- Henri Nouwen

Sundial at Jewel Box, Forest Park in St. Louis (photo by Steve Givens)

So often over the years I have found myself the impatient person described above, especially when it comes to waiting for God to act. I wanted to believe that the “real thing,” the better thing, my true purpose, was always just around the corner, just over the horizon, just about to happen.

I think the most fervent and continuously prayed prayer of my adult life has been some version of this: “Show me your will for my life, God, and I’ll go do it. Just show me. Make it clear.” And then I would add parenthetically: “It would be nice if you would do that soon, please. But not TOO soon because I still have this and this and this to take care of…”

Whatever it lacks, this kind of prayer is still a prayer of faith. But the problem, as Henri Nouwen points out, is that this kind of faith seems to deny the importance of who I am and what I am supposed to be doing right now, on “the ground on which we stand.” It says, “I’m getting impatient here, God, and where I am right now can’t possibly be where you want me to be…there has to be something better.”

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong in asking God for direction. And there’s nothing wrong in telling God that you are open to his call for your future. Our ongoing journeys of discerning God’s will are the most important things we do as mature Christians. Nevertheless, if we continually ask God, “what do you want me to do?” we may be ignoring what’s in front of our eyes. Right now, we’re called to respond to the life God has given and the situation into which God has placed us. Good or bad. Healthy or unhealthy. Successful or not. We are called to embrace the present, to be aware of God’s movement right now, to act in response to our current circumstances and not just wish for better days somewhere in the future when we will have a clearer sense of purpose and call. We are called to be patient.

Woman on Lamma Island, near Hong Kong (photo by Steve Givens)

So I’m asking myself today (on my 52^nd birthday!): How am I responding (or not responding) to those around me? How am I caring for (or ignoring) those in need? What social injustice has slipped off my radar screen because I’m too busy asking God what he wants me to do some day down the road? How much of the beauty of today will I miss because I’m impatient or anxious about tomorrow?

Our ability to be both truly present to one another and aware of God’s presence in our lives is a gift unto itself. It is our calling. There’s nothing more important we can do today.

Christian Brothers Cemetery at LaSalle, Glencoe, Mo.

Walking through cemeteries, I have learned over the years, is a lesson in awareness. We are reminded, of course, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But we also learn the power of quiet, of stillness, of non-busyness. It’s hard to hurry through a graveyard, and why would we want to? If we’re in a cemetery that bears the remains of our own ancestors, we become perhaps all the more acutely aware that we are not alone, that our little, short lives are not the be-all and end-all, that we are a flash in the pan of the flintlock rifle of human existence. We are merely a thread in the larger strand of life that includes the fibers of so many other lives.

I did not come to this awareness early or easily. I grew up in North St. Louis very near the huge and infamous Calvary (Catholic) and Bellefontaine (Protestant) cemeteries, home to massive Gothic mausoleums and St. Louis’ most notorious ghosts, or so we believed, fueled by Saturday matinees at the nearby Rio movie theater.  The two adjacent burial grounds, separated by the (obviously) haunted Calvary Drive (beware of Hitchhiking Annie!), contain the graves of civil war soldiers, cholera victims, and a bevy of St. Louis’ and America’s elite, including explorer William Clark and Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. In short, this was territory ripe for scaring the holy bajeezus out of 12-year-old boys. I stayed away, even though we all knew where the gaps were in the tall, wrought-iron fence.

My love for cemeteries came later and was a gift of my wife and, more specifically, from her mother, Carrol, a gifted and prolific genealogist and historical researcher who has spent many, many days searching for the truth of history in the faded stones of Missouri’s rural cemeteries. For that gift I will be forever thankful. I learned there was nothing to be afraid of and much, much to learn.

So I enjoy a stroll through a good cemetery as often as possible, whether or not I’m visiting departed friends or family. I go to my parents’ grave infrequently, I have to admit. I like to think about them when I’m there, of course, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t “find” them there. The souls of my parents and several sets of grandparents are not hanging around Memorial Park Cemetery waiting for me to show up.

