Leadership

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.”

BOOK REVIEW: Leah Rampy’s “Earth and Soul”

Steve · May 19, 2024 · 3 Comments

Writer and retreat leader Leah Rampy pulls no punches in her new volume from Bold Story Press, “Earth and Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos.” The earth as we know it is in a dire predicament, from which there is no easy return or solution. We are living in “edge times,” on the threshold of climate chaos and mass extinction of biodiversity and will remain there while we await a slow slipping over the edge — unless we are willing reconnect our personal lives and our spiritual selves to the world around us.

This is not a story devoid of hope. I doubt I would have kept reading if it were. If we’re willing to face the scientific facts of the situation, see more completely the fullness and wisdom of the world around us, and embrace the spiritual angst we are feeling, there is still the possibility of pulling ourselves back from the brink. “Earth and Soul” is a soul journey (the author’s and ultimately our own) that still has inherent in it the hope of something better beyond the grief that comes with such danger and loss. In the book’s concluding chapter she writes:

Because we will never know the outcomes beyond our lifetime, we can choose to live in a story that is grounded in the real and that still offers greater possibility. Living with hope is a choice. When we choose hope, we embrace what is already unfolding and discern if and how we are called to respond. Without any illusion that the path will be easy, we choose to live more fully into our soul’s mission and offer our gifts to the world guided by the Earth’s wisdom.

Writing while standing near the intersection of spirituality, ecology and story, the author offers us a chance to journey in the direction of recovery and sanity, a map of sorts for those willing to live deeply connected to the Earth from the depth of their own souls. For the climate crisis is, she reminds us, a spiritual one. “Without attending to our own continued transformation, we cannot hope to align with the living world to create a tapestry of a beautiful future,” she writes in the book’s introduction.

The eleven short chapters in this 200-page paperback edition made for easy, slow and digestible daily reading for a few weeks. While I could have read it much quickly (it’s not a dense slog through theory and environmental science), I soon discovered that this was a book better taken in a little at a time, a reminder to myself that this kind of change (our own and the environment’s) takes time and trust, a belief that the seeming impossible is, in fact, possible. Drawing from Jesuit theologian Walter’s Burghardt’s reminder that contemplation is a, “long, loving look at the real,” this book is a call to ponder the predicament as a precursor to individual and spiritual change and action.

What is necessary for such change to begin, Rampy reminds us, is personal transformation, a movement from long-held social beliefs that the Earth and its non-human creatures are only here for our sustenance, use and often abuse, to a state of recognition that we are better off living in communion with our plant and animal “kith and kin.”

“When we declare the land inanimate,” she writes, “we ravage our souls. If we deny the vibrantly alive Earth, the breathing beings from which we evolved, the plants with all their gifts — if all those lives can be deemed resources to be pillaged, destroyed, discarded, and annihilated to satisfy our wants — then so too can people who stand in the way of achieving the ends we seek.”

“Earth and Soul” is an invitation to think, live, contemplate and act differently, as if those human actions might just make a difference, which surely they can. This book, Rampy writes, serves as “one invitation to a great turning, a return to our truest selves and a transformation of our relationship with the Earth.”

To instigate such changes, we must begin now, while we are still on the threshold, but Rampy is quick to point out that this is the work of generations, not years or decades. She relates the story of a wise prophet giving feedback to a group of volunteers who had taken some positive steps. “I think this is very good,” the prophet says. “There will likely be excellent results from this in about six hundred years.”

And that’s the point of the book, I think. There are no easy and quick answers. There are only next steps that must be taken, once we have done the hard work of reconnecting our souls to the world around us. She writes: “We will need to practice simply discerning the next step, and then the next step, and then the next, trusting the wisdom we are given without knowing the future or the results of our efforts.”

