellowship, but also spent weekends dancing together. Our friendship defied traditional stereotyping. We lacked the physical relationship that so many of our friends were discovering, but we also shared social interests that many of our Christian friends lacked. I remember leaving for a dance after an evening of Christian singing and praying, only to be confronted by Bible study leaders who invited us to play Ping Pong with them. They were scandalized by our intention to fraternize with the heathens, but assured us that a night in Sodom and Gomorrah might be a good reminder of the dangers of temptation. I was a bit embarrassed when Agnes blurted out that we had already been before.
Our convenient living situation lent itself to late night talks, even though her scruples prevented us from ever being alone in either of our rooms. Our neighbors were constantly amused to find us talking at all hours in the halls and kitchen, and must have assumed that we were dating. Yet the love we developed for each other was the type shared between brother and sister, untainted with thoughts of romance. It occurred to everyone, except us, that we would be a perfect couple.
Given Agnes’s amazing faith and my curiosity, it was only natural that we should spend much time talking about things religious. Increasingly, I found myself playing devil’s advocate by presenting the Catholic interpretation of various scriptural passages, especially those related to the Real Presence and the process of salvation. Though it started as an intellectual exercise, I gradually started convincing myself, if not her. She was the first person who challenged me both intellectually and spiritually, and yet our interactions were driven by love for truth, God, and each other, not animosity. Agnes quickly became my closest friend and helped me through many challenges ranging from confronting my family about my conversion to breaking up with Cindy.
Our spiritual sharing reached its zenith the last night of that first semester. Ironically, we repeated the same conversation that was the beginning of my relationship with Cindy. Two years before, Cindy and I had stayed up all night arguing whether abortion should be legal. What Cindy lacked in persuasive arguments, she compensated for with sincere passion for the lives of the unborn. Ironically, I found myself using her same approach on Agnes, who adopted my former intellectual arguments concerning population control. Though most Christians in our fellowship were of the pro-life variety, Agnes came from an Asian society that subsidized and encouraged abortion. We argued until the sun rose, and then some. Agnes accused me of clouding the issue with emotional appeals when I focused on the fetus, and I responded that the issue was nothing if not emotional. In the end, I won the argument and almost lost a friend. Cindy’s appeals were as effective on Agnes as they had been on me. Agnes finally agreed that the fetus’s helpless state demanded society’s protection, but decided she wanted to have little to do with me after the intensity of our disagreement.
A month’s separation was exactly what our friendship required. Time healed all wounds, and we reconciled after the break. Our friendship even expanded to include academic pursuits the night Agnes asked me to walk her to the library. I had not been there during my first term, but discovered what was to become my second home at college. Agnes enjoyed tempting fate by studying on the thirteenth floor at the thirteenth desk, which soon became our meeting point for many study sessions. We would take hourly breaks to buy snacks, play in the snow, and discuss everything from God to high school dating. I even found myself sharing embarrassing details like my strategies for meeting girls, which she enjoyed critiquing.
We became even more interdependent when I switched into an advanced physiology class in the middle of the semester and needed Agnes’s notes and coaching to prepare for an upcoming exam. The professor allowed me into the class, normally open only to graduate students, with the warning that I might have to repeat the class. Agnes made the time to tutor me and freely shared her meticulous notes. Without her help, I probably would have fulfilled the professor’s dire prediction.
Our friendship continued to grow during the rest of our first year at college, confounding others who could not understand our intimacy outside the context of a dating relationship. Though we kept in touch during the summer with weekly letters, I purposefully chose to live on the opposite side of campus the following year to allow us both room in our lives for other people and also the opportunity to choose each other again as best friends. The proximity of our rooms had made it too easy for us to rely on each other; we had literally seen each other at our very best and very worst. There had been no place to hide or get away.
