It Really Is A Wonderful Life

A Christmas-season thank-you from a friend of Kale Zelden

Kale Zelden, fulfilling his vocation as a teacher

It’s Saturday morning here in Budapest, and over my first cup of coffee, I looked in to see how the Give Send Go campaign for my friend Kale Zelden, a high school literature teacher who has unexpectedly fallen on hard times this Christmas, is going. Man! People have given almost $10,000!

Last night, before falling asleep, I texted with Kale, who spent most of yesterday in a daze over this. He is going to ask our friend Steve Skojec, who started the campaign, to shut it down. Kale doesn’t want to be greedy. He’s a good man. I told him that is honorable, but that I suspect with him it’s more that he’s uncomfortable with the huge vote of confidence in him from strangers. Kale is surpassingly modest.

Because I have tears in my eyes just thinking of what so many strangers have done for this good man who is suffering — and whose three children would not have had a Christmas if not for you all — I want to say a little more about the situation here. I’m going to be very careful not to violate Kale’s privacy, but this is the kind of thing that more people should know about. We live in a world that is growing ever darker, but the light of the love we call caritas still shines bright.

Kale and I have been friends for, I dunno, maybe six or seven years now. We both come from south Louisiana, and even share a birthday, though Kale is six years younger. And we are both serious Christians. We bonded over the things we share — love of God and of books and ideas — but also over shared suffering. Kale accompanied me through the dissolution of my marriage, and then divorce; I have tried to help him through his own personal struggles. He’s a good and selfless friend, and I don’t know how I would have gotten through the past few years, the most agonizing of my life, without his friendship with me as a Christian brother.

One of the things Kale struggles with is a burning desire to teach beyond the classroom. Partly it’s for the cause of providing a better standard of living for his kids. It’s hard to raise a family on a single income, especially if that income is a teacher’s. Granted, he teaches at an expensive Catholic school, but it’s still a high school, and nobody gets rich as a high school teacher. He’s a good writer and an excellent podcaster, as well as a man who really has superb ideas about the connection between learning, literature, and the cultural crisis among our youth … but somehow, nothing has quite clicked financially.

Meanwhile, he has been struggling to pay the bills for his family. It’s a struggle many millions of Americans are dealing with, especially in these inflationary times; Kale is one of these souls I know well. As he explained on Twitter, his bank, without warning, went in and took $1,800 out of his account, to cover payments he owed. This left the Zelden family facing Christmas with next to nothing … until Steve Skojec stepped in, and so many good people followed Steve’s lead.

I’m telling you this because you who gave — and I see that some of this Substack’s readership did — need to know that this is honest to God a George Bailey situation.

Kale is a virtuous and worthy man who has fallen on hard times, and who despairs at times of his own worth because of that fact. People like Steve and me, who know Kale personally, understand how good he is, and how unjustly he suffers, but how courageously he bears the weight life has piled on his shoulders. Please understand that I can’t go into details. That would be an invasion of privacy, and anyway, Kale doesn’t want anyone’s pity. I’m so grateful that Steve Skojec took it upon himself to start the Give Send Go, and didn’t ask Kale for permission or worry too much what Kale would think. Kale would have denied permission, and taken the weight of failure onto himself, though it’s not his fault.

I have only had brief exchanges with Kale over text since Steve started the Give Send Go, and I can tell you that he is somewhat disoriented by this an answered prayer. Put yourself in the position of a father of three who, two weeks before Christmas, because of the action of a heartless bank, finds himself unable to afford presents for his children. Imagine the pain of a dad who works his butt off having to tell his kids — who are already accustomed to living in reduced circumstances — that they won’t be having Christmas this year, because of Reasons. That’s all in the past now, because of the kindness of others, including many of you. That’s all in the past now because of love — the love of strangers for a stranger.

