Creativity

Discovering Fire (Again): The Innovation of Love

Steve · May 14, 2025 · Leave a Comment

Although I took the bare minimum of science and math courses in both high school and college, I am in these elder days a bit of a science geek. And by that I don’t mean that I understand the underpinnings and the “math” of science as much as I relish and pore over each new issue of National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines as they arrive each month and watch longingly for new episodes of Nature and Nova on PBS. So I’m a spectator scientist, at best.

I am particularly drawn to the storytelling of scientific innovation — to the documentaries, essays, articles and podcasts that give us insight to those brilliant scientists and thinkers who are addressing the very real problems faced by the world today. Last month’s National Geographic featured profiles of 33 “visionary changemakers who are striving to make the world a better place” in a diverse range of areas such as climate change, wilderness preservation, economic opportunity, and mental health, among others. At a time when it’s easy to turn away from such troubling horizons, editor Nathan Lump writes that these 33 individuals (for the 33 men who founded the National Geographic Society in 1988) are “decidedly not looking away.”

The past century has been a long and broad season of innovation, to be sure. Just consider that the Wright Brothers first got a few feet off the surface of Earth in 1903 and, just 66 short years later, we landed on the surface of the moon. Consider, too, the advances of medicine, technology, energy and architecture. Heck, consider that I’m sitting here on my back porch typing on a laptop computer, checking a few facts (like the date of the Wright Brothers first flight) in an instant on my cell phone. In college, I thought I was dealing with pretty advanced technology with my Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter and a bottle of Wite-Out®.

So we’ve made some great global strides, to be sure. We have found new ways to care for our Earth and those people and creatures that live on it. And yet, it seems we have failed (and keep failing) when it comes to the most elemental thing that God asks of us: To love one another as God loves us. We, as a society, so often fail to love in ways that would put human lives and dignity before wealth, corporate gains and political strength. We measure success in all the easy but wrong ways.

These early morning thoughts bring to mind the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20^th-century French Jesuit, Catholic priest, scientist, theologian, and teacher. In his 1934 essay, “The Evolution of Chastity,” he wrote: “The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

We’ve done so much in such a short period of time. And, no doubt, some of the world’s greatest innovations were done out of love for the Earth and humanity. But imagine — just imagine — what might be accomplished if everything we did began with the kind of power, influence and great innovation akin to the love that God has for us. The change that kind of power would bring to the world would tower over the elemental innovations like rockets, the wheel and even, as Teilhard writes, fire.

For in the end, it will be on our ability to love and not turn away from those in need that we will be judged, both by God and by those who will circle our coffins and graves trying to speak a few words of remembrance. For it’s not what we accomplish and earn that matters. It’s not the financial or social legacy we leave behind that will endure. It’s how much and how well we loved.

I’ll give the final word today to St. Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was martyred while celebrating mass in 1980: “In the evening of life, you will be judged on love.”

Right in Front of Our Eyes

Steve · July 6, 2023 · 8 Comments

Once when I was a boy I was trying to find something — I don’t remember now what it was — but this thing ended up being right there on the table in front of me. My father laughed as he pointed it out to me and said, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you.”

As a child, that metaphor scared me a little. What IF it had been a snake? What IF I hadn’t seen it there on the table, hiding among my father’s copies of National Geographic and Organic Gardening, slithering toward me between his overflowing ashtray and transistor radio? I learned to look closely around me for the things I was searching for before I started asking for help. Lesson learned: pay attention to the obvious and the close at hand.

In our search for God, sometimes the same thing happens. We miss the obvious moments and occurrences of the Divine because we’re frantically searching for something “out there,” something that is big and splashy and without-a-doubt “God,” when all the time there are these small, ordinary experiences that we’re missing, hidden among the ordinary stuff of life.

Finding God in our daily lives does not require special abilities or tools. We do not have to be particularly holy, although focusing our minds on the holy around us can be a good place to begin. What is required is our intention — a desire and willingness to pay attention to the life we have been given and find God already there waiting for us, beckoning to us, laughing at us and saying, “If I had been a snake…”

I recently wrote a new song on this theme, this idea that God is “right there,” always in front of our eyes. God doesn’t hide from us. God is always waiting to be found, always delighted when we slow down, pay attention and utter those sacred words: “Ah…there you are.”

Here are the lyrics to the song, and a new video is below (you may have to scroll a little). Thanks to my musical collaborator Phil Cooper for the beautiful piano arrangement and to my talented daughter, Jenny, for creating the vocal arrangement and singing with me. In the midst of the creation of this song I found God again — in the act of creation, in the gift of words and music, in the chemistry that happens when we gather together to create something new.

There you are, there you are
in the green that clothes the trees
There you are, there you are
in the very least of these.

