My name is Doyle, and I'm the Head of Product @ Exodus 90. Exodus 90 exists to help men encounter Uncommon Freedom in Jesus Christ. For freedom, Christ has set us free, as St. Paul tells us. I'm married to my wife Morgan, and we have two sons (Phoenix, 3.75 & Aubrey, 1.75). And we have a third child on the way! I wanted to introduce myself and give you some sense of what you might expect in following my blog.
What's in a Name?
My full name (including my Confirmation Saint) is Doyle Matthew Benedict Baxter. My maternal grandfather was Matt Doyle, and I'm named in his honor.
Doyle. In Gaelic, Doyle means "Dark Stranger," referring to the dark-haired foreigners who found their way to Ireland. In the world of ideas, I've always thought of myself as a dark-haired foreigner--never afraid to test out new concepts or ways of looking at the world, even from atypical or non-traditional angles. This, combined with my profound love of the traditions of the Catholic faith and traditional, liberal education in the Classics, means that I can be difficult to place into a single ideological box. And I'm proud of that fact.
Matthew. I can recall a time in the second grade when my dad was reading me the Bible before bed. He would ask me to select a book, then a chapter, then a verse. He would read it to me, and then we would start again. One night, I asked for Matthew 9:9, which reads in the RSV, "As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office; and he said to him 'Follow me.' And he rose and followed him." By pure happenstance that can only be called the Hand of Providence, my first day working at Exodus 90 full-time was September 21--the Feast of Saint Matthew, the gospel reading for which includes Matthew 9:9. The priest preached that day on the real meaning of vocation. As laymen, we often set our call to be husbands and fathers in prime of place above our work. But our primary vocation and secondary vocation should serve one another in the task that God, in his wisdom, has placed before us. Sitting in mass that day, Jesus asked me to follow him, and, like Saint Matthew, I was compelled by the awe-inspiring presence of that Divine Command. Caravaggio captured it perfectly:
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Benedict. As a young boy, my spiritual home away from home was the Benedictine monastery in Southern Indiana called St. Meinrad. The monks, in their habits with their daily recitation of the psalms, taught me so much and inspired my imagination. I discerned a monastic vocation for years and even asked for an exception to enter St. Meinrad as a monk right after high school. Later, during my college years, I visited the Benedictines in Norcia, Italy, and likewise discerned entering there. God clearly had other plans. But Benedictine spirituality continues to be my bread. Their motto of ora et labora, prayer and work resonates with my deeply held belief about the nature of vocation discussed above. I am inspired that these holy men make a vow of conversatio mora--a vow to daily conversion, for we all have a task of constantly turning and returning to the Lord.
Baxter. Family names mean a lot to me. A name is a correspondence to an essence, and thereby, names have power. You are, in a deep way, your name and especially the name of your family. You have to wrestle with the challenges and delight in the glories of your family name. Sometimes, you have to rescue your family name from the belly of the whale. We've lost this sense in the modern world. We view ourselves as atomic individuals setting our own course in the world. But that's not true. You are who you are, and God created you for some definite purpose--name, family, and all. One trait of the Baxters I inherited is ruthless and myopic passion. It's a double-edged sword (as all things are), but I'm always willing to bet on Baxter intensity.
Written in the Stars?
If you have not yet read Dante, I'd highly encourage you to pick up his Divine Comedy. It's his epic, where he traverses the depths of hell, climbs Mount Purgatory, and ultimately revels in the unity with God in Paradise. Dante is the poetic height of the Catholic Middle Ages. We live in a civilization seeking to reject its Christian roots, but in Dante's time, they gloried in it.
In Canto XXII of Paradise, Dante has two remarkable encounters. First, he speaks with Saint Benedict who explains the role that his monasticism played in the Christianization of the world and then calls the Order and Church again to conversion--to reject the riches and greed that ruling the world had bestowed. And then, in an instant, Dante was transported into the Gemini constellation, the sign of the Zodiac under which he was born. He had this to say about his astrological sign:
O light bursting with virtue, glorious stars,
unto whose influence, as I see, is due
whatever I possess of native powers,
The sun was born with you and hid with you
when first I felt the air of Tuscany,
the sun, the father of mortal life;
And when the grace was richly granted me,
I was assigned your region of the skies
for entering your high wheel. Devotedly
Unto you starry Twins my spirit sighs
to gain the strength to master the hard test
that draws on all my force. "You are so near
The ultimate perfection of the blest,"
so Beatrice began, "you must possess
clear eyes and keener vision. So, before
Further in-selving in this blessedness,
gaze down and see how much of the world below
you have already set beneath your feet,
So that, all that it can, your heart will go
gladly along with the triumphing band
that in this ring of ether march with joy."
I turned and looked on all the space that spanned
the seven spheres, and saw this globe so small
I smiled to see how paltry it appeared;
And I approved that counsel best of all
that scorns it--but to think of something higher
truly bespeaks a spirit brave and tall.
The last detail about myself I'll share is that I, like Dante, was born under the Summer stars of the Gemini. As you can imagine, Dante's back-to-back encounters with Saint Benedict and Gemini speak to me deeply. Dante visits his stars and credits them with "whatever I possess of native powers." Like Dante, I myself am a creative and even a poet. And at times, I revel deeply, perhaps too much, in these gifts that God has given me. Beatrice's admonition to possess a "keener vision" is one that I must heed as well. May God, in his kindness, grant me the grace to recognize "how paltry it appeared" in comparison to the whole of heaven and "think of something higher."