There’s an even more important gift here than money. It has been painful to love Kale as a friend, and to watch him struggle with all the difficulties in his life, including the feeling that he is a failure. What a good friend he is to me! And I know I’m not the only one. It is a mystery why someone with the convictions, the ideas, the vision, and the work ethic of Kale Zelden, a teacher and lover of literature, hasn’t been able to strike gold yet. But this is how it goes in this life. The worthy aren’t always rewarded. Many have been the times that Kale and I have been in conversation about what he’s seeing among the high schoolers he teaches, and he would get going on how they need to know and to love the great books of the Western tradition, and how much these books have to say to them about life and how to live it, and I would be thinking, this man needs a platform, because he is speaking prophetic wisdom that can save lives. I mean, it’s one thing for some wiseacre like me to say these things; it’s another to hear it from a man who spends his days with American teenagers, and sees how lost they are from the lies our culture tells them.

For whatever reasons, it hasn’t worked out for Kale that he has found the platform he needs and deserves. But my gosh, does he ever keep working at it! I don’t know anybody like him, who is so determined to keep trying to find a way. Mostly it’s driven by a mission to help kids — a mission driven by his deep Catholic faith, and his true love of good literature — but it’s also driven in part by his love for his children, and his paternal desire to make them proud of him. I met his kids once, many years ago, and if I could see them again, I would want to sit down with them and tell them what a good man their father is, and how much he loves them, and how hard he works to serve them.

This is something that I didn’t come to appreciate about my own father until I became a dad myself: that good parents go to extraordinary lengths to provide for their kids, including bearing great weights with a smile, because one of the most important gifts they can give a child is the sense that the world is stable and good. Now that I’m in my mid-fifties, I can see that my mom and dad went through periods when I was a kid in which they didn’t have much money in the bank. My sister and I never had an inkling of it. I’m sure we would have loved our parents no less had we known, but the point is they didn’t want us to know: they wanted us to feel safe, so they took that burden onto themselves, and kept working hard to make it better.

I’m realizing as I’m writing this that one of the reasons I feel so strongly about Kale is that he reminds me of my dad. My father worked as a civil servant in one of the poorest states in the US. His income wasn’t much, to put it mildly, so he had to work out various side hustles to keep food on the table. My mom drove a school bus, and dad was always doing different things to bring in money. He turned a former peanut patch he owned into a trailer park, for instance. I spent a lot of time as a kid working with him to fix broken water lines, collect trash, and so forth. That trailer park, back in its day, put me and my sister through college. I think with shame back to my high school years, being ashamed that we were the kind of lower middle class people who owned a trailer park. That humble trailer park, which shut down decades ago, was the means by which my father gave us an education, and I am grateful to him for all his hard work.

My mom used to get angry with my dad for letting so many of his tenants fall behind on their rent, and I get why she was mad. We had bills to pay too. But I also see why Daddy did that: he had grown up poor, with his own father having to spend years away from home during the Great Depression, working and sending money back to support his family. Why? Because that’s what good men did. Daddy’s being a soft touch on rent came from his own experience with poverty, and from his eagerness to help people preserve their dignity in the face of material struggle.

Over the past few years, I would pour out my heart to Kale about the agony of living within a marriage that was once my idea of paradise on earth, but which for various reasons outside of my control had turned to a source of intense pain. (I don’t put it that way so you will think badly of my ex-wife; she too had her pain, caused by things outside her control, a pain that finally became intolerable.) One of the things that made the struggle so difficult for me was the fact that I felt that I had to maintain a façade of being a good conservative Christian family man. I knew in reality that it was a front. It wasn’t always, God knows, but it became that way. I hoped and prayed that it would be so again, but in the meantime, I had to write and behave as if the failure of my life as a husband wasn’t happening. Nothing — nothing — I did to try to save the marriage worked. No therapy, no sacrifice, nothing. I felt so ashamed, and so helpless. Kale was one of the few people in my life with whom I shared everything, and one of the few people who, having that knowledge, was able to help me carry the weight. I wasn’t helpless, in part because God brought Kale Zelden into my life.

