By While most people have a come-to-Jesus moment in their religious journeys, Jaydee Huschka’s faith journey began the day he was robbed.
On a warm September day at the beginning of semester, Huschka was returning from a very spiritual experience at freshman retreat
After exiting the packed bus, Huschka approached his perpetually dusty 2001 Toyota 4Runner. When he got to his car door, he was confused to find it unlocked, and all of his belongings inside missing, including his Strawberry Starburst flavoured chewing gum.
Jaydee Huschka was born and raised in Helena, a proud member of the first graduating class of East Helena High. Huschka is a junior double-majoring in public health and health sciences, with a minor in music. He was raised Catholic, but over time he has had many opportunities to wrestle with faith and what its purpose in his life might be.
The Catholic tradition has been a part of Huschka’s life since before he can remember.
“Oh I think religion was always part of my life, even before I had a memory,” said Huschka.
His mom descended from a long lineage of devout Catholics. His great-grandparents were the traditional fire-and-brimstone Catholics, who even named their son, Huschka’s Grandpa, Pious.
“They believed strongly that their religion was something that they had to fight for,” he said. “But, I mean, to name your kid, Pious?”
While the faith flowed from his grandparents to his mother’s generation, his mom didn’t follow in those footsteps.
“She wasn’t as religious,” said Huschka. “I remember, later in her life…her saying she didn’t like going to church as often because of the political stuff they have been pushing,”
In fact, the only reason Huschka remembers Mass being an important part of his childhood was because his grandma had come to live with his family when she had a stroke. Grandma insisted that the whole family go to church.
“Grandma was really one of the main reasons that I went to church on Sundays,” said Huschka.
“Because my mom would drag me along when she had to go because my grandma Wayne wanted to go so bad.”
His mom never pushed hard on Huschka’s faith. She never forced him to dress up for Mass or even pay attention during service. In fact, most of Huschka’s memories from attending mass were eating Goldfish from his goldfish-shaped container under the pews.
“She wasn’t very strict…like, you have to pay attention, you have to do this, you have to memorize this.”
Although his mother didn’t continue to teach him Catholicism, she was a model for living a life of faith. His mom didn’t impose Catholicism upon him. Instead, she simply lived what she believed,
“She was very, very religious and faithful in the way that she lived her life,” said Huschka.
His mother was extremely generous and believed in the power of forgiveness and love wholeheartedly.
“One of the greatest pieces of wisdom that she gave me was to believe that everything is gonna be OK,” said Huschka. “No matter what,”
In high school, Huschka began to move even further away from Catholicism. Having dealt with Catholic guilt in middle school for his adolescent actions, he moved away from the church values.
That choice gave him the grace to make mistakes and move forward. By taking his mother’s words in stride, he was able to build himself up and become confident in the person he was becoming.
“At some point, I think I figured out, like, it’s not for me, and that’s OK,” said Huschka. “I don’t have to feel guilty, or, like, someone’s gonna come and find me, because it’s normal to mess up.”
Huschka’s mom was an integral part of his life growing up; he knew if he stayed close to home he’d have her support, which is why he decided to go to Carroll, only 17 miles from his house.
With freshman year and his 18th birthday just around the corner, Huschka was confident in who he was beginning to find his place in the world.
That confidence was shattered one early July morning. In the darkness of his still and cold bedroom, his sister shook him awake and told him that his mother had passed suddenly in a car accident on the way home.
She was gone.
Huschka felt as if the world, which was previously his for the taking, had swallowed him up.
While time moved forward, Huschka stayed still.
In those tumultuous months after his mom’s passing and leading up to his freshman year at Carroll, Huschka was looking for any sign of good in the world.
He needed something or someone to guide him, to support him-to help him understand.
He knew if he didn’t start school now, he might never go, and he had to keep moving forward.
In his search, he began to reconsider returning to Catholicism, as a way to connect with a part of his mother’s past he’d never truly delved into before.
So Huschka, still struggling with his grief, enrolled at Carroll. In his mom’s honor, he began his college journey open to faith.
“Over the four years I’m at Carroll, maybe I’ll become a very religious person. Maybe, I’ll find happiness and community in the Catholic places at Carroll, in the faith community,” Huschka recalled thinking before he started school. “That’ll be good for me.”
