For Tom Duesterhaus, community is everything.
After growing up in a family with eight kids, teaching in a
classroom for 15 years and living in a communal environment
since his second year of college, it’s no wonder he’s used to
having people around.
“Community has always been such a crucial component for me,”
he said in a recent interview. “If I’m in a community, then
I’m part of it. I’m responsible to help build it up. I also
benefit from it, but it’s not just a self-serving thing.”
Of course, it’s more than just being used to having people
around – Duesterhaus thrives on his relationships with
others. The 37-year-old Duesterhaus is a lay consecrated
member of the men’s Youth Apostles community and currently
serves as house director at their home base in McLean. For
the last 15 years he has taught creative writing and English
at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, from where he
graduated in 1991. And at the base is his community of family
– a strong group of Catholics in Northern Virginia who
support one another and, he said, serve as a “building block”
for everything else.
Early communities
As the sixth of eight children, Duesterhaus observed
carefully the paths that his siblings took in life and his
parents’ support of them. Many are married and Father Michael
R. Duesterhaus is parochial vicar at Our Lady of Angels
Church in Woodbridge. Through weekly Mass, attending Our Lady
of Good Counsel School in Vienna and then attending Bishop
O’Connell, Duesterhaus developed a foundation of faith that
was never forced.
“It was in the air we breathed,” he said. “It was in our
bloodstream.”
The large family was involved in parish and school
activities, and his parents quietly led by example.
But it wasn’t until Duesterhaus’ last two years in high
school – when he attended and then helped lead a Youth
Encounter retreat – that he felt a transition from
understanding the Faith to taking responsibility for it, he
said.
“It was a pivotal moment,” he said. “That gave me a framework
for looking ahead to college.”
Once at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg it
didn’t take long for Duesterhaus to discover a new
manifestation of togetherness.
“I was looking for community,” he said. “Pretty much right
away I found it.”
In addition to being steadily active with the Catholic Campus
Ministry, Duesterhaus began meeting once a week with a group
of men familiar with the Youth Apostles. Though they had
different backgrounds and studied different subjects, all the
men were “on a similar wavelength” to Duesterhaus where
religion was concerned. For the last three years of college,
he lived in community with these men, eating together and
praying together in the same vein as the McLean-based
brotherhood.
Duesterhaus recognizes how counter-cultural this type of
college life was.
“We took a very intentional approach to how we were going to
live our college years,” he said. “That was the seedbed for
me to discern further.”
Discern he did. By the time he graduated in 1995 (with a
degree in English from the school of education), he had
discerned a life of lay consecration, where he would
consecrate his life to God through community and ministry in
a unique way: not as a priest, but not as a man open to
marriage, either.
“For the most part it was an idea that wasn’t being fully
lived out,” he said. “It was certainly a new idea, and it
sparked right away.”
That summer, he made a one-year commitment to the Youth
Apostles.
During this time of discernment and decision, Duesterhaus’
parents maintained the quiet support that, he said, had
always been “implicit” in his family. They placed the same
trust in him that he witnessed them place in his older
siblings.
“That’s the culture of our family,” he said. “I bought in
because I saw the positives coming from it.”
From student to teacher
After some time in formation and working in young adult and
youth ministry at St. Mark Church in Vienna, Duesterhaus
signed a contract to teach seventh- and eighth-grade language
arts and reading at St. Louis School in Alexandria.
After three years, in the fall of 1999, he made a lifetime
commitment as a lay consecrated member of Youth Apostles. At
that same time, he went back to O’Connell to try to help form
his students in the way of Christ. By helping students
discover how they are called to serve Christ and others,
Duesterhaus said, he is living out his own vocation.
“To acknowledge when a kid is on a good path, showing a
desire to serve other people, being an encouraging voice” –
that is his goal, he said.
Last year, he accompanied several O’Connell students to the
Dominican Republic for a service trip.
“It was a profound opportunity to give the kids an occasion
to serve, to be in touch with a culture that’s very different
from your own,” he said. “It’s that balance between getting
out of the way to let God do the biggest work and then
realizing there are moments that God’s going to have to work
through you.”
When Duesterhaus’ mother died in 2006 after suffering from a
brain tumor, it was a pivotal moment in his faith.
“Stuff I’d believed up into that moment became much more
real,” he said, especially concerning “the big picture of
life here on earth and what God desires for us afterward.”
Again, community played a huge part in that trial – his
family was in it together, for better or worse.
“We saw what the cancer was doing to mom,” he said. “Being
together as siblings and knowing we can’t change things,
we’re helpless and powerless … there were just a lot
of lessons. And a lot to be gained just by us being
together.”
Faith, he said, is often mystery and questions. With his
mother’s death, his family didn’t have any answers “but we’re
together and we’re relying on each other because we know that
we couldn’t shoulder this one alone and it would be senseless
to even try.”
Daily life, now and ahead
Aside from relying on friends and family for comfort and
strength, Duesterhaus stays grounded in God by attending
daily Mass and keeping a daily holy hour.
“Those are big oases for me,” he said. “They keep me mindful,
aware of the rhythms of my day (and the) different ways that
God wants to move in my life.”
He recently earned a graduate degree in English at George
Mason University in Fairfax and, even more recently,
published a book, The Loyal Treatment, that he compiled in
summer 2006 just weeks after the death of his mother. He is
always looking for new ways and challenges to live out God’s
will in his life.
And, naturally, the relationships of his family, friends,
students and fellow Youth Apostles continue to sustain him.
“We are meant to be connected to each other,” he said.
“People are leaning on you in a good way and you can lean on
them.
“Without community you can go ‘lone ranger’ for a while, but
that’s no long-term plan,” he added. “That’s no way to live.”