In Ronald Rolheiser’s beautiful book, “The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality,” the Canadian Oblate priest asks this poignant question: “How do we find our loved ones after death separates them from us?”

The answer lies in what we have been celebrating these past 8 days of the Christmas season – the incarnation of Christ. It lies in the Word of God made flesh and living among us, not just 2,000 years ago but right now. As Christians, as believers in this miracle and gift of incarnation, we participate in the ongoing life of Jesus “among us,” and not even our physical death separates us from that life.

His last words...Christian Brothers Cemetery, Glencoe, Mo.

It all began, Rolheiser writes, on that first Easter morning. Mary Magdala rushes to the tomb hoping to anoint the dead body of her friend, only to find it empty and an angel who says to her: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Rolheiser writes:

Curious words? Not really. In effect, the angel is telling her that cemeteries are not the real place where we find people who have passed from this world but are now alive in a new way. We do not find our deceased love ones in their graves, good though it be to visit graves. Invisible angels sit there, at the graves of our loved ones, and send us back into life to seek for them at other places…. We will meet the ones we can no longer touch when we put ourselves in situations where their souls once flourished…. Simply put, we find our deceased loved ones by entering into life, in terms of love and faith, in the way that was most distinctive to them…when we pour ourselves into life as they did.

If we believe that the ones we love are, in fact, alive in Christ and part of the communion of saints and the ongoing word and flesh of  “God with Us,” then we must seek them where we can find them and where they flourish, not among the dead.

I find my mother when I hold a child, any child, for her life was a life of caregiving and selfless love.

I find my father in the quiet of a good book or a walk through the woods, two places where his restless and often desperate heart found some peace.

Memorial Park Cemetery, St. Louis, Mo.

I find my paternal grandmother in a simple hummed melody or a game of rummy, two ways in which she soothed my young fears.

I find my brother in the faces of his four beautiful daughters and their energetic pack of children (all boys but one!), the fruit of his life and work and sacrifice. In their presence he was always most alive, so why search elsewhere now?

Each person, Rolheiser reminds us, shapes not only his or her own life and that of those around him or her, but the very presence of God for others, the continuing “word becoming flesh.” We are Christ for those around us. That is both our call and our gift as Christians, as people of the Word.

Happy New Year.

MIssion Churchyard Cross, Steve Givens 2010.

He was but two,

the age they call “terrible,”

the age that elicits terrible questions too.

He stood at the crib at the church’s entrance;

he glanced up at the cross in the church’s sanctuary.

Then Aidan asked his mother,

“How can Jesus be both here and there?”

from “Aidan’s Question” by Bishop Robert Morneau, A Splash of Sunshine and Other Glimpses of Grace, Orbis Books, 2011.

Aidan’s question resonates deeply in me in these days leading up to Christmas. For especially now we Christians face this great, painful and glorious paradox of the wood – the wood of the stable and the wood of the cross. Back in my undergraduate days, I wrote this (very) short poem:

Word

turned flesh

falling from above

finding rest

in a cross-stitched world

of straw

and wood.

Cross-stitched we are, indeed. We are sewn and bound together in faith by these two images, one of the Baby Jesus lying in the manger and the other of a full-grown 30-something man hanging on a cross. In both he is held by the things of earth, by the texture and smell of wood and soil and iron.

Yet he is God from God, light from light, present at the creation. He is both the voice that speaks the words, “Let there be light,” and he is the Word itself.  And yet he cries out to his mother, holds out his arms to find her breast in the dark of the stable.

He is the promised of nations, the Prince of Peace, Lord of Light and Lord of All. And yet he sleeps soundly in his puzzled father’s arms.

Ours is a faith built on these paradoxes of wood, and many others as well.

We place our faith, our very lives, in something we cannot see. We sing, we pray, we worship a God while some scoff at us for addressing thin air.

