Spirituality

Let’s Go Around the Table (in Detail)

Steve · November 27, 2025 · Leave a Comment

To prevent any “spoilers,” I’ll just say I was doing an unnamed online word puzzle this morning. I quickly figured out it was asking me for words that you might normally hear while going around the Thanksgiving table and asking everyone to name those things for which they were most grateful. Let’s just say there were no surprises.

[If you haven’t done all your daily online word puzzles yet, you might want to stop reading now and come back later…]

These generic answers were all well and good as far as this annual exercise in gratitude goes, of course. The answers were all important “things” for which to be grateful. But, as I was taught a long time ago by one of my writing teachers, never use the word “thing” when you can be more specific. There’s more power and meaning in the details and in giving the “things” in our lives names.

So, as you go around the table today, I challenge you to outlaw the word “thing” and other generic words like family, life, home, friends, health, work, community, and food. Make them think harder and go deeper. Ask them for the details, for that’s where real meaning is. God, after all, is in the details of our lives. God is the giver of “life,” of course, but also the giver of specific moments, people, places and memories. Maybe ask these questions and require a “why” follow-up:

What was your favorite family moment this year?
When did you feel most alive?
Who are your three best friends right now?
What have you done this year to improve your health?
When did you feel most challenged by work or study?
When did you feel most a part of your community, neighborhood, church or school?
What’s the best meal you had this year? What’s your favorite food?

The stories we tell around the Thanksgiving table matter. They matter for the kids who are creating the memories they will carry forward to their own futures and families. They matter for the old folks who are searching for meaning and joy in their elder years. The things for which we are most grateful (and the details that describe them) speak most clearly of what we treasure.

And remember: “For wherever your treasure is, there will you find your heart.” (Matthew 6:21)

All Signs Point to the House of God

Steve · October 30, 2025 · 2 Comments

We just kept following the signs.

Sue Givens at Monet’s famous lily pond bridge.

One day near the end of September, Sue and I and our good friends, John and Karen, spent the morning walking through Claude Monet’s famous garden in Giverny, a small village in France’s Normandy region where the Epte flows into the Seine and where the impressionist master lived and worked from 1883 until his death in 1926. It’s the one with the water lilies and the green footbridge crossing the small pond, of course. No doubt you’ve seen the pictures.

While there, we followed the signs, first through the tunnel under the road to the water lily pond and then back through the tunnel to the rest of his gardens and home. It was an exquisite, unhurried morning in an unforgettable place. As we made our way back through the village’s main street, the aptly named Rue Claude Monet, we kept seeing flyers advertising “daily piano concerts” in the village church. We decided to follow the signs, which isn’t very hard to do in a town with one main road.

We arrived at the Church of Sainte-Radegonde, where Monet is buried and where the daily classical “improvisational” piano concert was advertised featuring someone named Hughes Reiner. Not knowing what to expect, we ducked into the dimly lit church and waited for our eyes to adjust before finding a seat among a handful of others. It quickly became evident to all of us that we had been dropped into the middle of something very special.

Reiner, it turned out, is a rather famous pianist, composer, opera singer, choirmaster, and conductor who lives locally but who has played all over France and Europe. Without much classical music knowledge, I don’t have many words for what we heard but it was certainly as exceptional as his resume was long. He was truly an extraordinary, intricate (and fast) pianist, and we sat mesmerized by his playing, with not a note of music in front of him.

As we were about to leave, I noticed an ornate, calligraphed sign near one of the side walls of the church. It was, of course, written in French, so I had no idea what it said. John snapped a photo and loaded it into an app that translated it in seconds. He passed me his phone and I read:

You have entered this house.
The house of God.
Whoever you are, He welcomes you.
With your joys, your sorrows.
Your successes, your failures.
Your hopes, your disappointments.
Be welcome.
Generations before you have loved this place,
have contributed to building it, to making it beautiful.
They prayed here.
Respect the peaceful silence.
If you are a believer, pray.
If you seek, reflect.
If you doubt, ask for light.
If you suffer, ask for strength.
If you are joyful, give thanks.
And may you remain here.
Whoever you are, He welcomes you.
Welcome Him. too.

The translation as I repeat it here may not be complete or perfect, but the moment was transcendent, a simple reward for following and reading the signs. It was a reminder that God gives us these signs on a daily basis, wherever we are, if only our eyes are open wide enough to see and read.

