Vocation & Call

Book Review: Margaret Silf’s “Just Call Me López”

Steve · August 11, 2012 · 2 Comments

There’s an old chestnut of an icebreaker/conversation starter that goes something like this: What person, living or deceased, would you most like to spend some time with? (Go ahead, discuss…)

Margaret Silf’s “Just Call Me López: Getting to the Heart of Ignatius Loyola (Loyola Press, 144 pages) takes that question on a spiritual journey and allows us to come along for the ride, as long as we’re willing to suspend our disbelief in the impossibility of the premise of the book – the contemporary narrator’s months-long interactions with the 16^th century saint and founder of the Jesuits. Along the way, what we get is far more than a creative approach to Ignatius’ biography (his middle name was López) or an introduction to his famed spiritual exercises, although we get plenty of both. For those who know nothing or little of Ignatius’ life and approach to spirituality, this slim volume will serve as a fine introduction.

In this unlikely tale of a 16^th-century soldier-turned-saint and 21^st-century woman, we see what happens when one person opens herself to a real-life, real-time experience of the communion of saints. The two are as different as pen-and-ink and laptops are as writing instruments, but their conversations show us that life’s really important questions don’t change with the times and technology. And perhaps the most essential question we can ask as spiritual beings (what is God’s will and plan for my life?) is the question to which most of us continue to seek an answer. That introspective and prayerful approach to life is what lies at the heart of Ignatian spirituality.

Watching for Movement

Steve · July 29, 2012 · 4 Comments

daisy — Black-eyed Susans at Long Lake Park, by Steve Givens

Walking with Sue yesterday morning at Long Lake Regional Park in New Brighton, Minnesota, I was aware, as I always try to be when I walk in nature, of not only the beauty of everything around me but of its movement. For where there is movement there is energy and life.

Even the minutest movements illustrate the animation of life. With my camera I stop to capture a purple wildflower, only to notice the ever-so-slight movement of a pale yellow insect I would have otherwise missed, slowly and methodically working its way around the flower, doing what it is made to do with flowers. Energy and life.

Walking along a path, a flurry of brown and black motion catches my eye and I shift my attention and focus. It’s the rump of a chipmunk, hard at work digging in the soft soil, oblivious to us until we are nearly on top of it. Energy and life.

Holy as a Day is Spent: Our Awareness of the Sacred Around Us

Steve · July 1, 2012 · 5 Comments

flower — The fecundity of life, by Steve Givens

I got out this morning for a walk in the woods near my house before I found myself in the midst of yet another scorching, humid St. Louis summer day. The temperature peaked at 108 the last few days, and more of the same is promised for today.

I was accompanied on my walk this morning by the music of singer-songwriter-teacher-activist Carrie Newcomer, with whom I have had the pleasure to work and learn a few times. As I entered the canopy of the woods, I was greeted in my ear buds with Carrie’s beautiful hymn to the sacred all around us, “Holy as a Day is Spent,” a song that never ceases to make me stop and consider where I am and how I’m taking up space on the earth at the moment. More than anything else, though, the song asks us to see the sacred in the ordinary, beautiful things of daily life. Near the end of the song, Carrie sings:

Holy is the place I stand
To give whatever small good I can
The empty page, the open book
Redemption everywhere I look

Unknowingly we slow our pace
In the shade of unexpected grace
With grateful smiles and sad lament
As holy as a day is spent.

What We Have to Offer Each Other: Our Presence

Steve · May 12, 2012 · 4 Comments

candle1 — Being present to one another and to God. By Steve Givens

About a month or so ago I began volunteering for a local hospice organization called Heartland Hospice. My job is pretty basic: I visit with Margaret (not her real name) about once a week. We sit a foot apart, she in her wheelchair and I in a straight-backed chair. We look each other straight in the eyes and we talk. It’s pretty simple and Margaret makes it easy on me, as she’s quite the talker.

But our relationship is different from any other I have ever had and here’s why: From visit to visit Margaret doesn’t remember me, although she’s always enthusiastic about having someone to talk to. Like many older adults (Margaret is going to be 98 this year!), her memory is not good and so she often asks me the same questions multiple times during the hour of our visit.

And, of course, she tells me the same stories every time I visit because, after all, she’s never met me before. So I get to hear again and again about her early life in North St. Louis, about walking through Fairgrounds Park to get to the then-new Beaumont High School (where my parents would also attend a few years later), about her wanting to be a dancer but her mother refusing to allow her daughter to “take to the stage,” about her father calling her “tin ear” because she would be so engrossed in a book she didn’t hear him calling her to dinner. She talks about her two marriages (one of 40-something years and the other, later in life, of about ten years). She tells me of her two sons, one who died in his 40s and one who lives in Florida now. Or maybe Texas. That part of the story sometimes changes.

Patience: Treasuring the Ground on Which We Stand

Steve · January 8, 2012 · 13 Comments

Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else. Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.

– Henri Nouwen

time — 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…”