Though I expected the intensity and excitement of our friendship to dim with time, as our frenetic pace was not sustainable, I could not have predicted the sudden obstacles we would face during our sophomore year or the extent our friendship would be strained by my decision to be baptized into the Catholic Church. My joy and excitement were matched only by her disappointment. Agnes cared enough to attend the Mass, running all over the church while capturing several Kodak moments, and also to buy a book entitled Are Catholics Saved? Our Scriptural discussions, which before had merely been challenging, turned divisive as she reacted to my zeal for the Church with increasingly virulent anti-Catholicism. Ironically, Agnes’s intellectual opposition, combined with her commitment to truth, did more to move me towards Catholicism than Cindy’s uninformed but sincere embrace of the Church. Despite her personal animosity toward the conclusion, Agnes would not let me flinch from responding to God’s calling. Indeed, I was more than a little reassured that Agnes, who had taught me so much about submitting to God through her own life, could find fault neither with my theology nor my discernment process, but only with the end result.
Agnes’s integrity, as well as her feelings for me, were to be tested throughout the rest of our sophomore year as we grew apart. I became more involved in Catholic groups, while Agnes spent more time in the lab and with other guys. The low point occurred when Agnes admitted that she could not consider the Catholic Church, even if she knew it was Christ’s intention that she do so. Her trust in me was second only to her hatred and disrespect for Catholicism. What upset me most was not her hatred for the faith I had made my own, but rather her lack of faith in and submission to God’s will. If I had suggested that she not sacrifice any other aspect of her life to Christ, Agnes would have been appalled. If I had suggested an outrageous principle, she would have investigated my arguments and tested my logic. She must have considered me a better scientist than Christian, for she did not consider my seemingly ridiculous theological claims to be worth refuting. Whereas she once explored the Church’s claims to help save me from the “Whore of Babylon,” she was unwilling to pursue the same path for her own sake. Neither of us could tolerate such pride in our friendship, for we had built our relationship on a foundation of honesty and complete openness to the Lord and each other. The result was months of friction and even weeks of tense silence.
That summer proved to be a tough period, as we struggled with the direction our relationship should take. Our friendship was saved at the last hour when I wrote an emotional letter describing to Agnes how much she meant to me. The peace was not to last. We had unlocked the equivalent of Pandora’s box by openly discussing our feelings for each other. The sudden honesty, both with each other and, more important, with ourselves, prevented us from returning to the friendship we had enjoyed. Instead, we admitted what could not be denied anymore, that we were more than simply friends.
The changes were subtle enough that no observer noticed. Despite the lack of external signs, we felt a more profound transformation. What we lacked in physical intimacy, we more than compensated for with spiritual and emotional intimacy. We shared our lives, while at the same time maintaining separate identities. She had no interest in my political activities, and I barely understood her research, yet we somehow supported each other. The paradoxical nature of our relationship defies explanation, perhaps because it was so extraordinary.
Few of her Protestant friends believed that Agnes chose the Catholic faith rather than me when she was confirmed our junior year. Her real motivation had been watching helplessly as a friend left Agnes’s church to join a cult. The lack of a magisterium had rendered Agnes unable to argue with her friend’s personal interpretation of Scripture. Though she would have preferred to find an alternative teaching authority, she found Rome alone to have historical and biblical credibility.
Though I certainly influenced Agnes, just as she had earlier contributed to my decision, my impact was limited to pushing her to follow Christ. Yes, she became familiar with the Church’s teachings through our discussions; we had been arguing over the same topics ever since we had met. Perhaps only she and I can know for sure that her decision was ultimately motivated out of love for his Body and the sacraments. What was obvious to all is that she faced strident opposition from family and friends and sacrificed much for her decision.
We went to great inconvenience to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. We attended separate Masses; she sought formal instruction from a priest I did not know; she chose the Church along with a group of Protestant women; she sought counsel from others during her discernment process. I was as surprised as the others, especially since Agnes had just been named to the executive council of the Protestant fellowship, but I took great delight in her submission to God’s dominion over her entire life, which preceded her enrollment in RCIA by several months. This submission had been a constant in her life from the moment she first accepted Christ, but had been temporarily disrupted by her earlier unwillingness to follow God if the path went through Rome. The issue of submission had been a bigger stumbling block in our relationship than even the denominational issues; her reconciliation with God was a necessary prerequisite for our reconciliation.
