The COVID-19 pandemic, a commuter society and digital screens too often replacing face-to-face conversations have set people adrift from one another, and people in the Catholic Church are not immune to that trend, argues Father Joseph Johnson, pastor of Holy Family in St. Louis Park.

“People often don’t even know their neighbors who live next door,” Father Johnson said. “We live in a commuter society, and we were unconsciously practicing a form of ‘social distancing’ long before the coronavirus.” Father Johnson said he sees men as particularly susceptible to the trend of turning inward.

What follows is the story, told by a founding member of what became known as Beer and the Bard, of how a dozen or so men from Holy Family responded to Father Johnson’s invitation to reclaim true Christian community and friendship. They did so from an unlikely source that for most only conjures up half-forgotten high school memories. They decided to meet at one another’s homes each Sunday evening to read aloud and discuss the plays of William Shakespeare.

This is also the story of how these men, who continue to meet four years after their first gathering, found new direction for their lives as husbands, fathers and Catholic men, and how, through this profound friendship, they walked together through serious adversity, even death.

This is the story of a “band of brothers.”

Father Joseph Johnson, pastor of Holy Family, said he believes Catholic parishes should be at the forefront of rebuilding community and friendships. Just before Lent in 2019, he asked the Holy Family congregation, “Who here thinks that when Jesus founded the Church, he meant it to be a bunch of strangers who just happened to sit under the same roof to pray for an hour on Sunday morning?”

But sometimes men have difficulty making good friends, Father Johnson said.

“A man often just has his wife’s best friend’s husband. The women are friends, so the men are thrown together.” Sometimes, he added, that arrangement works and sparks a fruitful relationship. “Other times, it is just another ‘buddy’ without any deep connection. Buddies and work colleagues are common. Deep and meaningful friendships are not.”

Father Johnson challenged all parishioners to take part in small groups throughout Lent. Dozens of new groups formed.

This call to community and friendship resonated with Holy Family parishioner Nate Bullard, 41, a business executive and father of six. Bullard recalls an urgent prayer from his younger years: “God, please send me a good friend.” The desire that prompted that prayer has been with him ever since.

Bullard decided to form a small group that was off the beaten path, as Church groups go. He reasoned that, instead of speaking directly about their spiritual life, a group of faithful men might thrive by exploring something else — a rich, evocative topic that could lead them to deeper places. Shortly before Ash Wednesday, while exercising on a treadmill at the downtown Minneapolis YMCA, he decided the “something else” should be a weekly reading and discussion of the plays of William Shakespeare.

Bullard had never read Shakespeare, but he knew from others that this literary treasure trove contains many of the best, worst, most tragic and comical variations in the high drama that is the human condition. He worried, though, that the subject matter might sound intimidating. To lighten things up, he gave the group a whimsical name that suggested fellowship and good times: Beer and the Bard.

A dozen or so men signed up. Many had only a passing acquaintance with Shakespeare’s work, if that. They ranged in age from their 20s to 70s, and included a physician, tech specialists, a business owner, teachers, a customer service rep, lawyers and some who had retired.

Many had avoided men’s groups in the past. They assumed such gatherings often amounted to sitting in a circle, talking endlessly about “feelings.” One initial skeptic, Will Lasseter, 52, an educator, put it this way: “So many groups — frankly, including Bible study groups — are not designed for the peculiarities of men. They’re designed to directly pull emotional responses out of you, which rarely works with guys.”

Several of the men were intrigued by the good-time name Bullard had chosen. “I’ve seen too many stone-cold sober, midday, chip-and-dip gatherings,” observed founding member John Emmel, 35, a physician.

“To me, Beer and the Bard suggested a more relaxed, even boisterous atmosphere,” member Mark Fischer, 61, a customer service representative, agreed. “Don’t all Catholic men like fellowship responsibly interspersed with some kind of firewater?” he quipped.

