Kyrie Eleison

I can trace the beginning of my faith.

Not to doctrine, nor debate, nor any adult awakening,

but to a time when the world still felt enchanted,

and the line between earth and heaven was thin enough for a child to cross without realizing it.

I was about six years old, standing in the church of my Catholic school, taking part in Mass.

During Advent, our priest sang a haunting yet reverent Kyrie Eleison,

and although I knew nothing of Greek, something inside me recognized it.

Those words felt like a password whispered at the entrance of a hidden world,

a door only the imagination of a child could see.

Even then, my heart gravitated toward the sacred.

The Christmas season was not really about gifts.

My child mind was drawn elsewhere.

To the Story itself.

The shepherds with their staffs under a cold sky.

The Son of God in the manger.

And the Biblical Magi (Three Wise Men), those travelers who followed a star across the desert, bearing gold and the same frankincense & myrrh I smelled at Mass.

They all felt like ancient heroes, moving through a world where the supernatural lived beside the ordinary. I sensed their mystery long before I understood it.

The playground only strengthened this instinct.
While most children I assume reenacted cartoons, my friends and I turned recess into our own biblical drama. We fashioned robes from jackets and gym shirts, cast ourselves as Moses, Aaron, Pharaoh, and Egyptian guards, parting imaginary seas beside the slide and delivering plagues with reverent authority.

We weren’t pretending.
We were participating.

As we grew older, religion class was required, but instead of flattening that world, it deepened it.

Jesus Christ

John the Baptist

The Apostles

were not presented as distant historical figures to me,

they were luminous characters in a living saga. Men who moved through deserts, confronted kings, heard the voice of God, and carried destinies larger than their humanity.

They were not merely real.

They were mythic.

Years later I would come to understand and recognize the truth of Christ’s words:

“Unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

-Matthew 18:3

It was through that childlike wonder, the kind that sees the sacred where adults see routine, that my spiritual instinct first awakened.

When childhood finally receded, that instinct didn’t vanish.

It only changed its language.

By eighth grade, I discovered the idea of fraternity life, first in its loud, bravado-filled, exaggerated form.

Later in its deeper promise.

The rituals.
The candles.
The brotherhood.
The architecture of initiation.

The same thrill I once felt as a child in a shepherd’s costume during Christmas plays stirred again.

That instinct remained, but without proper guidance, I began to look for the mystical wherever it could be found.

In high school, on late winter nights when the air was cold enough to see your breath, we’d sneak outside.

Beanies covering our ears, hoods up, the world quiet, smoke beneath the streetlights.

I don’t believe it was rebellion for rebellion’s sake.
Nor chaos and escapism.

But a ritual.

It was the closest thing I knew to recreating that childhood sense of entering a different world.

The way the cold night air mixed with the smoke, the way laughter echoed through empty suburban streets, the way time slowed and reality shifted, it gave us, in our teenage ignorance, an imitation of the echo of sacred feeling I once felt in Catholic school.

We were trying to slip into a higher state with the only tools we knew.
Seeking transcendence without realizing it.

By college, that instinct to chase the sacred, however imperfectly, matured into a fascination with ceremonial brotherhood. Greek life, with its secret traditions and initiatory structure, offered a new language for the same longing.

I stepped into Phi Kappa Tau not for the parties, but for the ritual.

For the sense of being initiated into something hidden.

And following the dissolution of Phi Kappa Tau, we created our own:

The BTS Fraternity.

And within it, the Novus Society, a secret order meeting in the silent hours between midnight and dawn.

Brotherhoods formed around ideas, symbols, and shared purpose.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but all I was doing was reconstructing the sacred with secular frames.

I was trying to rebuild the feeling of the six year old hearing Kyrie Eleison for the first time.

But the imitation of reverence and ceremonial mysteries can only sustain a man for so long.

Even the most carefully built structures reveal their emptiness when the foundation is false.

By my early twenties, the architecture of fraternity ritual began to feel hollow…

The thrill faded.

Parties became noise.

Nightlife lost its glow.

Even alcohol dulled, as though my soul had grown tired of it.

My spirit had matured beyond the environments I built to contain it.

I became restless.
Thirsty for Living Water. (John 7:38)
Unsteady.

The rituals I once created now felt like shadows of something deeper I had forgotten.

The ache grew sharper.

The longing clarified.

It was the beginning of a spiritual crisis,

the slow realization that nothing I built could replace the mystery I once knew.

At twenty-five, almost without planning, I walked into the Cathedral again.

The Mass began.
The incense rose.
The priest sang solemnly.
And then I heard it:

Kyrie Eleison.

Christe Eleison.

Kyrie Eleison.

This time I understood the words:

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.”

Yet the meaning did not shrink the mystery.

It expanded it.

The same chant that once enchanted me as a child now closed a twenty-year loop.

Everything aligned.

The Magi.
The shepherds.
The recess reenactments of Moses and Pharaoh.
The winter nights.
The fraternity initiations.
BTS.
Novus.
The emptiness.
The spiritual ache.
The longing for initiation.

It was all one story.

This was not a conversion.
It was a return.
A recognition.
A homecoming of the soul.

In this cold holy season, perhaps we are not meant to discover something new,

but to recognize what has been calling us all along.

The star I followed at six years old was still there.
I had simply grown into the man capable of understanding where it led.