Vocation & Call

Leadership: Standing Still and Stepping Out

Steve · August 9, 2020 · 12 Comments

(First in a series of posts about being the kind of servant-leaders the world needs.)

Generally speaking, Sue and I enjoy sleeping through a good thunderstorm, but last night Mother Nature put on a display of thunder, lightning, driving wind and incessant downpour that made us jump out of bed a few times just to make sure the world hadn’t come to an end and our house wasn’t floating away.

Luckily, the morning brought some cool and calm, and we spent a good chunk of the morning on the back porch watching the gold and house finches, chickadees and hummingbirds visit our feeders out in their storm-soaked world. They seem no worse for the wear. The squirrels go on as ever, and that’s a story for another time. Someday soon, I intend to write an insightful essay about how to love the pesky “squirrels” in our lives. But as they just recently destroyed another birdfeeder, that time is not yet.

As always, there seems to be a lesson to be learned from the two great works of “scripture” in our lives — nature and the written word of God. Today, both are speaking to me of resilience and of the necessity of finding pieces and places of quiet and solitude in order to be effective leaders — at home, at work, in our churches and other organizations.

Today’s readings (for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, for those of you who follow the liturgical cycle) give us two stories that resonate with the storm that was thrown at us last night. With last night’s tempest still lingering in the air and in my memory, we get stories from both the Old and New Testaments about finding God in the storm. The lessons are clear, especially for leaders who frequently find themselves trying to navigate themselves and others through the most recent cloudburst. (I almost wrote “unexpected cloudburst” but that would be poor leadership indeed, huh? For the storms, however far apart, will always return.)

In the first reading (1 Kings 19:9-13), we are reminded that sometimes being a leader requires us to channel our inner Elijah, standing at the mouth of a cave (at the front of our organizations?) amid strong winds, crushing rocks and consuming fire and still having the faith and the wherewithal to seek the quiet whisper of God’s voice that says, “Here I am, never mind the storm.” If we’re going to lead others effectively through rough times, we need to put ourselves in the right place to hear that voice. That “place” is a regular return to prayer — to quiet, to solitude, to “silence,” even when the world and those in it seem intent on screaming in our general direction.

In today’s gospel reading from Matthew 14, we read the well-known story of Jesus walking on the water to comfort his friends, stranded as they are in a storm-rocked boat in the Sea of Galilee. Jesus, compassionate leader and teacher that he is, leaves his needed place of quiet and solitude and prayer (see above!) and sets out to help his friends, walking on the waves to prove his point and get their attention. For the floundering, fearful, faltering followers (and future leaders) in the boat (that’s us, too) the lesson is obvious: When we’re getting hit hardest, when we are most confused about what to do, we need to look beyond our abilities to navigate a storm by ourselves. We need to watch for Jesus walking and working in the most unlikely of places — perhaps where we seem least likely to find him even though we ought to know better by now. Like Peter, we need just enough faith to step out of the boat and into the storm instead of cowering in the bow and waiting for it all to pass.

We seek God in quiet. We are nourished and calmed by that presence. But we also must be prepared to wade into the depths and find a hand waiting for us. Alone, it can all seem too much to bear. With that hand in ours, it’s still not a walk in the park on a sunny day. Storms always return. But that hand is enough. We never lead alone.

Standing Between Hopelessness and Hope

Steve · July 17, 2020 · 6 Comments

This originally appeared as a “Faith Perspectives” column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on July 13, 2020.

Over the past few weeks, I have taken part in more than a few online, faith-based presentations and dialogues focused on issues surrounding racial injustice in America. But even as we gather to help find our places and voices in the ongoing conversations, protests and proposed solutions to racial injustice and violence, we find ourselves in the liminal and paradoxical space that exists between hopelessness and hope.

With the exception of presenters and panelists who are people of color, these have been, by and large, conversations among white Catholics who profess to care deeply about the injustice and violence experienced by so many of our black and brown brothers and sisters.

We have gathered at the request and invitation of a wide range of Catholic institutions and religious orders, including the Archdiocese of St. Louis, the Marianists, the Jesuits and the Dominicans, and no doubt there were many more of these happening that I did not attend. As a Church, we’re good at gathering. It is the act of gathering, indeed, that makes us Church.

Of course, we all expressed that we feel helpless because the issues are so big, so old and so seemingly impossible. The virtual venues changed, but the questions remained the same: What should we be doing? What is our role here as a Church and as people of faith? We want so much to be hopeful. We search for signs that this time is different and find glimpses of goodness and light. We see more people who look like us taking part in peaceful protests. We see parents doing their best to learn about and explain racism to their children with a belief that they can, over time, slow or break the unrelenting and terrible cycle.

Some Catholics are becoming bold and outspoken in their belief that they cannot be prolife for unborn lives and not when lives are adolescent or adult and black or brown. We see more people willing to pause their lives and listen to and learn from others who live and experience racism every day. But talk is never enough. Education alone is never adequate. Faith without works is dead.

Despite what centuries of European art and iconography try to reveal, as Christians we pin our hope on the life, death and resurrection of a brown, Jewish man from a working-class village in the Galilean countryside. He doesn’t look like us. Surely, somehow, we can choose to remember that fact when we are tempted to think that the current unrest has nothing to do with us.