We hold out our hands and accept small pieces of flat bread and tiny sips of wine because we believe them to be the very real presence of Christ’s body and blood. Two disparate things seemingly in the same place at the same time.

Mission Churchyard Cross #2, Steve Givens, 2010

This is life for us searching and questioning souls living here on earth. And the truth is, we need the mystery of being “here and there at the same time.” We need it somewhere deep down, some place too far away to reach and, yet, there it is out of the corner of our eye. We need to know God is above us, watching over us, guiding the universe, but we need to know that God is right here, right now, as close as a whispered prayer.

For we belong both here and there. We are both here and there. We are soul and we are body. Although I like C.S. Lewis’ version of this theology better:

“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

——–

Previous thoughts on advent and Christmas:

Waiting for Christ with Bright Eyes

Just What are We Waiting For?

A Light in Darkness: A Christmas Villanelle

Look him in the eyes.

They are the faces in the crowd, some standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of this condemned prophet or rabble-rouser, take your pick, as he stands mute before the authorities, as he flinches but never complains against the searing heat of the lashes, as he bears the weight of the beam across his shoulder blades and feels the bite of the sheer mass and the splintered wood.

Some are mere spectators, while others have roles to play. The

The centurion.

centurion keeps watch and sneers under his breath about this crazy Jew and his zealous, ignorant followers. A group of women tag along, scuttling and shuffling in the dusty road to keep up and occasionally offer an encouraging word, a tear of compassion or a cloth to wipe his sweaty, bloody face.

A man stands at a distance, wondering if he should or can intervene. Finally, futilely, he dashes to catch the crossbar before it drives this wounded, gentle teacher to his knees yet again. He is rewarded for his concern by being pressed into service by the soldiers to carry the cross the rest of the way up the hill while the bruised and battered rabbi lags behind.

Hail Mary, full of grace...

A woman, his mother, is suddenly at his side, her eyes wide at the horror and helplessness of it all. She is inconsolable but his eyes tell her to let it go, to accept the rest of his journey in the very same, faithful way that she accepted the strange beginning of it. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…

He nods “yes” to her and she knows well this “yes,” has lived this “yes” over and over and over. Blessed art you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb…

Led like a lamb

At the top, he is pushed to the ground and grabbed roughly by the executioners and guards who, it must be said, are just doing a job. They have no dog in this fight.  Below, at the foot of the hill, the women and the others can see a hammer raised high, can hear the sickening crash of metal to metal to bone to flesh to wood. She hears the scream, the cry she knows so well and has heard for so long, the Word incarnate and light of the world who has always looked to her for food, for warmth, for comfort.

She longs to hold him now, to soothe his face with her tears, her hands, her cloak. Oh, to hold once more this child, this man, this God-child, man-child. It is all still a mystery, even to her. And yet she believes, knows it is all true somehow.

Who will carry the cross?

He is lifted into place and the crossbar finds its notch, jolts him into place. Pain streams through his body and he feels it all, no divine relief available to him now. He must sustain it all, must see this through to the bitter end. His eyes are closed in supplication and in the acceptance of what he knows must be done, what he was created for, what he was formed and named to be. And at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth…

His breath becomes shallow and barely visible, and yet he finds the strength to pray, to think of those faces in the crowd and those who are yet to be born.

The hammer holds

To forgive: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

To assure: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.

To take care of those he loves: Woman, this is your son. This is your mother.

To cry out, to give us a reason to do the same: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

To be fully human: I thirst.

By his wounds we have been healed.

To complete: It is finished. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

The faces in the crowd now shrink back in fear and wonder, as a glimmer of understanding flashes through and among them. They begin to discern the injustice, the rash political decision, the utter humility and humanity and gentleness of the man.

And for some, for a select and chosen few, they begin to see the reason, begin to feel the freedom and the grace that emanates from the cross. Begin to see in one clear, shining moment a love that will span the centuries and leave those they will never know in the stunned silence of faith, of adoration and praise. And they know, just as we know, that they will never again be the same. Cannot be the same.

