A gnawing angst
At college, he joined a fraternity – which meant camaraderie, leadership and philanthropy projects.
But frat life had a dark side. There were drugs, alcohol and denigrating attitudes toward women.
By junior year, the “pagan pastimes” were gnawing on his conscience — as was the impermanence of his academic, social and athletic accomplishments.
His goals were “not bad things in themselves,” Brother Hannah said. “But when perfect performance did not emerge, and was made less and less perfect by the increasing mental haze attending fraternity life, a deep sense of anxiety developed within me.”
“I knew deep within my soul that things were not quite right,” he observed.
In quiet moments, he acknowledged, “‘There’s something really wrong about the messages I’m getting. There’s an emptiness in my soul that needs to be answered, filled somehow.’”
Then, the summer before senior year, his father encouraged him to become an official member of their hometown Presbyterian church — a step he had not yet taken.
“Like a lot of young people today,” he told his father that he wanted to “study other religions first.” For Christianity, his dad recommended the book, “Mere Christianity.”
So after a round of golf, Brother Hannah went to Barnes & Noble and walked out with a copy of C. S. Lewis’s classic and the autobiography of Jack Nicklaus.
'Water in the desert'
(Story continues below)
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Lewis’s book turned out “like water in the desert for me,” Brother Hannah recalled.
“It was like, ‘Wow, Christianity does have some things to say!’” and those things, he observed, “protect order in society, protect human dignity” in “wonderful ways.”
Although he had “never tried to live intentionally in a non-Christian way,” Brother Hannah said he hadn’t thought much about what living in a Christian way looked like.
He began to realize that, however unwittingly, he had been acquiring “a lot of the habits that many people in the world acquire.”
He listed a few: the portrayal of women as sexual objects, the pursuit of wealth “to the neglect of the poorest of the poor or as kind of an end unto itself” and the pursuit of power and ambition apart from other concerns.
Finally, Brother Hannah acknowledged that he shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed by a conscience that was bothered by such attitudes and behaviors.