As many students are off to college, Father Dave welcomes back Meg Hunter-Kilmer for a discussion about life on campus and her new book on understanding the Gospels. Meg works in campus ministry at the University of Notre Dame and her new book is called, “Eyes Fixed on Jesus, Volume 1: A Journey Into the Gospels.
Meg offers assurance to parents who are worried about their kids maintaining their faith in college. “[Kids can] not just keep their faith, but deepen their faith and make it something that’s their own. [They can] come to know Jesus in a personal and intimate way, live into what you have been pouring into them all these years, and discover that this isn’t just something that mom makes me do,” she says. “My best advice — if you have kids who are even a little bit interested in staying Catholic — the first thing you do when you get to college is you go to campus ministry and you just sign up for everything.”
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“At the beginning of freshman year, you’re making a lot of friends that you don’t actually want to be friends with; you just need somebody to hang out with,” she continues. “If the random people you hang out with at the beginning of freshman year are in campus ministry, they’re at least probably not making bad choices. So this is your baseline of friendship…you set yourself in patterns of not making terrible choices, and grow from there.”
In addition to her work campus ministry, Meg shares details about her latest book, which serves as a line-by-line commentary on the Gospels. “My whole heart in this book. This is everything that I have been working towards for the last eight years,” she says. “I feel like it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done.” She explains how her years as an itinerant missionary helped inspire this book, along with her degrees in theology and meticulous study of other Scripture commentaries.
“This is the fruit of praying through the Gospels 50 times. This is the fruit of preaching these texts in front of thousands of people around the world and feeling utterly convicted that the most [important] thing in the world is to come to know Jesus through his Word,” Meg says. “This book has so many layers of academic and intellectual [teaching] and all of that, but this also [reflects] everything the Lord has done in my heart through his Gospels in the 30 years that I’ve been following him.”
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Meg’s commentary will be released in three volumes. “My hope is to break open the Scriptures and take what is so familiar and give more context. Taking what feels very foreign and explaining all of these layers of meaning, and also saying, Maybe this is how this went, or maybe this was what her attitude was here,” she says. “Just opening people up to the idea that Scripture can be exciting, moving, and powerful. It doesn’t have to be dull.”
Father Dave compliments the book as both detailed and relatable. Meg responds, “I’m excited about it because I feel like you can hand it to a 15-year-old and it’s accessible to them, but I have priest friends who are using the manuscript for their homily prep. Even if you’re a Scripture scholar, there are going to be layers of how people pray with the Scriptures that haven’t occurred to you yet.”