Never again alone. Never again trapped in desperation. Never again lost.

Never again.

Blessed are you among women...

All these images are details from the Stations of the Cross at the LaSalle Retreat Center in Glencoe, Mo., where I attended an ACTS retreat last weekend. This is dedicated to all my ACTS brothers, those who walked the way with me and offered to carry the cross.

The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., photo by Steve Givens

On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., I attended morning mass at one of my favorite places, the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, just a few blocks up from DuPont Circle where I was staying. Because I travel to D.C. a few times a year to attend meetings of higher education public affairs folks like me, and because DuPont Circle is “home territory” for many higher education organizations, I have come to know this area pretty well. And St. Matthew’s has become my parish home when I’m there.

To be honest, in a city filled with architectural gems, from the outside St. Matthew’s has little in its facade that would draw you inside. It lies just a block off busy Connecticut Avenue on Rhode Island, tucked back from the street in such a way that you might miss it if you didn’t look up. But inside, its collection of side chapels, statuary, and mosaics are inspiringly beautiful and prayerful. My favorite mosaic is that of a different gospel writer, St. Mark, elbow on knee and fist beneath his chin, urging us all to enter into conversation with him on the life and death of his friend. The shape of the interior (at least to my untrained eye) is more of a square than a rectangle, drawing all nearer to the altar. (In fact, it is in the shape of a Latin cross, 155 feet long by 136 feet wide). To see more of the Cathedral, visit its online tour.

St. Mark invites us into conversation. Photo by Steve Givens

The Cathedral honors St. Matthew, that iconic tax collector and the patron saint of civil servants, and it plays a major role in the life of Catholics in the nation’s capital. It is the seat of the archbishop, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass there in 1979 and, in perhaps its most noted moment, it was the place of President Kennedy’s funeral Mass on November 25, 1963, a fact of which I am always reminded whenever I go forward for communion and stand upon an inlaid marble plaque that marks the spot. I breathe a little deeper when I stand there, waiting.

The Cathedral is attended by Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, Cabinet members, members of the diplomatic corps, and sometimes even the president of the United States. As a history buff, I can’t NOT be affected by these facts. I do not stand in awe of these people, but I am aware of the tremendous burdens they bear in their positions of responsibility. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. Sometimes I agree with their decisions and sometimes I do not.

But I appreciate the fact that many of them come here to pray and worship and receive the sacraments, to place themselves into the hands of God, to be no more important at the moment of receiving the body and blood of Christ than me or the person sweeping the floor or a hungry, frightened child in Uganda who might benefit from, say, a wise decision to send aid and U.S. troops to protect them from being pressed into service as child soldiers by the horrifically named “Lord’s Resistance Army.”

JFK marker at St. Matthew's, photo by Steve Givens

We all need a place to pray with others who share our faith or just to be alone with our thoughts and our God. Washington, D.C. has many such places for believers of every kind. And with the weight of the nation and the world on the shoulders of so many of these men and women, it’s a good thing.

Take a moment today to pray for all of those who serve our country as elected officials and civil servants. For a few seconds, forget about party lines and campaign speeches and the scandal of the day. Just breathe. Just pray.

Outside Sedona. Photo by Steve Givens

Sue and I just returned from a week in Sedona, Arizona, celebrating our 31^st anniversary surrounded by some of God’s very best handiwork. Located in Arizona’s high desert country under the southwestern rim of the Colorado Plateau, Sedona is situated at the mouth of spectacular Oak Creek Canyon and surrounded by massive red-rock formations. It was a glorious week of rest and walking the area’s myriad hiking trails that drew us right up to the bases of the rock formations with names like Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte and Boynton Canyon.

But located between Sedona and the Village of Oak Creek is one of the region’s manmade (and woman-designed!) wonders: The Chapel of the Holy Cross. We had been through here once before when the kids were…well…kids. We had stopped at the chapel then, too, but this time we had more time to savor the beauty of the chapel and its setting, and even experience a beautifully simple Taize ecumenical prayer service.

