Practical Wisdom (Part VI)

I was sitting in a familiar spot doing a familiar thing. I was sitting in Msgr. Frank Lane’s office listening. Over the years, I’ve often wished I had recorded our conversations. This would give me enduring access to his encyclopedic knowledge. Alas.

During my most recent visit, he made a reference to a book titled The Spiritual Franciscans but he couldn’t remember the author. So, he set off trying to find it in his personal library. As he struggled to locate it, he said, “I love having to hunt down books and references, because along the way, you find other interesting things.”

He could have simply used AI to learn about the elusive author. Instead, he was intentionally inefficient because setting off the find the answer on your own means you’ll find other interesting things along the way. And, we did. He talked about a few other books on his shelves that would be of interesting to me. As you find these interesting things, you’ll probably raise some new questions you didn’t know you had and explore previously unimaginable inquiries. In all of this, the human mind expands and agency increases. And none of this happens when in the highly efficient engineering of a prompt that’s served up to a chatbot who spits out the answer in a matter of seconds.

Oh, and David Burr authored The Spiritual Franciscans.

“Dad, can we play catch?”

“…”

“Dad?”

I was on my phone, busy with an inconsequential email. The older kids were at school and my wife had the baby at an appointment. It was just me and the boy, whose requests I’d been batting away all morning. I was distracted, my attention split between pacifying my son, while handling house chores and juggling work demands remotely. 

Without looking up, I said, “Um…yeah. Yeah, go get the gloves.”

He hunted for mitts, which bought me enough time to send the email.

When he returned, I put down the phone and we went into the yard for a catch. I put on my glove. Its worn leather hugged my hand. He situated his and heaved a crooked throw. I plucked it out of the sky and reciprocated, the scuffed ball grating across my fingertips with the toss. My son’s smile was speckled with sunlight, and his giggle was with excited nerves.

I’m not sure how much time passed. I lost track. 

There’s nothing like having a catch with your son. Playing catch is a waste of time, when you think about it, especially with a three-year-old who can’t catch. It serves no practical purpose. In our pragmatic, utilitarian lens, it is utterly unproductive. Heck, the amount of time the ball was on the ground proves it wasn’t even an effective game of catch. But, it’s a delightful waste of time.  

Later that day, it occurred to me that I’d experienced a moment of true leisure, leisure in the form of a game of catch.

Leisure is not having free time, doing nothing, or “vegging out.” It’s not binge-watching, drinking after a long week, or doomscrolling on social media. It’s not the weekend or vacation, though one can enter into leisure on the weekend or vacation. It’s certainly not utilitarian — resting for the sake of working again. 

Instead, leisure is an attitude. A mental and spiritual one. It’s an interior reality and not a circumstantial one, though circumstances can help. Leisure is stillness. It’s a disposition, an interior silence that is actively open to reality — to life as it really is. Josef Pieper, the great German philosopher of the 20^th century, says that:

Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness…Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.

Leisure is a state of being. It is stillness, an interior silence (which doesn’t mean everything around you is perfectly still or silent). This kind of interior stillness opens me to receive what is really real in an increasingly artificial world. It allows me to accept myself, to be at one with myself, with my place in life. It allows me to acquiesce in my own being. And such acquiescence is rest.

Ironically, we have to work for leisure. Our interior lives are often disheveled, our hearts hectic. There is work involved in putting things in order, stilling ourselves. Think of the game of catch above. I had to work to put the phone down, put on the glove, and engage in the game. Catch with a three-year-old who insists on using a hard ball is hard work. Yet focusing through this one activity stilled my heart and allowed me to receive the realest thing in front of me all day — my relationship with my son. Not only did I receive it, but I enjoyed it.

Liturgy is similar. Liturgy is work leading to leisure, stillness, all for the sake of encountering the God who is really real, indeed, reality itself. This is why Mass is the pinnacle of leisure, and why praying the Mass is hard, but worth it. 

Leisure connects us with the real, not by escaping it, but by penetrating it. By entering deeply into life and time in this way, we get a foretaste of eternity, those moments where time seems to stand still or you find yourself saying, “It seemed like just five minutes had passed, but it was an hour.” This can happen at Mass, on vacation, or when you’re having a classic, midsummer catch with your son. 

“Just one more inning, dad,”

my boys say with a cry

that carries me back to my own boyhood.

Back then, the boys of summer 

played a game that never ended.

It picked us up

all summer long,

as we’d pick it up where we’d left off

and play daily from dawn till dusk.

As darkness crept in,

parents would call from up and down the street,

and we would go home, begrudgingly,

but only after one more inning.

We smelled of sweat and leather, 

grass stains and dirt — 

dust so far up the nose 

you could smell it with your brain.

I still can. 

We’d sleep and dream

of that only sport worthy of heaven.

The pleas of my boys remind me now,

there must be baseball there, 

this game that never ends, 

and of my youth, and of

eternal beginning.

