writing

Appreciating the Small and the Now

Steve · September 29, 2018 · 9 Comments

“The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.”
– Jon Kabat-Zinn

When I was a young man, I think I lived day to day waiting for the “big thing” to happen. I raced to the mailbox at the end of the day (imagine relying on such an antiquated source of information and news!) to see what it might hold for me that might change my life — a letter from an editor wanting to publish something I’d written or a breakthrough song, perhaps, one great hit to be recorded by the likes of Garth Brooks or Tricia Yearwood.

Finding God in All Things: 10 Books for 2018

Steve · January 15, 2018 · 5 Comments

From time to time, as both a writer and a spiritual director, I get asked for book recommendations. So on this cold and snowy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in the U.S., I stayed inside and scoured my shelves for ten books I would highly recommend, books that are both well-read and well-loved, books that have pointed me in different ways to the movement of God in my life, inspired me by their beauty and story, or have somehow appeared in my life just when I needed them most.

The Creative Spirit: The Human Necessity of ‘Being Moved’

Steve · August 27, 2017 · 8 Comments

Over the past week, I have been reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’ve seen the B movies and a very good theatrical version years ago at the St. Louis Repertory Theatre, but I’ve never read the book. It was assigned reading this year for all the first-year students at the university where I work, so I thought I would join the throng of readers.

We all read books, poems and sacred texts with different mindsets and personal histories, of course, so these words purposefully and creatively strung together by the authors affect each person differently. As regular readers of my blog no doubt know, I write often on the idea of paying attention to the world around us, of leaving ourselves open to being moved by the things in our lives and, ultimately, by the looming presence of God. So I was delighted to read this passage below, spoken by Dr. Frankenstein about his hike through the woods and mountains, during which he observed the desolation after an avalanche, dangerous and deep ravines, “somber” pines, the distant valley with mist rising off the river and the mountain summits shrouded in clouds. In short, he was paying attention and was deeply aware of the human necessity of being moved. He says:

The Creative Spirit: Working from Memory

Steve · May 31, 2015 · 3 Comments

candle — University of Notre Dame grotto. SJG photo.

“Now will I recall God’s works; what I have seen, I will describe.”
–Sirach 42:15

Memory, it seems, plays a crucial role in the lives of those of us who create. For what we recall and have seen, to paraphrase the wisdom of Sirach, we are called to describe to others. The memory might be from just yesterday (an overheard conversation becomes a story, the setting sun hitting the side of a tree becomes a poem or a painting) or it might be something much older (the sound of our mother’s voice becomes a song, a remembered Christmas morning becomes dialogue for our invented characters). Even remembered tastes and smells can be grist for the mill of our imaginations.

And this is especially true (and all the more important), with our recollections of how God has moved and worked in our lives, of the moments when God seemed so real and present that we could not NOT tell others. To experience the love of God and not be inclined to retell the story — in some way — is akin to seeing the Grand Canyon and forgetting to take a photo or send a postcard. Just who could do that? We see, we experience something majestic and grand, and we feel a deep desire to say, “Let me tell you about the time…” or “let me show you something.”

The “trick,” of course, is that we need to set ourselves up to remember. We need to live lives with time for reflection and contemplation built in to the fabric. Whether daily or weekly, this time to remember fuels our creativity in ways we could never imagine. When I write, and when I reflect back, I remember things that have remained buried for days, months, years, even decades. But the act of writing, for me, raises them from the ashes.

An example, right here and right now. None of what I’m about to write have I thought about or mulled over…it’s all spilling forth as my fingers slip across the keys:

prayer — Praying at California mission. SJG photo.

It’s about 1973, I think. I’m 13 and a friend has invited me to Holy Saturday mass at the (it seems to me) massive Holy Cross Catholic Church in the Baden neighborhood of North St. Louis. I’ve never been in a Catholic Church before, except maybe for a wedding of some family friends. I’m a little scared. I’m scared of being out of place and not knowing the drill. Raised a Protestant, I’ve heard the stories and the jokes — stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, sit. Religious calisthenics. I don’t quite know what to expect.

My senses are assaulted as I come through the huge oaken doors. It is dim in the pews where we sit, the altar aglow with candlelight. It’s crowded, pews already filling with older people and large families. I slide into a pew with my friend and his family (they genuflect but I did not know how), including his 16-year-old sister Theresa, who I always had a bit of a crush on, and his younger brother Mark, who would die the following year in a car crash in Arizona that almost took out the whole family during a vacation. They kneel so I kneel, something we didn’t do in my church. And yet it felt right and proper to do so here, felt like a holy thing to do, like there was something going on here that needed to be bowed to. I didn’t fully understand that, of course. I just sensed it.

Msgr. Martin Hellriegel (from website cited)

The mass began with a long procession, the altar boys (only boys back then) and the priests making their way up the center aisle. One of the altar boys who I knew from baseball was swinging the censor back and forth and filling the space with incense. (There are so many words here that I didn’t know or understand back then I now realize…mass, procession, censor…). I don’t ever remember my sense of smell coming into play during worship before. This was something new. I swooned a bit, I think, the combination of the incense and this new act of kneeling. The priest, I would learn and appreciate a decade later, was Monsignor Martin Hellriegel, a liturgical pioneer and hymn composer who wrote “To Jesus Christ our Sovereign King,” which is still sung in churches around the world.