Wonder as the Foundation of Prayer

Steve · August 31, 2025 · 3 Comments

Earlier this summer, I read the book, “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” by Dacher Keltner, an expert on human emotion and a professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, where he serves as the director of the university’s Greater Good Science Center. In the book, Keltner sets out to define what we mean by “awe” and illustrates the experience of awe through dozens of individual stories gathered from around the world.

And, indeed, it’s the global experience of awe that makes this book worth reading. We are all moved, he writes, by experiences that make us draw in a sharp breath and let out the slow sound of “awe” or maybe “wow” or “woah.” In this sense, in what moves us, we all speak the same language, and there is something very important about understanding that.

For the purpose of the book and drawn from his own deep research, Keltner defines awe as: “The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” It is about “our relation to the vast mysteries of life.” These experiences, he writes, come from the “eight wonders of life,” which can be classified into a “taxonomy of awe.” They are, in order of their commonality around the world:

Moral Beauty – other people’s courage, kindness, strength and overcoming.
Collective Effervescence – those moments when, as part of a crowd (whether at church or a sports stadium) we feel we are part of a collective self or tribe – an experience of “we.”
Nature – not surprisingly, our experience in and of nature can often leave us speechless and with a sense of “something bigger” at work.
Music – and its ability to transport us to “new dimensions of symbolic meaning.”
Visual Design – art and architecture and its power to open our minds to new ways of perceiving the world and “locate ourselves” within the cultural systems that surround us.
Stories of Spirituality and Religion – and the way they transform, transcend, and give us hope for something more.
Stories of Life and Death – are common around the world and lead to awe at such moments as first and last breaths.
Moments of Epiphanies – times when we suddenly understand essential truths about life and experience “philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures that transform life in an instant.”

While you likely won’t find Keltner’s book on the “spirituality or religion” section of your local bookstore or online category, I found it to be a great tool for my regular prayer of reflection and examination of my day – my “examen,” as it known in Ignatian spirituality. Keltner’s “eight mysteries” opened my mind to looking for and finding God in an ever-wider array of my life experiences.

Shortly after finishing the book, I began to wonder: What if I paid a little closer attention every day to what astounds me and fills me with awe and wonder? What might I see and experience each day because I am looking for the awe? What if I expanded my time of reflection to look more broadly and consider those eight areas of mystery? What if this was the way I ended each day, with this examen of awe?

At this point in time, I am two months into a project to record one such moment of awe each day. What I am finding thus far is a much wider set of experiences, all of which cause me to either catch my breath, drop me to my knees, or stand in quiet reflection and gratitude.

Here are two examples:

July 13 – Today Sue and I walked a half-mile loop trail that lead to the Akaka Waterfall on the east side of the Big Island of Hawai’i near Hilo. As it finally came into view, this long, 400-foot ribbon of water took my breath away — a sudden and short intake of breath that amounts to “awe.” It plunged over the edge like an Olympic diver, cutting like a knife into the pool beneath it. Perfect in form, a quiet and perfectly straight line into the folding water. And so I prayed: “Cut me like a knife, O Lord, sever me from myself to allow you in. Pierce my heart and allow me to feel the height and depth of your love and compassion for me. Fill me, just as this water continually fills the bowl that rests beneath the falls like open hands.”

August 30 – This morning we went to a funeral for our friend’s 94-year-old father. We didn’t know him or were not even sure we had ever met him. We were there because we believe it’s important to “show up” for people in their times of grief and need. We believe in the beauty and sanctity of the “last rites” of the Catholic Church, that they are fitting ways to celebrate the end of earthly existence and be present as something new begins. I was awed by the flow of music, scripture, ritual, words of remembrance, all encouraging me to consider my own life and death. With the responsorial Psalm, drawn from the oft-used 23^rd Psalm, we sang: “Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life.” And I think that this is what I want most when my time comes – for God to show up and shepherd me home, surrounded by the presence of those I knew and loved, and maybe a few others who show up to be there for my family, even if they have never met me. There’s awe in the way we humans (and the church) care for each other.

So here’s my challenge to you today: Pay attention to what catches your heart, your breath, your sense of being in the world, for God is in that moment.

We are the Leftover Fragments

Steve · June 23, 2025 · 2 Comments

They all ate and were satisfied. And when the leftover fragments were picked up, they filled twelve wicker baskets. Luke 9:17

At mass yesterday for the Feast of Corpus Christi, we listened to the well-known and oft-told story from Luke’s gospel of the feeding of 5,000 hungry people who had gathered near the town of Bethsaida to hear Jesus preach. I’ve heard the story many times, of course, and I’m guessing you know it well, too.

