To the Band of Brothers: 
The Martian
 

7/9/2026
Fr. Willie, S.J. ’87 | President

There are movies I can watch over and over and never get tired of. On one of those rare, lazy afternoons, I love sitting in front of the television set and surfing the channels. I get to AMC or TNT and if one of those movies is playing, I’ll pause and watch. They’re so good, I don’t even mind the commercials. On the contrary, those advertisement interruptions remind me of my youth, when you had no choice but to sit through a 30-second demonstration of how a knife can cut a penny and still slice a tomato, or that the light in David Singer’s office was still on.

Yesterday, thanks to the summer break, I was surfing and came across “The Martian.” What a great flick. Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a botanist-turned-astronaut who is left behind on Mars after being struck by debris from a severe dust storm. Unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, he survives and plans are made to rescue him. After a series of successes and failures, there is a moment of great despair. Sitting on a sandy hill, he writes a note to another astronaut asking her to say goodbye to his parents. He asks her to tell them he loves them. Then he writes, “Tell them I love what I do.”

When I heard the line, I paused the movie and pondered. Then, I played it again. Then again. And then again. “Tell them I love what I do.” This guy is about to die on Mars, never to be seen or heard from again. No one will bury him, no one will come to his funeral or place flowers on his grave and still he finds words of consolation, not only for his parents, but for himself. “Tell them I love what I do.” That is, if you truly love what you do, then you can die happily doing it.

Can there be anything more satisfying than that? To discover what you love to do and get a chance to live your life doing it. That kind of discovery makes even death doable. In today’s prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours, the morning reading is taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:35, 37). He writes, “What can separate us from the love of Christ? Trial, distress, or persecutions, or hunger, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? Yet in all this, we are more than conquerors because of him who has loved us.” That’s it. Love makes all things possible.

Watney discovered what he loved. Okay, it may not have been God explicitly, but it was God implicitly. Why? Because ultimately, anything you love, I mean truly love, is of God. St. John writes, “Love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). That means true love, no matter who or what the object is, is of God.

On this recent Belen Youth Mission trip, one of the nights before going to bed, I was sitting around with some of the students. They asked me how I realized I wanted to be a priest. As I was telling them my vocation story, I realized, deep down inside, “I love what I do.” I love the great stuff, but I also love the challenging ones. Living chastity, poverty, and obedience, going up the mountains of the Dominican Republic with 60 kids, building an aqueduct, sleeping on the floor, showering with a hose, using a latrine… all these trials and tribulations, these challenges, are as nothing compared to the love of God, as compared to discovering what God has called me to do.

It’s like anything else. When you discover who you truly love and what you truly love to do, there is not a single bit of suffering you are not willing to undertake. There is no trial you are not willing to accept if it means fulfilling that love. If you love the view from the top of a hill, you climb the hill. If you love to get an A, you study. If you love to feel healthy, you exercise. As a matter of fact, the more climbing, studying, or exercising you do, the greater the reward. It’s the suffering that makes it real because it’s the love that makes it so doable.

God calls each and every one of us to something. There is a vocation, a calling for all of us. Life is so much about discovering, little by little, what that vocation is. The key is to say “yes” when you discover it. I mentioned this to the boys and one of them, rightfully, asked, “What if you say ‘no?’” Well, I figure, if you say “no,” then God has to work with what you give Him. Will you be as happy as you can possibly be? Probably not, but it doesn’t mean God doesn’t take advantage, for our sake, of the little we give and make good things happen. But I do believe there are a lot of people out there who selfishly box God out of their vocation discernment experience and end up missing the mark. They walk around not as happy as they can possibly be.

You know, these kids keep me on my toes. More than any other experience in my life, speaking with and spending time with our students opens the door to extraordinary conversations that challenge me more than any theology or philosophy class I have ever taken. It’s in those moments and through those conversations that I become more aware of how much God loves us and calls us to deeply listen to Him. It’s moments like those with the kids that help me realize how much I love what I do.

Auspice Maria