But back then, I didn’t hear or understand much (Oh, to go back and listen!) and this was just a long, tedious service for someone so young. Three hours of readings, the retelling of salvation history interspersed with psalms and songs, with the incense hanging in the air as a reminder of the presence of God when we pray, that our prayers rise like the smoke rose to the arched ceiling of the grand sanctuary.

Okay, enough of that memory for now. But that’s the power of memory. When we give ourselves some time and some promptings to remember, we can recall images and stories, and stories and images can change lives, can turn people toward God who waits for our turning. For most of us, these stories and pictures speak louder than proclamations. Remember your stories and fold them into lessons. Infuse them into art. Move them into music and dance. Stitch them into fabric.

A challenge: Sit down with pen and paper or your computer and ask yourself these questions: What is one of my earliest memories of faith, of church, of God? What do I remember of that moment…the sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes? Now just write (or draw!) for ten minutes. Don’t stop to edit and don’t pause long to think. Let your fingers do the work; allow the buried truth (even if your memories are a bit tarnished by time) to flow from you onto the page or the sketchpad. If you’re so inclined, post what you created in the comments section.

Ask yourself in silence: What memories am I missing because I’m not taking the time to recall them?

The Creative Spirit: Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Steve · May 10, 2015 · 5 Comments

scarecrow — Scarecrow: Folk art or innovation? Faust Historical Park, St. Louis. SJG photo.

I’m up early this Sunday morning, searching the quiet of the new day for a spark of inspiration; not only inspiration for writing this — although that’s part of it — but inspiration for the day, the week, the moments that lie ahead. Inspiration to not just get through these times but to actually live through and with them, to embrace the gift of the ordinary that fills our lives and do something productive and creative with what I see and experience.

And isn’t that often how creativity and innovation occurs? I hear birdsong outside my door and think of flutes and the trills of a violin. I hear the natural rhythm of the birds and the crickets and the frogs and I sense not just noise but the percussion of the world around me. Noise becomes music, as it has for so many composers and musicians throughout the ages. From great classical composers to jazz innovators to those who carry forward the folk traditions of aboriginal and old-world music as it reflects the beauty and intricacy of the world around them, the ordinary becomes extraordinary when we put our hands and our minds to work. Do we hear birdsong in the flute or the flute in the birdsong?

The green of the leaves on the trees out my back door is radiant with the early sun’s glancing blows and the lingering wetness of last night’s rain, and although trees don’t move from their rooted stations they move before our eyes, of course, whether slow and subtle in a gentle breeze or ecstatic and tortured in a storm. Ordinary? Of course, but don’t tell that to Monet and so many other artists who made the trees and gardens and their movement come alive for us.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as Hopkins wrote, but within the ordinary grandeur of our lives are the seeds of our own human innovation and art. Flowers are flowers, spores are spores, but they also contain multitudes — healing medicines and hope for cures when creative scientific minds look beyond the ordinary in search of extraordinary ways to improve our lives. Someone saw a bird fly and began to wonder how we could fly ourselves. And we eventually did.

leaf — The radiance of nature. SJG photo.

Our DNA hasn’t changed all that much in thousands of years, but we know now how to look closely enough to notice the changes that bring about disease, so we can begin to bring about healing. A miracle? Perhaps, but only in the sense that we have learned to capture the ordinary to bring about the extraordinary. Perhaps that’s what the writer of Genesis had in mind when he said that God gave man dominion over the earth. We have far too often used that Biblical narrative as an excuse to do whatever we wanted to the earth around us — often to the detriment of the world we are called to protect and nurture — when, perhaps, we should have just been paying closer attention.

And, indeed, many have been doing this for a long time. The history of our art, our music, our science and engineering breakthroughs more often than not springs from our ability to pay attention to the world around us. The ordinary world, from its molecules and atoms to the grandest of canyons and the vastness of oceans, continues to inspire and motivate change, innovation and art.

So what is our response? How do we fit in? What contribution do we have to make? Don’t be confused or disheartened by my examples. We all don’t have the training and the wherewithal to find a cure for cancer, to paint a masterpiece worthy of Monet, to compose music that will reflect the beauty of the world back to its Maker. Or maybe we do.

We all have the ability to transform the ordinary in extraordinary ways. We plant and fertilize and nurture and a garden is born, a gift to those who see it even at a glance or taste its fruits. We write a poem or a letter to a friend who needs to hear that they are remembered and extraordinary. We sketch, we draw, we doodle. We make up stories and games to keep our children amused. We hum an old hymn in the ear of an elderly friend and we cradle a newborn and calm her tears with a whispered lullaby. We solve a business or societal problem by emulating how nature takes care of itself. We pay attention. We get off our duffs and act. We believe we have something to contribute.

Last week, one of my reflections appeared in the Living Faith daily devotional, and I ended it with this:

Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” We can see each sunrise, each newborn child, each encounter with beauty and chalk them all up to chance, or we can stand back in wonder at these daily miracles and choose to see the hand of God. The first option is a yawn; the second is a gasp. You choose.”

Ask yourself in silence: What one thing can you do today to pay attention and act, to respond to your call as creator and reflector of the divine, creative spark?

Challenge: Write and tell me what you did!