I was excited about the possibility of us sharing the Eucharist together and was thrilled when she asked me to be her sponsor. My journal describes the experience better than I can now: Agnes’s confirmation was the most incredible and intense day of my life, second only to my own baptism. Though I had served as another friend’s sponsor, nothing prepared me for this moment. Initially, she was upset at the absence of her family, Agnes was soon overwhelmed by the sacraments. I used to wonder at her amazing spirituality and gifts; I knew she would bring energy and enthusiasm into the Church. There were times we even stopped talking to each other. Few outsiders will ever understand what happened between us, and many will not believe that her conversion was not due to me. But we know, and that is enough.
Agnes and I learned much about caring for others through our time together. We also continued growing in our faith. My fondest memories of that year include rising before the sun to attend daily Masses together or skipping lunch to do the same at a more decent hour. The campus priest finally took pity on us and allowed us a corner of the church basement where we could at least snack between the Mass and afternoon classes.
The year was not without its lighter moments. We went out on the town and danced the night away to celebrate Agnes’s successful defense of her thesis, which also happened to be the night before my MCAT. I had not even gotten to bed by the time many of my pre-medical peers had risen to study for the all-important exam. Agnes compensated for my sacrifice by baking chocolate chip cookies, my favorite, for lunch. There were also road trips to explore the surrounding area. We drove until we could continue no longer, then found a park, theater, or museum. Despite her wealthy background, Agnes taught me how to enjoy life’s common treasures, sunny afternoons, fresh fruit, wildflowers. I had more fun with Agnes than I ever had with anyone else, even though we spent much of our time doing silly or mundane things.
I would have preferred a less direct demonstration of my feelings for Agnes, but I was given the ideal opportunity one night as we walked home from a dance. The muggers probably thought us easy targets and surely had not expected me to argue with them. I did many stupid things that night, including negotiating how much I was willing to pay, but I did not even think before stepping between Agnes and our attackers. My only thought was to protect her, without any consideration for my welfare. The only positive outcome of the night was that I was given the chance to show my affection in a manner far more convincing than flowers or candy.
We toured Europe that summer as a reward for our hard work, especially Agnes’s early completion of her undergraduate degree and admission into medical school. I matured greatly as a result of that trip, for I had never been responsible for myself, much less for another. We went to Rome as pilgrims, not tourists, dined in southern France, and attended a Viennese opera. We spent hours together on trains and buses, with nowhere to escape. We frustrated, amused, and protected each other constantly. By the end of the trip, we knew more about each other and ourselves than we even thought possible. Rather than discovering ugly truths, we were pleasantly surprised to discover how much we truly liked each other.
Our senior year would be our last year together. Agnes returned all the love and attention I had shown her tenfold. She drove me to interviews, proofread applications, and otherwise supported me as I finished my degree and applied to medical schools. She did everything from staying up with me while I finished my thesis, sharing my “brownie” breaks, to making me dinner after long days. She made all these sacrifices while completing a strenuous first year of medical school. It is no exaggeration to acknowledge that my accomplishments that year were as much hers as mine.
I did not appreciate Agnes’s most painful sacrifice until many months later. She had always dreamt of being together for graduate studies, as a prelude to being together forever. She even asked God to send us both to a particular institution to show that he intended our union. Yet, I seemingly forgot this dream when I applied for a fellowship that would take me overseas and away from her. Agnes supported me in this application as she had done in all the others, never complaining or demanding that I stay with her. She even organized a graduation Mass to celebrate my selection.
My time overseas proved to be too great a burden for our relationship, yet Agnes never once complained or accused me of choosing my studies over her. I learned more from her than in any classroom. Her living faith showed me both a commitment to following Christ and also caring for others. I enjoyed my most intense prayer times, as well as my most enjoyable college memories, with her.
We inspired and pushed each other, sometimes to the point of frustration and tears; neither of us had ever been so overwhelmed and enthralled with another. Agnes was my hero, and I suppose I was hers.