All the men who joined Beer and the Bard agreed on one thing: The search for friendship was a primary motive. “People, especially men, are becoming more isolated from one another, lonelier and less anchored to communities,” observed Kit Adderley, 32, a teacher. “I think at this point in history — where we are staring down the barrel of anti-Christian culture — making strong friendships with other serious Catholics is of vital importance.”

Tyler Blanski, 39, a development and sales specialist, added: “Being a Catholic father can be surprisingly lonely. Unlike with dating, there are no ‘friendship apps’ for dads.”

Throughout Lent of 2019, Beer and the Bard members met every Sunday night in one another’s living rooms, around fire pits and in basements. They began with one of Shakespeare’s last plays, “Cymbeline,” about an obscure, ancient king of Britain. They signed up for parts before each session, read one act per evening, and paused to discuss each scene before moving on to the next, finishing the entire play during Lent.

At the end of Lent, there was much support for continuing with Beer and the Bard.

As Bullard had anticipated, members found in Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and histories a vast array of characters, a great storeroom of human nature’s odds and ends, from the most sinister kings to the most uproarious buffoons. “Shakespeare embodies in words the entire human experience,” Lasseter said. “We’re constantly seeing overlap with Catholic thought and culture,” Emmel observed, “whether it be the soul-corrupting revenge in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ or the out-of-control ambition in ‘Macbeth.’”

Men who had rarely been comfortable with deep conversation on “first things” felt a door to such talk open through Shakespeare, especially because it did so indirectly, without requiring members to bare their souls. “Our experience,” Adderley noted, “is that Shakespeare’s work elicits discussion, camaraderie, laughter, tears, suspense, fear, joy, relief and more: the full range of human thought and emotion.”

Members also discovered the conversation benefited from its unique intergenerational character. Except family, most members had little experience speaking of important things with individuals 40 years older or younger than themselves. At Beer and the Bard gatherings, any “generation gap” seemed to vanish.

Reading “Antony and Cleopatra,” the group debated the trade-offs between worldly success and love and pondered the distinction between real love and the destructive allure of Cleopatra’s siren song.

In Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” the king, sleepless and alone, paces the palace halls late at night, worrying about threats to the kingdom and his son’s errant ways. He mutters to himself: “Heavy lies the head that wears the crown.” Passages like this echoed group members’ perennial worries about successfully meeting their own heavy responsibilities of work and family. As “Henry IV” unfolds, Prince Hal, the king’s wayward son, grows from a youthful carouser to one of England’s greatest kings. In the next history play, “Henry V,” he speaks some of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines as he rallies his men before the watershed battle of Agincourt, where England’s forces are vastly outnumbered:

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition: and gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon St. Crispin’s day.”

These stirring lines — spoken in the face of a seemingly hopeless fight — prompted compelling questions in Beer and the Bard members’ minds: Could our children someday rise above the cultural and personal challenges facing them? Can I be a courageous inspiration to my family despite the odds against me in this culture? Am I capable of standing shoulder to shoulder in a “band of brothers?”

Over time, the scope of Beer and the Bard’s activities expanded well beyond Shakespeare readings on Sunday nights. The group broadened its reach to include poetry reading, music, Shakespeare films, attending orchestra concerts and enjoying dinners with spouses.

As the members’ bonds grew, they found ways to support one another outside of Sunday gatherings: celebrating the births of each other’s children, grieving over the death of a member’s father, acting as godfather for another member’s child, assisting in a move to a new home. They prayed for, and counseled, each other in difficult times. Beer and the Bard became a rock of togetherness for its members during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and members developed a stronger attachment to Holy Family parish.

“We began to bring friendship to each other beyond the borders of the group,” Lasseter said. “We believed we were playing a role in creating a new culture of Catholic community, something well beyond the parameters of the original small group.”

As time went on, members noticed the impact of Beer and the Bard on their personal lives.