Remembering Elders and Mentors

Steve · July 31, 2021 · 1 Comment

Tomorrow I leave to give a weeklong retreat to retired Marianist brothers and priests in a care facility in Dayton, Ohio, my first retreat since the pandemic began. This community of men, who will be joined at the retreat by some younger Marianists who live in the area, have been hit hard in the past 18 months, losing more than 20 members due to COVID-19 and other health issues. I have a deep feeling that I will learn more from them than they will from me.

One of my talks will be about remembering and honoring those elders and mentors who have helped shape our lives – those who mentored us when we were young, who guided us on our path by their words and their deeds, by their successes and their failures. Sometimes we sought them out or maybe had them given to us. Sometimes they just appeared, as that old saying from Tao Te Ching says: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” And the second part of that famous quote is equally telling: “When the student is truly ready…the teacher will disappear.” For very often our mentors are only with us for a little while.

In Parker Palmer’s book, “On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and getting Old,” he wrote this about his mentors: “My mentors saw more in me than I saw myself. They evoked that “more” in many ways — challenging me, cheering for me, helping me understand that failure is part of the deal. Then my mentors opened doors for me, or at least pointed me toward them.

When I was willing to walk through those doors, I found purpose and meaning. My mentors changed my life.”

Mentoring and being mentored is not a one-way street, as anyone who has been on either the giving or receiving end of it will tell you. Rather, it is a “gift exchange, where we get as much as we give,” Palmer says. This mutual sharing evokes the potential in each other. The theologian, professor, feminist activist, and civil rights leader Nelle Morton called this, “hearing one another into speech.” I often think of this as a spiritual director and as a person who receives spiritual direction…so very often I don’t really know what I’m thinking or maybe even what I am feeling or believing until I say it out loud to another person.

Mentoring gives us a chance to welcome each other into a relationship that honors our vulnerability and our need for each other.
Mentoring allows us to learn from each other’s creative failures, from their “falling down and getting back up.”

As Palmer describes, “mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching and mentoring’s great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.”

So we have these people plopped down in our lives somehow. Saints and sinners who fall down and get up and live to tell us about it and show us the way. They are gifts that never leave us, even if we go for years without thinking of the giver.

So today, ask yourself in this silence:

Who have been my mentors and guides?
Who believed in me when I was young?
Who changed me?
Whose words and life struck me somewhere deep and set me on this road?
Have I thanked them and thanked God for them?

Leadership: Stewardship and Awareness

Steve · August 22, 2020 · 6 Comments

[Third in a series of posts about being the kind of servant-leaders the world needs.]

Last weekend, Sue and I spent a few days away from home (our first small trip since the onset of COVID-19), in Missouri Wine Country, a stretch of beautiful and rich land just west of St. Louis in the Missouri River Valley. 19^th-century Germans immigrated here in large numbers and, finding the land of little use for much else, discovered that it wasn’t bad for grapes. It’s no Napa Valley, perhaps, but it was at one time America’s largest producer of wine and was designated the nation’s first American Viticultural Area (AVA) in 1980.

It’s a long and complicated history, interrupted by prohibition and anti-German sentiment around the time of both World Wars. But spending time amidst this landscape that boasts both natural and cultivated beauty was a reminder of the importance of stewardship of the land and, by extension, stewardship as the proper model for servant-based leadership.

For stewardship, as it relates to leadership, implies something more than supervision, oversight or authority. Stewardship begins with a deep awareness and care for whatever it is we are stewards of. Winemakers, like many others who steward the land, have a deep understanding and awareness of all their land holds and promises, so they care deeply for what is in their care and oversight. They rejoice with each great vintage and die a little when hard frost, pests, drought (or too much rain) interfere with the work of turning vines into wine.

Whatever and whoever we lead, we would do well to emulate the model of stewardship, the central point of which is that this organization (or this piece of land) is not ours for the taking but, rather, ours for the caring. As Pope Francis said in remarks during a meeting with political, business and community leaders in Quito, Ecuador, in July 2015:

“We received this world as an inheritance from past generations, but also as a loan from future generations, to whom we will have to return it!”