Although operated by the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix and St. John Vianney Parish of Sedona (our parish home for the week), the church is open to all and is not an operating Catholic church. The story behind its design and creation is the story of one artist’s vision, a nagging dream and her desire to find the spirit of Christ in her art.

Chapel of the Holy Cross. Photo by Steve Givens

Marguerite Brunswig Staude first had the idea for a cruciform-shaped church in 1932 while viewing the newly constructed Empire State Building. Years later, she wrote, “When viewed from a certain angle a cross seemed to impose itself through the very core of the structure. What an idea for a church! For days it haunted and obsessed me, insisting on taking shape.”

Later she sketched the church, which she showed to her teacher. That happened to be a guy named Frank Lloyd Wright. He liked the idea and together they interpreted her dream, which they initially envisioned would be built in Budapest on one of the hills overlooking the Danube. World War II put an end to that idea. The idea lay dormant for many years.

In the 1950s, Staude owned a ranch in Oak Creek Canyon, and she wrote that the area around her home seemed to be “calling for the existence of a shrine where God can be worshipped as a contemporary” and where God could be “brought closer to each and everyone of us.” Although much smaller in scale than her original vision, construction on the chapel began in 1955 on a 250-foot-high, twin-pinnacled spur, jutting out of a thousand-foot rock wall, and was completed a year later.

“Just as the soul inhabits a human frame, and the house is built to shelter that frame, it is the mission of the church to shelter and inspire both the soul and body,” she once wrote. “It therefore should not only be a monument to faith, but a spiritual fortress so charged with God that it spurs man’s spirit Godward!

Interior of chapel. Photo by Steve Givens

“As an artist, this is my offering,” she said. “Ad Majorem Dei,” (for the glory of God) in answer to the One who in order to save us stretched out his arms on the cross.”

Photo by Steve Givens

In my reading this morning for a class I begin next week, I read the following, which brought me up short because I had forgotten it, even though I read the book mentioned many years ago (and saw the movie):

In [Alice Walker’s novel] The Color Purple, the heroine, Celie, had never been introduced to any image of God other than the old white man with a beard, legalistic and authoritarian. Her friend Shug is much more awakened. Celie is astonished: she says to Shug, “You telling me God love you, and you ain’t never done anything for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?” But Shug’s God is a lover who is “always wanting to share a good thing,” who is “pissed off if we walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” (from The Art of Spiritual Guidance, Carolyn Gratton)

Oh yeah. Now I remember…powerful reminder.

Photo by Steve Givens

I don’t have much to add to these thoughts because they are so spot on. I just got back from church, and there I experienced God because I sought and found him in the readings, in the music, in the great sacrament of the Eucharist and in the body of believers gathered around me.  But I also know that the God I love and worship is bigger than that room and smart enough to know that all will not seek him there. God can never be confined to a building or to a set of beliefs. He cannot be bound even by sacred scripture and the most intimate experiences of sacrament and prayer, however real and powerful I believe those to be. He is there in those sacred moments in church, surely, but he is not limited by that experience.  How could the creator of the universe be? And why would he want to be?

Photo by Steve Givens

But neither is God hard to find, nor is he only for the initiated, favored or chosen. God is present to all of us, whether we recognize it or not, whether we choose to thank him or not. He is present in the incessant chirping of the cicadas outside my door, in the flow of water down a mountain stream and in the rising and setting of the sun. God cannot and will not be separated from these sure signs of his creation. God is in the sacredness of our ordinary lives and in the mundane tasks we carry out everyday. God is as readily found, if we look, as the noses on our face or the color purple. Just look.

For more on this topic, you can read an earlier post, “Standing Still and Learning to Be Astonished.