And that’s the challenge. Sometimes when we know a Gospel story well we inadvertently tune it out. After all, we know it by heart. Yadda yadda yadda. What’s there to learn? So I was sitting with the choir yesterday, half-listening to the Gospel, when God kind-of grabbed me by the lapels and said, “pay attention, you dolt!”

They all ate and were satisfied.

And I thought, here I am, feeling pretty satisfied with myself – making time for mass in the middle of a busy Sunday, singing with the choir, doing that thing I do. Sharing in the body and blood of Christ on this feast day. Satisfied. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good to be get filled up on Sundays, right?

Not THAT part, God nudged. Listen now:

And when the leftover fragments were picked up, they filled twelve wicker baskets.

Hold on, I thought. When the leftover fragments from the feast were picked up, there was, somehow, more than what they started with? Even after everyone had eaten? I mean, I knew that but…whoah. There’s something else going on here.

And somewhere deep I knew this “something else” to be true and important. It’s the same every Sunday. We come in hungry. We listen to Jesus. We share in the meal we don’t deserve, and we leave satisfied. But we also leave bigger and “more” than what we were when we came in. We are like the fragments of the meal, collected to be used again. Collected to be used to feed others.

We’re the leftovers from the feast. We are the fragments of the body of Christ. We’re not called to just be satisfied. We’re called to be more.

So what do you need me to do today, Lord?

Does Faith Leave Us Open to Change?

Steve · June 10, 2025 · 2 Comments

Last week, Sue and I were up early on our last full day in the San Diego area, prowling the relatively empty streets of the historic Gaslamp District for a breakfast place. We ducked into 6^th & G Breakfast Company, conveniently located a few blocks from our hotel on the corner of, well, 6^th and G Streets.

As we sat down, I found myself facing some of the restaurant’s evocative graffiti-like art, including the art shown above with the words, Amor Fati. My Latin is not what it should be so, of course, I Googled it. According to that veritable font of all wisdom, Wikipedia, Amor Fati is, “a Latin phrase that may be translated as “love of fate. It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss as a good or, at the very least, necessary.”

As I pondered the phrase and its meaning, my mind kept going to another piece of “art,” a little plaque that hangs on our screened porch back in St. Louis. It says, simply, “It is what it is.” That little saying, we believe, is an act of faith and a way of God-centered living. It’s a willingness to accept change as it comes and welcome the little daily surprises that arise as being, as Wikipedia described Amor Fati, “good or, at the very least, necessary.” Within the framework of Ignatian spirituality where I spend a good chunk of time as a spiritual director, writer and administrator, the phrase is a reminder that we can, indeed, “find God in all things.” Not just in the good and the beautiful and the obviously divine and holy. In ALL things. Faith requires us to be open to change and to find God in all those shifting moments.

All of this reminded me of another piece of street art that we saw earlier in the week just north of San Diego in the historic beach town of Carlsbad. The 18-foot-tall mural, shown above, is called “Catnap,” and was created by a local artist named Michael Summers. It features two large black and white tigers beneath rain-like drips of vibrant color. One is sheltered by an umbrella, while the other sleeps peacefully, allowing the colorful rain to change it into something new. A third tiger, a small cub, hasn’t made up its mind yet. And that’s exactly the theme of the mural, we were told by a local walking tour guide. Are we willing to allow ourselves to be changed?

Summers, I read in an online article, said the idea for his mural was inspired by a quote from the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, who once wrote: “Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you may become.”

While faith might sometimes be described as an unwavering belief in some things that never change — like the idea of a creative and omniscient God — faith also calls us to constantly re-examine our lives and see where change might be both good and necessary. Faith demands that we allow ourselves to be changed by, with, and for God and for those around us. Faith challenges us to see and move beyond the prejudices, hatreds and “isms” that were and still sometimes are baked into lives of those who would call themselves religious. Christianity has historically been a pretty good hiding place, after all, for bigots, racists, and supremacists of all kinds. We are called to change that, even as we change ourselves.

Jim Manney, in his book of daily Ignatian reflections, What Matters Most and Why, echoes these ideas through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. He writes:

One of the hallmarks of an Ignatian approach is flexibility. Plans need to be adjusted if circumstances call for it. New situations need to be studied and understood….This attitude is both liberating and worrisome. It’s liberating because it gives room for creativity and makes it more likely that a suitable solution will be found. It’s worrisome because there’s more room to make mistakes…. But if you believe that God can be found in all things, you don’t have much choice. God is lurking in the new, unexpected situation. To find him, you need to be ready to change your mind and alter your plans.