Jesus, if he was walking the earth today, would look less like the people gathered on my Zoom conference call and more like the gentlemen from Mexico or El Salvador who mow the grass in my neighborhood. He would look more like George Floyd or Rayshard Brooks than the people I gather to worship with on Sunday. So the questions we must ask are straightforward: How would we treat Jesus if we caught him running through our neighborhood late at night? What would we say about him and what would we call him if we thought he wasn’t listening? What excuses would we make about how he “had it coming” even as we drove the nails into his hands?

And yet there is room and need for hope, and so I will kneel and pray to God for the gift of hope in the midst of hopelessness. I will incline my ear and wait in hope for a response from a God who I believe listens to his people. But like people of all ages and colors who have prayed for so long and so hard for that same hope, I will ask God to please hurry.

Content being branches, bearing fruit

Steve · June 1, 2020 · 10 Comments

Last week, on my drive home from a long walk at a nearby county park, I noticed a sign at a local farm announcing that strawberries were ripe and ready for sale. I had been watching and waiting and hoping for this sign. I pulled onto the gravel road, drove the short distance between the fields from highway to shed, and parked the car.

I donned my mask as we all must do these days, but I think the woman behind the till could still see the smile on my face as I picked out a few cartons and paid. “I’ve been waiting for this,” I told her.

Back in the car, I set the strawberries on the seat next to me, already googling a recipe for shortcake and planning a nice surprise for our evening meal. But before I put the car in reverse and left the farm, I reached over and grabbed a plump red berry and bit into it. Still warm from the sun, it melted in my mouth and I couldn’t help but think about the goodness of God’s brown and green earth. I offered a prayer of gratitude for sun and earth and farmer and field.

Even in the midst of pandemic and racial injustice and unrest, even when we are confused and not sure what comes next, we have a gentle reminder from John’s gospel that sometimes the very best thing we can do is to hold tight to the one who created us: “I am the vine and you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.” (John 15:5)

Over the next few days I was drawn back to that scripture passage and to others that still speak to us of this unique relationship we have (mere branches to the vine of God’s presence) and the responsibility we have because of that position in God’s great plan. For if we’re going to claim a place on God’s vine, we have the duty to bear fruit that will draw others to God. We have an obligation to be the kind of fruit that brings broad smiles to others (even behind their masks) and makes them wonder what kind of master farmer produces such goodness.

I continued to pray with these images, sitting in silence, enjoying again and again the strawberries from that farmer’s field, and finding in those times of delicious contemplation a few words that helped me, once again, through a rough patch. For what I found (or remembered) is that sometimes the very best we can do is be content with being branches that bear fruit, attached to the vine until that very last moment when someone picks us off because we have become the very thing they need.

The Real Journey is Interior

Steve · January 5, 2020 · 12 Comments

In September 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and following the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton wrote in a circular letter to a group of friends these thoughts on life’s journey:

“Our real journey in life is interior; it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an even greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary for us to respond to that action.”

I was eight in 1968, barely aware of all that was going on in the world beyond the St. Louis Cardinals’ run for a repeat World Series championship. This week I turn 60. It’s one of those “big birthdays” that causes you to slow down, reflect on the past and consider what’s left of life.

My wife, Sue, threw a heck of a party for me on Friday night with some family and friends. She filled nine poster boards with photos from various periods of my life and set out copies of some of my books and music projects. Friends and colleagues from these different stages of my life got to see (and no doubt laugh) at the old pictures of me — the runt-sized boy in North St. Louis, the skinny high school basketball player, the heavily bearded young adult with a new bride, the new parent trying to figure it all out without an instruction manual, the expat in England with permed hair, the university magazine editor and administrator, the guy with the chemo-induced thinning hair, the traveler, the husband, the father, the grandfather. Me with all my musical friends and bands over the years. Me with friends I rarely, if ever, see anymore, and me with those who have been nearly constant companions for decades.

Sacrament and Service Go Hand in Hand

Steve · April 25, 2019 · 4 Comments

Fr. Tom Santen's chalice (made from a cannon shell). SJG photo.

My next “Faith Perspectives” column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch appeared online yesterday and should appear in the paper on Saturday morning. It’s a reflection on the recent Holy Thursday liturgy and the link between sacrament and service, between sharing in the Eucharist and washing the feet of those around us. You can read my column below or online here: http://bit.ly/sacramentservice

Just a few weeks ago at the evening Holy Thursday “Mass of the Last Supper” at my parish, I sat and kneeled and prayed, contemplating the creation of the sacrament of the Eucharist by Jesus in that upper room so long ago. This simple sacred meal, in which Catholics believe bread becomes Christ’s body and wine becomes his blood, is celebrated daily by Catholics around the world as the true presence of Christ in our midst. It is our center, our gathering place, our source and sustenance.

But the mass and the scripture readings for that evening did not end with the disciples huddled in the upper room, prayerfully professing their faith in this new-found communal meal. For before they had much time to even ponder the meaning this new sign of the divine in the world, Jesus gives them something else to consider.