Photo by Steve Givens

"Lasset uns Beten!" 1908, photo by Steve Givens

On Friday, Sue and I drove around the Missouri River Valley of Central Missouri just east of our state capital of Jefferson City, an area settled and farmed largely by 19^th- and 20^th-century German immigrants. They were drawn to the area, in large part, by its fertile river valley and its similarities to their homeland, and the marks they left on the landscape are still present in the cleared and plowed fields, a few old stone buildings, and their churches — both Catholic and Protestant – whose spires spring up from the land as you approach any village or town on the narrow, winding roads. Always, there is a church steeple signaling the existence of a community.

We hit just a few towns on this short road trip. When I see the town of Frankenstein on the map, I know we have to go see it. Besides the intrigue of the name, I have been there before many years ago when I was a child, as friends of our family owned a “country place” not far away up Highway 100 in Osage County. There’s not much to see now in Frankenstein, if there ever was, but its Catholic Church – Our Lady, Help of Christians – is a

Our Lady, Help of Christians, Frankenstein, Mo. Photo by Steve Givens

wonderful and well-preserved architectural specimen, especially considering the town currently boasts a population of 30 people. The town, at least according to one online source, was named not for the monster but for Gottfried Franken, who donated land to build the church in 1890.

From Frankenstein, we double back, heading south again through Linn and Loose Creek to the German Catholic village of Westphalia, home to St. Joseph Catholic Church, founded in 1835. Many of the early settlers of the area came from the Westphalen area of Germany, thus the name of the village.

The massive stone church building, typical of 19^th-century German architecture, looms large over the town. Up close, you can still see the hand-hewn marks on the off-white stones. Someone sweated over these stones and then lugged them up the hill and mortared them into place. Someone prayed over them and dedicated them to worship and prayer. Someone hoped that 150 years later these walls would still be standing, echoing back the prayers and songs and sacraments of a community of faith. To stand outside the walls and consider the baptisms and first communions and weddings and funerals is to see the history of an entire community in one

St. Joseph's, Westphalia, Mo. Photo by Steve Givens

cold-stone place. It’s imperfect, like so many places. But it is sacred ground. I can feel it.

From Westphalia, we drive southwest down State Highway 133 through Meta and then dip momentarily into Maries County (where some of my ancestors lived) and then cross into Miller County to the town of St. Elizabeth (originally called Charlestown) where the Church of St. Elizabeth stands at the center of the town. Interestingly, I learn after my visit that the original town of St. Elizabeth was located three miles away on the Osage River, and that old church was brought from the river to the new town site.

After a really good burger at Ms. Kitty’s bar, located just down the street from the church, we duck into a local antique store (originally a turn-of-the-century mercantile) just in time to beat a downpour. Inside, waiting for the rain to stop, we peruse the aisles a little longer than we might have otherwise. A half

The doors to St. Joseph's, Westphalia, Mo. Photo by Steve Givens

hour later, we leave with a jar of homemade bread and butter pickles and a small, leather-bound Catholic prayer book, given as a first communion gift almost exactly 100 years ago to a young man named Louis Boehmer from Richfountain, a small town not far away in Osage County. It is printed in German, of course, with a smattering of Latin, published in St. Louis in 1908. It is titled “Lasset uns Beten!” (Let us Pray!)

And I can’t help but wonder how many times Louis held this book in his hands and tried to pray the prayers. I wonder if he found God in this book. I wonder if it went with him into the fields or to the mill. I wonder if he rubbed the leather smooth on the cover from years of worry and prayer and devotion.

Louis and the people of this fertile region were certainly people of faith. They had faith in the land. Faith in each other. Faith in the God who led them here so far from home in search of a new life and some land of their own. No doubt they worked hard, sun up until sundown, trying to pull from the earth sustenance and a source of income for their families. They worked harder and with more commitment and sense of life and death than many of us in the modern world will ever begin to experience.

And their prayers were more than empty words bouncing around the stone walls of village churches. They were a lifeline to the source of their abundance, wrapped in their desires and fears like a small, leather-bound book given as a gift and bought for five bucks a century later.