Some days I rise but do not waken.
Sometimes I look but fail to see.
And still, you move and catch my eye
A flash of red, a moment fleeting.

In all the noise I cannot hear you.
In all my words I miss your voice.
And still, a whisper fills my head
A gentle beating, inside of me.

Today I saw you on the street
With all you own spread out around you.
And still, a spirit in your smile
A soul on fire, a gift before me.

There You Are
Words and music by Steve Givens
© 2023 Potter’s Mark Music

Songs of Comfort: On Eagle’s Wings

Steve · April 22, 2020 · 8 Comments

Note: I interviewed Fr. Jan Michael Joncas a few weeks ago about the enduring power and comfort of his song, “On Eagle’s Wings” for Catholic Digest magazine, which went out of print not long after the assignment. So with Fr. Joncas’ permission, I am posting the article here.

Fr. Jan Michael Joncas, courtesty photo.

When Fr. Jan Michael Joncas composed the song “On Eagle’s Wings” four decades ago, he was trying to comfort a friend whose father had just died of a heart attack. He wrote the song on guitar in the days following the death and then performed it at the funeral, and that might have been the end of the story. But God, Fr. Joncas said in a recent interview, had other plans.

“It’s just amazing to me,” said Joncas, 68, a prolific composer, priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and artist-in-residence and research fellow in Catholic Studies at St. Thomas University. “I had no way of knowing, first of all, how it got distributed so that people could use it. But by now, it’s made its way across most of the English-speaking world and into other denominational hymnals.”

Even higher-profile uses of the song include recordings by superstars like Josh Groban and Michael Crawford, as well as its performance at the memorial service for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing victims and at the funeral of opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

“I never expected anything like this to happen,” said Fr. Joncas, quarantined at home in St. Paul, “but as I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more and more comfortable with it. I tell my friends that to even have written one piece that has allowed this many people to sing their faith is an incredible gift. Even if nothing else I’ve written ever has that same kind of distribution or power, I’m still happy with it. God does what God wants with this stuff. I am just more and more amazed at how God can use things that you might not ever have thought of to advance whatever God’s intentions are.”

And although it’s become one of a handful of contemporary hymns that have become staples at funerals, Fr. Joncas believes its scriptural roots in Psalm 91, as well as in Exodus and the Gospel of Matthew, make it a song of comfort for the many confusing and fearful times of our lives, as well as for ordinary and joyful times like baptisms and weddings.

“I’m going to use my academic background here,” he said, laughing quietly. “It’s the multivalence [ability to have many values and meanings] of any kind of canonical text scriptures that give them really different importance or different meanings based on the context in which they are used. So the context for ‘Eagle’s Wings’ has been in most people’s experience of funerals, but it’s not limited to that.”

The fact that the song can often make people cry – not because it’s sad but because it’s so comforting — is a gift of the Spirit, said Fr. Joncas, who in 2003 was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system. He was paralyzed for several years and unable to compose. He wrote about his experiences of the disease in “On Eagle’s Wings: A Journey Through Illness Toward Healing,” released in 2017 by Twenty-Third Publications. It was that experience, he says, that allowed him to move beyond his Midwestern stoicism.

“The Eastern traditions talk about the gift of tears, which I think is really accurate,” he said. “I’m a now-beyond-middle-aged, Caucasian Midwesterner, which means that expressions of deep emotion just don’t come to me naturally. After my experience with Guillain-Barré, I found that I’m much more able to trust the feelings, to let them come out, and to connect empathically with people.”

It is, perhaps, the song’s central and vivid image of being “held in the palm of his hand” that gets us every time. It’s a physical impossibility, but it’s the emotional driver of the song. And that’s the power of scripture, Fr. Joncas says.

“One of the things I teach is that psalms are the cries of the human heart, that even though these are ancient Jewish lyrics, they have this wonderful ability to enter very deeply into human experience and then allow that experience to become a way of encountering God.”

At this moment in time, when the world is wracked by disease and the fear of the unknown, Fr. Joncas suggests that leaning on ancient texts like the Psalms can be a healing salve precisely because there’s nothing new under the sun.

“Although this [pandemic] is certainly unprecedented in our memory, there are people who can point to the Spanish influenza right at the beginning of the 20th century. As a historian, I can say, ‘well, it’s not the black death where a third of Europe simply disappeared over the course of a couple of years.’ We’ve faced this kind of difficulty before. But I think the scary part is we’ve got so much good science and technology that we thought we’d be protected from anything like this. So it really pulls the rug out from underneath our expectations.

“When that happens, I think going back to texts from our heritage is important, and songs of comfort remind us of a time when we have already experienced God’s care, and it’s kind of an act of trust that God will continue to care for us.”

In the palm of his hand.

