Spirituality

We are the Leftover Fragments

Steve · June 23, 2025 · Leave a Comment

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.

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.”

Considering Holy Week

Steve · April 13, 2025 · Leave a Comment

This coming week, we are beckoned by liturgy, scripture and prayer to slow down and more fully consider the final days, hours, minutes and moments of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. As Fr. Joe Tetlow, SJ has written, “These are terrible events, and we are keeping a death watch.” For in these intimate instances with Jesus, we are called to walk with him, listen to his words, witness his pain and suffering, and enter into his time and place.

We are called to ponder these moments of his passion and consider, as St. Ignatius of Loyola writes in his Spiritual Exercises, how Jesus chose to “hide his divinity” so that he could more fully experience his humanity. In his translation of the Exercises, Fr. David Fleming, SJ wrote: “At the time of the Passion, I should pay special attention to how the divinity hides itself so that Jesus seems so utterly human and helpless. (Fleming, Draw Me Into Your Friendship, 149; SE 196). So if Jesus seems weak and helpless on the cross, it’s because he chose to be. No one took his life; he gave it freely. (John 10:18) Consider that.

In a recent email exchange with Fr. Tetlow, he confirmed for me something I remembered him once saying at a workshop — that in the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius uses the word consider (and its equivalents like ponder) almost as many timesas he uses contemplate. For example, Fr. Joe wrote, in the Contemplation for Love near the end of the Exercises, Ignatius suggests that the retreatant, “consider the gifts that God gives, how God remains in His gifts, and how God is actually sharing the divine being with us. These, Ignatius suggests, all be considered.”

This “considering” is not easy work. It’s easier for us to give a cursory glance or to listen with limited attention to the words we hear on Palm Sunday and during the Triduum. After all, we’ve heard them all before, many times. Noah Webster’s old 1828 dictionary does a good job of taking us beyond the modern notion of consider as merely “to think about.” It says, in part, “the literal sense is, to sit by or close, or to set the mind or the eye to; to view or examine with attention.” To consider is not a moment of casual interest. It’s a chance to pull up a chair and engage deeply with the subject at hand.

So this week, don’t take the easy way out. Don’t ignore what you would rather not see. Go deep. For what’s on display on the cross is much more than the pain; it’s the ultimate love of the Father. Stand at the foot of the cross and consider, as the following song by me and my composing partner Phil Cooper suggests, “all that it takes to give in to the way that He died. Then consider the nails.”

Celebrating 40 Years of Living Faith

Steve · April 2, 2025 · 2 Comments

This past weekend, I helped lead a retreat celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the daily devotional Living Faith at the Marianist Retreat and Conference Center just outside St. Louis. I know that many of you are familiar with Living Faith and its impact. I am grateful for my long affiliation with Living Faith, having been a contributor for about 37 of those 40 years! I estimate I’ve written about 600 reflections over the years, and I can still remember the excitement of that day back in 1987 when my first reflection was accepted.

Speaking of remembering…I thought I would share with you a small part of one of my retreat presentations – about the importance and spiritual benefit of prayerfully remembering our lives of faith and the goodness of God over the course of our lives:

When we remember, we begin the process of gathering up the fragments of our lives (we re-member them) so we can tell our stories, along the way revealing patterns that we perhaps didn’t realize existed and leading us forward to the next stage of our lives. Sometimes we don’t know what we know about ourselves (we don’t remember what we don’t remember) until we begin to write them out or tell them to another person. This is so often what I do when I write Living Faith devotions.

This morning, I want to ask you to reflect on your lives of faith. To begin to re-member your lives of work and service to your families, to your Church and to the world. For you have all lived those lives and are still living them right now in various ways. I don’t know how you have all lived your lives but I can make some guesses. You have raised families and volunteered at your parishes and in your communities. Maybe you taught or cared for others in the field of medicine. Maybe you were a first responder or you worked at or ran a business. Whatever you did, however you spent your days, the lives you have been called to were not solitary lives but communal and engaged ones. You have preached the Gospel with your words and with your actions, amidst the noise of a busy world and in the silence of your own prayer. You have anchored yourselves in prayer and sacrament and church.

You have experienced the joy of the Gospel and, I hazard to guess, you have experienced moments of desolation and confusion about your faith and your calling. Perhaps you sensed a long time ago that you were called to a life that was grounded in prayer and devotion. Or perhaps you are just discovering (or rediscovering) that right now. But you also came to know that prayer and devotion wasn’t all to which you were called. You discovered the joy (and sometimes the pain) of pulling yourself away from quiet times of prayer and heading out into the world, of moving from contemplation to action…of being aware of God not just at mass or in your favorite prayer spot but also in your places of work and ministry. You are people of living faith. You are people of community and leaders in mission to bring Christ to the world.

From left, editorial assistant Ben Kupiszewski, assistant editor Kasey Nugent, writer Melanie Rigney, writer Deb Meister, me, and editorial director Pat Gohn.

We are not called to just sit in our lives of faith but, instead, we must have the courage to stand and walk in it. We are not called to be solo Christians, singular people of faith concerned only with keeping to silence and hours of prayer. We are called to be more than enlightened individuals. We are created to be light in our communities, to be in service to one another. We are called to be in communion with God, but we are also called to be in communion with others. This is what makes us church.

God calls us, instead, to lives of action and interaction, to lives that allow others to see an inmost calm at work in us and wonder where they might find such peace for themselves.

One of my all-time favorite movies is Field of Dreams. We all know the most famous line from that film, right? Right at the beginning, Ray is walking through the corn and he hears a voice say: “If you build it, he will come.” (see the clip by going to my blog)

One of my favorite pieces of dialogue comes right after that first scene, when Ray goes inside to have dinner with his wife, Annie, and his daughter, Karin. His wife asks him what the voice said and he replies:

If you build it, he will come.
She replies: If you build what, who will come?
He says: He didn’t say.
And she says, “I hate it when that happens.”

I have come to see this as a model of prayer. We put ourselves somewhere where we can be quiet enough to listen. Like that cornfield that Ray created as a place of encounter with Shoeless Joe Jackson, a bunch of long-dead ballplayers and, eventually, his own father. In the beginning, he is digging around in the dirt and he stops and listens because he THINKS he heard something.

What if God is asking us to build something? What if God is asking for your help to rebuild his Church? How do we answer the question: If we build what, who will come? What is God asking us to build? In our lives of prayer, just like in the movie, sometimes this voice is not very clear or overly instructive. But this, in fact, is the work of our lives, and we don’t do it alone. We get to do it together. This is what it means to be Church. This is what we live for. This is what God is building in us.

God is building the perfect us in us, the perfect church in us, if we will only let him.