Dedication page, photo by Steve GIvens

Inside spread of German prayer book. Photo by Steve Givens

Detail from Marc Chagall's "America Window" at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo by Steve Givens.

Yesterday a friend sensed in my distracted voice

over the phone

sadness and confusion

and sent a Psalm

number 61

written for the Chief Musician

(an inside joke)

and for a stringed instrument

(a shared love).

He knew

as I do, but sometimes forget, that we all long to cry out:

Hear my cry, God.

Listen to my prayer.

He is wiser than he lets on

for he knows what it really means to say:

I will call to you when my heart is overwhelmed.

I needed his prayers and this Psalm

and today he may need mine.

This is what makes us Church

the Body of Christ, broken yet unbroken.

It is this that leads us to the rock

higher than we ever thought we could reach.

Together and separately we seek refuge

a strong tower from the enemy

where we dwell under God’s tent and

huddle beneath his protective wings,

baby birds open-mouthed and hiding from the storm.

Me and Ghost. A few years ago...

There we stay, sometimes hiding, sometimes peeking out.

Always enthroned in the nest of his hands.

Always seeking to be fed.

Always singing.

The Miracle on Ice, 1980

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Chicago for a professional meeting of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, where one of the scheduled speakers was Mike Eruzione. Please tell me you know who Mike Eruzione is. Please…

Okay, I realize that not everyone is a sports fan, but Eruzione played a huge role in what is certainly one of the greatest moments in sports history. Ever. In 1980, in the midst of the Cold War when America desperately needed something to believe in, he was the captain of the United States Olympic Hockey Team, back in the day when real amateurs represented our country in a sports world filled with professionals.

Against all odds, this ragtag band of skaters captured the attention of the world and beat team after team on home ice in Lake Placid, New York, including the Soviets in the penultimate game and Finland in the finals to win the gold. It was, perhaps next to my own appearance in the 1973 Missouri-Illinois Little League All-Star Game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis (where I went 2 for 2 and drove in the go-ahead run in the 3^rd inning…), the most exciting sporting event I ever witnessed.

Eruzione’s winning goal against the Soviet Union has become one of the most played highlights in American sports, and it was voted the greatest highlight of all time by ESPN viewers in March 2008. “The Miracle on Ice,” as it was known, was later made into a Disney movie called “Miracle,” but nothing was better than seeing the real thing happening before our very eyes on television.

And here I was in Chicago, standing next to him in the doorway of the meeting room, trying to act all nonchalant and stuff. Mike now works for Boston University where his job is pretty much being Mike Eruzione. He’s also a frequent inspirational speaker, and his talk this day was titled, “How to Surmount Obstacles and Win.” It’s certainly something he knows a little about, along with the importance of teamwork. For what it’s worth, I thought the best line of Eruzione’s presentation was this: “1980 wasn’t a miracle. It was teamwork and a work ethic.” Well said, sir.

But what really drew me into his talk were the wonderful stories about his father, who worked multiple jobs to support his son’s passion for hockey, even though he himself knew little about the game. Once, when Eruzione missed a shot on a breakaway, his father told him after the game, “You should have deked the goalie.”

“Really, Dad?” Eruzione replied. “And what does deked mean?”

“I don’t know,” his father said, “but the guy behind me said you should have deked the goalie.”

Me and MIke

You gotta love his commitment to his son. That’s what dad’s do. Or what they are supposed to do. We love what our kids do and we support them, even if we don’t understand what’s going on or even if we’re not really interested. When Eruzione won the gold medal, he said his father said he was so proud he was going to “have the medal bronzed and set it next to his baby shoes.” I’m pretty sure that was just a made-up story to make us laugh, but the point remains the same: We need to be proud of our kids and let them know. Frequently. And no matter how old they are.

Eruzione grinned widely as he retold the story of watching the movie “Miracle” with his dad, who was riveted to the screen and sitting on the edge of his seat.

“Relax, Dad,” he said. “We win.”