“Beer and the Bard opened my eyes to just how rich true Christian friendship can be,” said member Ben Legatt, 46, a software business owner, “and this has led me to pursue depth in my other friendships.” Adderley observed: “I am a better father and a better husband and a better man because of the Beer and the Bard experience. I have found that I am less anxious, happier, more patient and have grown more reflective than I was before joining this group.”

Andrew Acker, 32, a data scientist, said he now thinks more seriously about his responsibilities as a Christian father and husband, and, he added whimsically, “I even notice I’m a better reader to my young children because of all my reading aloud at Beer and the Bard.”

Then at the beginning of 2021, about two years after Beer and the Bard’s formation, something profound occurred, something that required one of the group’s members and his family to walk the way of the cross, something that would call on group members to walk by his side.

Founding member David Swenson was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer on New Year’s Day 2021. David and his wife, Angela, had three small children, their youngest just having celebrated his first birthday. It quickly became clear that David did not have long to live.

Beer and the Bard members instantly showed up. They brought the family “meals for a day” — breakfast, lunch and dinner. When David was hospitalized, members visited to chat about everyday things. “I think that was one of the things David really appreciated,” said Angela. “The guys treated him as they had before he was sick, and this gave him the chance to be himself again, not just a guy with stage 4 cancer.”

Perhaps most importantly, they gave David confidence that they would continue to show up after he was gone. “In the last weeks of David’s life,” Angela recalled, “one of his reassurances to me was that we are in this beautiful community, and the families here will help raise our kids. I know it brought him a great deal of peace and comfort to understand that these men who had become spiritual brothers to him would continue to step up and be father figures to our kids.”

Beer and the Bard members were true to their word. Just a month after David died on June 28, 2021, Nate Bullard invited the Swensons’ then-6-year-old son to join him and his son for a father-son camping trip. Several families in the Shakespeare group used their holiday break from school to make a multi-family outing possible for Angela and her children. According to Angela, her youngest son, Samuel, has had a particularly hard time understanding where his father went and why he can’t come back.

“He has latched on to a number of the guys in the group, actually calling John Emmel ‘daddy’ for a while,” Angela said, adding that, at a recent pancake breakfast, “Sam clung to John for the better part of an hour, head on his shoulder, arms wrapped around him.”

For Angela personally, Beer and the Bard’s greatest gift was that the group’s wives, like their husbands, banded together in friendship and offered that friendship to her in her time of trouble. She recalled that two of the women with nursing backgrounds surprised her by showing up in their scrubs when David was placed in home hospice to cover night shifts so she could get some much-needed sleep. On her first night alone without David, Angela said, two of the wives showed up, with pajamas, at her house, prepared to stay with her. “My bed was already full with three kids and a cat, but nonetheless, it was such a beautiful act of friendship, and I love them for it,” Angela said.

This friendship among Beer and the Bard wives continues to the present day. “We now have our own group that gets together as well,” Angela said. “They have become my dearest friends and an unfailing source of support and love.”

Angela’s experience reveals what is at the heart of the deepest Christian friendship. “It cannot be engineered or forced,” she said. “It often comes about because people go through a great challenge together — a tragedy or an extremely vulnerable moment. At these moments, we punch through all barriers to the most profound friendship.”

Beer and the Bard shows no signs of slowing down and has many Shakespeare plays yet to read (“after which we’ll probably start them all over again,” quipped Bullard). More importantly, they continue to pursue with one another an effort to replicate that great gift our Lord offered to his disciples: “But now I call you my friends.”

Father Johnson put it this way: “As individual disciples, we each need a sense of belonging to the Church, but we are also meant to be God’s blessing to each other. We cannot do this as strangers.” He added that “Jesus sent his apostles out ‘two by two.’ We need that sense of shared mission as well.”

At David Swenson’s funeral, Angela Swenson asked Beer and the Bard’s members to be her husband’s pallbearers. She said that watching all of them surround his casket was one of the most moving moments of the day.

The men placed a floral display in front of David’s casket at the funeral home for the wake. On the flowers was a card that read: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

Editor’s note: Johnson is a Twin Cities writer.