Games We Played: Fuzzball

Steve · April 15, 2020 · 12 Comments

Welcome to the first installment in an occasional new series of blogposts called “Games We Played.”

The idea behind this series is to — in a quick and hopefully fun way — pass on to my grandchildren’s generation the games we played as kids. And by games I don’t mean Monopoly and Chinese Checkers and I certainly don’t mean any game that can be played sitting on the couch with a computer, tablet or phone in your hands.

I’m talking about the games we played outside with friends in the neighborhood. For me, that was in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a North St. Louis neighborhood called North Point, nestled up against Walnut Park, Baden and the St. Louis County line with Jennings. But what I’ve learned talking to some friends and family about these games is that our memories of the rules of these neighborhood and schoolyard games are widely inconsistent. Even the names of the games varied by when and where they were played.

But that’s kind of the point. We all remember the games and the rules differently not because we’re all old people losing our memories — although that most certainly is true in the case of some of my friends (naming no names here and present company excepted) — but because there were NEVER any firmly established rules to begin with. These were the games we made up ourselves or inherited from older siblings and changed to meet our own needs and abilities. Making up or adjusting the rules was all part of the game and, I think, that made us smarter, more resilient and more creative kids.

Today I begin with THE seminal game of my childhood. Fuzzball was one of many, many derivatives of baseball that we played in North Point. No doubt kids in other parts of the country played some version of this game, but this one has a distinct St. Louis heritage because its roots are tied to another St. Louis-born game called corkball, which was originally played with broomsticks and roundly carved and tape-wrapped pieces of cork from beer barrel bungs. That game became so popular that official bats and balls were eventually manufactured to meet the needs of the many who played it. According to a Wiki page, the game was played in the streets and alleys of St. Louis as early as 1890, and as time went on the game travelled around the country as St. Louis servicemen taught it to their buddies during World War II and the Korean War.

But enough about corkball, other than to say that little ball was hard and could blacken an eye or knock out a few windows if not played in a big old field (like the corkball fields at several city parks like Hickey Park in Baden) or inside a rectangular cage like those that popped up adjacent to taverns around town. It also hurt like a dickens when it hits you.

So for brevity, which is already waning I realize, let’s just say that in the interest of safety, the cost and hassle of window replacement and childhood innocence, someone eventually replaced the corkball with a tennis ball, which is, of course, how fuzzball got its name. The game could now be played in backyards, alleys and schoolyards without incurring the wrath of neighbors and principals. Usually. By the way, some kids burnt the fuzz off the ball to make it go faster.

Here’s a quick, two-minute video that teaches the rules given below:

+ The game was usually played with four players, two to a side, a pitcher and a catcher. There were no bases to run. It was simply a game of pitching and hitting. Here are the rules as we played it:

+ There’s no ump so no “called” balls and strikes. Just throw the ball over the plate.

+ Two strikes and you’re out.

+ One strike and you’re out if the catcher cleanly catches a swing and miss.

+ Foul tip behind the plate and you’re out. And by “plate,” I mean whatever was laying around, usually someone’s glove or jacket.

+ Foul tip caught by the catcher is a double play, if there is an “imaginary runner” on base. More on this in a minute.

+ Ground ball or fly ball caught by either player is an out.

+ Ground ball bobbled or past the pitcher is a single.

+ That single gives you an imaginary runner on base, and these “ghosts” move around the base path one base at a time with subsequent hits. A double would move the runner two bases.

+ See rule about double plays above.

+ A pop fly or line drive past or over the pitcher’s head is a double.

+ If you’re playing in a schoolyard with a fence, over the fence is a homerun and off the fence a triple.

+ If there’s no fence, you can designate anything you want as the homerun marker, of course.

Three outs and you switch sides. If the innings seem to be passing too quickly, you can always call for “double innings,” but any imaginary stranded runners do not get to stay on base when you begin the second set of three outs. Unless, of course, you change the rules.

That’s it. You can play with more kids and put people out in the field. You can play with just three and just rotate between pitcher, catcher and hitter. You can do what you want.

Until next time:

Get outside (when you can)
Play with your friends (when it’s safe to do so)
Make up your own rules.
Most importantly, have fun.

Playing in the Wild Garden of Childhood

Steve · January 25, 2019 · 12 Comments

FOD BAll — At the "Field of Dreams," Dyersville, Iowa. SJG photo.

I recently came across this line of poetry from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: “Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.” And, of course, that’s right.

Take, for example, the pick-up games of some variation of baseball (fuzz ball, Indian ball, Wiffle® ball, cork ball, kickball, step ball) of my childhood in North St. Louis in the early ‘70s. These were “wild gardens” in the very best sense, meaning they required no adults, no official field dimensions, no uniforms and very few rules, other than the ever-evolving ones that existed only in our collective consciousness as 12-year-olds.