The same can be said of any organization, and it should be that same ethos of care and stewardship that guides us if we are called to help lead it. At the core of this kind of leadership is our awareness of God’s presence in everything, and this sense of God’s presence consoles and guides us to make good decisions and lead with love and care. To be true servant-leaders means knowing that God is at the heart of all we do. This awareness becomes prayer itself, and then our prayer grows out of ourselves and becomes action.

We become servant-leaders and “contemplatives in action” when we use (and offer back to God) the gifts we have been given without stifling, distorting or wasting them. These gifts — our temperament, character, education, experience, skills, creativity and much more — add up to what it is we have to offer the world and the organizations we lead.

Where and how we meet people in our daily walk and work is where and how we meet God, and it is our obligation to “never resist that call,” as St. Ignatius once wrote to one of his young companions, writing that his encouragement was like the old proverb of “spurs to a willing horse.” We are called to be that willing horse, accepting the gentle (if sharp) nudge of God to move ever forward in our lives of service.

Greetings from the Missouri River Valley

So we need ask ourselves:

Can we meld and balance the “being” and “doing” of our lives?

Is our service to others “large-hearted and humble?” (Pedro Arrupe SJ)

Can we draw energy by being radically centered in Christ and transform that energy into loving, creative, generous, compassionate, healing service to others?

Leadership: St. Ignatius and Compassionate Leadership

Steve · August 15, 2020 · Leave a Comment

[Second in a series of posts about being the kind of servant-leaders the world needs.]

St. Ignatius of Loyola, the 16^th-century founder and leader of the “Company of Jesus,” later to be called the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits, was a tough, fearless military man. He was wounded in battle helping face down a much larger force. Those closest to him in his post-military days remembered him as a man who led with compassion and encouraged and nurtured friendships among his companions. He led like a loving father, making no distinctions between his charges. No favorites. And like a good father, he could be strict while being gentle, and he tended to see the good in others. Because of his approach to leadership, he was admired, readily followed and loved.

He also insisted on unity of purpose and mission, and at the center of that unity was his companions’ love for God. From this mutual love of God came a conformity of spirit that would ultimately lead the Jesuits to preach the Gospel around the world and establish some of the world’s leading educational institutions. Although spread throughout the world even during his lifetime, he nurtured this sense of unity of purpose among all in the company.

This is leadership based on love and the common good, on passion for the work and compassion for fellow workers. It is a model of leadership for all Christians and reminiscent of the days of the early church, as Bergan and Schwan write in “Praying with Ignatius of Loyola” (Saint Mary’s Press, 1991):

“Jesus called all Christians to build community through mutual concern, compassion, sharing, and developing friendships. Indeed, at the very beginning of the Church, people pointed to the Christians and remarked on how they loved one another.”

Are we still living up to that ideal as a people of faith? “Being a leader” so often equates to questions of “who’s in charge?” and “to whom do I report?” These reporting lines are not unimportant in most organizations, but the kind of compassionate leadership fostered by St. Ignatius and so many others extends far beyond organizational charts and into the realm of creating organizations that work always toward the common good, the common goal, and unity of purpose. Leadership that sows discontent, especially within an organization, is not leadership at all, nor is leadership based on a cult of personality of the leader.

Ignatius was strong, yet gentle and flexible, able to adjust to the needs of others. He guided others with love and an intuition that sprang from a life of prayer and awareness. He encouraged others’ strengths while being aware of their sensitivities, emotions, and fragilities. He was a master of fitting the job and his direction to the individual.

So, when we are asked to take on leadership roles and responsibilities within our places of work, worship or service, we might be wise to ask how we can best emulate the care that Ignatius showed to those in his company. Are we leading because we want to be seen as a leader or because we believe we can make those with whom we work feel more important, needed and valued?

Ask yourself:

Am I consistent and fair in my support and affirmation of those who work with me?

Do I nourish life-giving relationships?

Do I cope well with differences and diversity or demand uniformity at all costs?

Do I work to enable and enhance the work of others?

Do I pray for the people I lead?