Huschka took the opportunity to start anew in his faith by attending the Freshman Retreat in September of 2023, just two months after his mom’s passing
Huschka felt especially moved by the religious teachings at this retreat. Attending Mass on the mountain felt like a moment of peace and serenity in his rapidly collapsing world.
“I remember looking over the cliff, at the river and the mountains and everything,” said Huschka.
“and I cried.”
Some of the teachings struck a nerve for him socially, small reminders of why he’d moved away from the church in the first place.
Other moments, like the Mass on the mountain, called to him and gave him a sense of clarity.
Returning back to campus from retreat, Huschka felt secure that he had discovered his path at Carroll after his mom’s passing.
That’s the moment when he saw his dusty 4Runner, seemingly untouched in the sunshine parked at the edge of campus.
He remembers his confusion when he discovered the door was unlocked, and his questioning if he’d really forgotten to lock his car before he left for Retreat weekend.
In utter disbelief and shock, Huschka discovered all his belongings were gone. After calling his dad to make sure that he hadn’t just forgotten he left his stuff at home, he knew he had been robbed.
His money, his information, his backpack, his notes, everything had been taken from him. Huschka admitted that any outsider could see this as either bad luck or a stupid mistake any 18-year-old could make.
He had left cash from odd jobs in an envelope in the glove compartment. His schoolwork and I.D were in his backpack.
He might as well have written “take me” on the bag.
All gone for good.
“I live off campus, and there wasn’t someone that was gonna be able to drive to my car and take my backpack home,” said Huschka. “So I left it in the car for the weekend.”
It wasn’t the loss of his notes, or money that impacted him most though.
This scary event became a turning point, a Hail Mary sign that he should not return to Catholicism.
While some might see this event as horrible luck or even a huge leap of misunderstanding, to Huschka, it made perfect sense. To him, the robbery was a blaring sign not to seek refuge in the church which made him uncomfortable, just for the sake of finding order in his life.
“At the time, I was still looking for any sign of like, what is the world trying to tell me,” said Huschka. “I said mmm… OK. If there is a God, he’s telling me I’m not supposed to follow this Catholic stuff.”
“People could probably look at it like I was just making an excuse, making up a reason to stay away from Catholicism,” said Huschka. “Or you could even look at it as a test of faith.”
“But that’s not how I took it.”
Still looking for some sense in the world, and having fully turned away from Catholicism, Huschka dug deeper into his philosophy classes, taking both “Intro to Philosophy,” and “Hip-Hop and Self Knowledge.”
“Both of those classes helped me immensely,” said Hsuchka. “They taught me to think about how I deal with, with the concept of who I am and what I want with my life.”
Philosophy helped give Huschka the structure and understanding of the world he had hoped to find in Catholicism.
“And that can kind of guided me along, finding a way to be OK with how crappy my life feels,” said Huschka.
Philosophy helped tie Huschka back to what his mom had told him about faith all those years ago. The type of faith that believes everything will be OK. It was an understanding of faith that had been missing from his life for a while.
“That’s part of the beautiful thing,” said Huschka. “And ideas of total forgiveness and love, and I knew all that. That’s what faith was supposed to be about.”
In a full-circle moment, taking Philosophy and Theology courses allowed Huschka to find a new understanding of faith and religion. He was able to see and understand from a critical standpoint the positive influence of the church in people’s lives, and move past his previous negative experiences with the church’s social standings and harsh rules.
“I got caught up in all of the things you can’t do or the things that you’re going to hell if you do,” said Huschka. “Or the things that make you a terrible person and are judged for.”
Because of his liberal arts education, Huschka has been able to gain a newfound respect and understanding for the Catholic faith, without having to return in fullness to the church. He doesn’t attend Mass regularly, unless he is singing with the Carroll College Choir.
He still often disagrees with some of the church community’s strongly held beliefs.
In the end, Huschka still has no final solution to what faith and religion truly are, but he does have a respect and understanding for the many different ways faith can guide people’s lives. His own faith in the fact that everything is going to be OK, often weakens in strength during those hardest months, as it does for us all.
However, the faith his mother installed in him still holds true – and acts as his guiding light in the darkness.
“I feel grateful in that weird kind of way where something miraculous or something outside of me helped me to figure stuff out and led me to Carroll and liberal arts,” said Huschka. “I didn’t want to just keep wallowing forever. There were avenues of thought that could take me away from the guilt, and the anger, and the wishing things could be different.”
