The Final Fraternity

John 13: 34-35 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

There was a time when my life felt like an everlasting fraternity party.

Day drinking. Chants echoing down hallways. “Drop That Low” by Tujamo shaking the walls.

Black Robes. Pillowcases covering the heads of newcomers. All in the name of tradition.

Written rituals passed down like Gospels.

Pledge classes running through the same system designed by us, over and over again.

We had our own rules. Our own creeds. Our own sacred texts, even if they were written in Sharpie in a beer-soaked book.

I truly believed I had found and founded the brotherhood that would define me.

We had our own code. Our own rituals. Our own legends.

But eventually, it faded. The old fraternity doors closed.

I tried to keep the feeling alive.

Gathering together in bar crawls. Night clubs. Packed stadiums and arenas.

Trying to recreate what had passed.

Then I was led back.

Not to another frat house, but to something far older.

A brotherhood not founded on a college campus…

But on the Sermon on the Mount.

A tradition that hasn’t lasted decades, but millennia.

A mystical fraternity, open to anyone willing to follow the One who started it all.

I found myself kneeling at the altar.

Singing along with the ancient hymns.

Receiving the Eucharist.

It reached deeper than anything I knew before.

It didn’t offer me a full beer bong.

It offered me the body of Christ.

The Apostles? The original founders.

The Saints? The big brothers guiding us through this life, after transforming their own.

This may seem dramatic.

But, I shed a tear during Easter Mass this year.

Not for the music. Not for the incense. Not even for the tradition.

But because I pictured a man I’ve never met, in unimaginable pain.

Mocked. Stripped. Nailed. Bleeding, voluntarily, so that my sins wouldn’t define me.

A man I ignored for years.

A man who has known me since the beginning.

And still calls me “son”.

That moment broke me open.

I realized:

This wasn’t just a historical event.

It was a personal sacrifice.

Not for the world in general, but for me.

For my ego. My lust. My rage. My doubt.

And still, He offered redeeming love.

That’s when I understood, this isn’t just my religion.

This is the fraternity.

The fraternity of Jesus that doesn’t stop after graduation.

It never ends.

No Sunday Fundays. But, Sunday worship.

No pledge pin. But, rosary beads.

No Solo cup. But, a chalice.

Yes robes, but in reverence.

Discipline. Honor. Purpose.

Love in its highest form.

He is the Alpha and the Omega.

And this fraternity?

It’s not a phase. It’s the covenant.

No final party.

No “crossing” ceremony.

Just a life lived in pursuit of the eternal.

The pledge process seems never ending.

But once you’re initiated, you’re in it forever.

Guided. Transformed. Sealed in blood. The covenant.

The fraternity of Jesus.