What a rotten thing it is to feel a failure as a man. Though I have become successful as a writer, I would trade it all in without hesitating if I could have my happy family back. That ceased to be possible over a decade ago, I now know, for reasons that I cannot go into here because it’s not only my story to tell. I spent a fair amount of time over the last ten years wondering what my readers, those who admired my writing, would think if they knew the truth about my situation. If they knew how hard it was a lot of the time just to get through the day without wanting to die. Don’t misunderstand, I was never in danger of suicide! Still, not wanting to kill yourself is not the same thing as wanting to live. I did keep going, and kept writing through the intense pain and despair from the loss of the thing on this earth that was most precious to me, mostly because I love my children, and wanted to provide for them. See, I had been taught by example that good men bear any burden life loads on their shoulders, for the sake of their children.

(I would ask you who wonder why I am living with one of my children, on the other side of the ocean from my two younger children, to withhold judgment; I can’t talk about the details out of a concern for others’ privacy, but please trust me that if it were possible for Matt and me to be back in Baton Rouge, we would be. You readers of this Substack who are close to me understand what’s going on.)

This is how Kale lives: though the circumstances of his life are different, he, like me, seeks to do whatever it takes, in the face of setback after setback, to do right by his kids. I admire him so much for it. Plus, he feels called to the mission of teaching, of guiding young minds into love of the best literature Western civilization has produced. Ultimately, his vocation as a Catholic is to lead them to unity with God, through love of art. This is not what a man in 21st century America does if he wants to grow rich, or even become middle class. Kale went this route out of love, and because these are the gifts God gave him. It is an indictment of our culture that we don’t reward teachers like this commensurately with their service. Teachers like Kale suffer doubly, because the literature-teaching profession has become infested with people who hate wisdom, and who treat literature as a corpse to be dissected and reanimated for ideological ends. Kale Zelden is an old-school teacher who swims against the currents in his profession.

I might also add that he is a faithful orthodox Catholic. The auto-destruction of his church, especially in the current pontificate, has been an immense grief to him, and has taken away much of the consolation that he would normally have had in the face of him many other struggles. Instead of helping him bear his burdens, the church of Francis has become one of them. In this, Kale has a lot of company, I know.

And yet … he persists. He must go on; he can’t go on; he goes on.

I give you all this back story to tell you that a gift even greater than the money people have given to Kale and his family this Christmas season is the vote of confidence that these donations mean. When I tell you that Kale is a real Christian, part of what I mean is that he is humble. Sometimes I worry, as his friend, that he is too humble, that he doesn’t see his true worth. That so many strangers, people who know his work from the Internet, or who just heard about his dire straits and wanted to help, have committed themselves to walking with him on this hard stretch of road on the pilgrim’s path to heaven — well, it has shown a man who doubts his own worth how much he is loved. And that, my dears, is the core of a wonderful life. Thank you so much for your generosity.

The gifts have been more than the Zeldens need to pay their bills and give their kids a decent Christmas, and yet they keep coming. If you want to donate, don’t delay, because I believe Kale will prevail on Steve Skojec to shut it down. Typical of Kale, he doesn’t want people to feel taken advantage of. If you want to support Kale and his work more long-term, become a subscriber to his Substack and podcasts, called The Underneath. Even if you don’t subscribe, you should check it out.

One of our circle, the biggest donor of this campaign, said to me last night, “This is like a modest book advance.” It is. And I told Kale yesterday, before our friend said that to me, that he needs to focus on writing a book. I’ll do what I can to help get him published, but there’s nothing that establishes credibility in Kale’s world like being the author of a published book. I have a funny feeling that from this terrible time will come the opportunities and the means that Magister Zelden needs to write the book that he’s been carrying inside him for years.

This crisis broke something … and maybe that something is ground: ground from which the seeds that have been dormant inside that good and faithful — but frustrated, for reasons beyond his control — servant of God Kale Zelden can at long last bear fruit. If so, well, friends, that is a glorious Christmas gift. You might not feel called to donate to the Kale fund, but you surely know someone in your own life who needs help this Christmas. Please be generous. Help a father — or mother — be good to their children this Christmas. Let them know that they are not alone.