The explainer for brain lateralization (i.e., the tendency of one hemisphere to specialize in certain processes) does typically runs along this line:

• Right hemisphere: spatial awareness, face recognition, emotional cues — more receptive and synthesizing, so to speak
• Left hemisphere: language, logic, sequential processing — more active and analytical, so to speak

That people are either right-brained or left-brained has been proven false. In reality, both hemispheres fire and work together throughout the thinking process. In this sense, both hemispheres are involved in the act of knowing, so it’s not the black and white: “he is right-brained,” “she is left-brained.” Commenting on the neuroscience in general (and Iain McGilchrist’s work more specifically), Rod Dreher explains:

Neuroscience knows that the brain’s left side is where abstract reasoning happens, while its right hemisphere is where we receive pure experience and where our capacity for intuition and empathy resides (the biblical term for this faculty of noetic knowledge is “the heart”). In a healthy brain, both hemispheres work together to give a person a more-or-less accurate picture of reality. To put it crudely, the right brain receives information, sends it to the left brain for analysis, receive the left brain’s report, and integrates it into a holistic picture of the world.¹

Apart from those who have suffered certain brain injuries, we’re whole-brained. This may be true in terms of what the hemispheres do, meaning both hemispheres are involved in any act of knowing and not just the right or just the left. However, how each hemisphere attends to the world differs greatly. To be intentionally redundant, McGilchrist argues that what each hemisphere does (i.e., its involvement in knowing) doesn’t vary greatly, but the way in which each hemisphere approaches reality does. McGilchrist explains: “You could say…that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us apprehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to comprehend it—see it all for what it is.”² This is likely too simplistic, but the left hemisphere takes (or grasps), while the right hemisphere receives.

Why does this matter?

In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist riffs on a parable from Nietzsche and uses it to illustrate a problem in brain lateralization. In the parable, a ruler’s kingdom grows to such a degree that he needs to dispatch his representative (an emissary) to govern the far reaches of the land. The narrow-minded emissary comes to believe he’s smarter than the master and usurps the master, becomes a tyrant, and eventually leading the once-flourishing kingdom to ruin.³ McGilchrist applies this fable to the brain and describes the right hemisphere as the master, the wise one who sees the world as a whole, and the left as the master’s emissary who is given a particular responsibility of executing tasks (abstracting, analyzing, categorizing, etc). The left hemisphere can’t see the whole picture. It loses the forest for the trees. And it’s myopia becomes problematic. Yet, in the modern world (say, the last 500 years — though I think this has been going on for longer than that), the left brain has usurped the right — the emissary has overthrown the master. The cultural results, as we’ve seen have been disastrous.

This is not the space to deal with all the ramifications of this takeover. The Enlightenment, rationalism, the hyper-emphasis on STEM, and so forth could all be part of the conversation. Because the left hemisphere tends to abstract, isolate, and grasp, we can conjecture it plays a role in shaping society’s individualistic tendencies and preying on a desire for control. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes this trait of modernity, saying, “The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire that we can make the world controllable.”⁴ This is quite a task and one that causes some anxiety. Rosa observes that “we invariably encounter the world as a ‘point of aggressions’ or as a series of points of aggression.” This leads to “anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.”⁵

Back to the brain. I believe most of us have a sense of what we think about in a given day (e.g., baseball, kids, what we’re eating for dinner, and a hundred thousand other things); few of us consider how we think. My own story may help to illustrate this point.

As I wrap up my 17th year in the ministry field, I find it interesting to think about my own experience in ministry along the line of hemispherical difference. When I first began, I was a wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old. I didn’t know up from down or right from left. I was just going. And I was going hard at it. Lots of Holy Spirit fire and stuff like that. And, I saw God doing amazing things in the lives of teens (I was a youth minister at the time). Then, somewhere around 2012 or 2013, I was neck-deep in my MA in Theology and the New Evangelization became popular. FOCUS was making waves in college campus ministry and discipleship became all the rage. (Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples was published in 2012, for added context.) I got all caught up in this. The admixture of my academic pursuits, my shiny, new archdiocesan job, and the discipleship craze pushed my experience of ministry into a world of abstraction. Everything became linear and had to follow a kind of logic: process of evangelization; pathway for conversion; discipleship roadmap; discipleship thresholds; the divine renovation of a rebuilt parish. All of it has some value, but, for me, it caused analysis paralysis out the wazoo. I would draft schema after schema, each one innovating on my prior innovation. I studied the stats. I could spew them out and defend my plans. But, at the end of the day, it was all analysis, abstraction, and aggression. And it was dry. And I was dry. And tired.

Let’s turn again to McGilchrist for further insight:

Not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical. The left hemisphere’s principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive. The left hemisphere codes for tools and machines.⁶

Ministry had become mechanical. Utility, now that was a piece of the puzzle, too. How to make everything scaleable, and so forth. Could we find parishes that would serve as “labs”? That’s man-made ministry, right there, or at least a propensity for it. The left hemisphere has an affinity for what is abstract and not alive.

How I approached ministry had changed. At first, it was all relational. Build relationships. Grow networks of relationships. Christ was the connective tissue and friendship was the engine. It was amazing. I was amazed, actually. I was amazed at the expansiveness of ministry and the transformation I was seeing. Then, I got caught up in the left hemisphere, so to speak, and I tried to map everything. It was like killing the frog and dissecting it rather than watching it in its natural environment. Sure, I learned a bunch at the micro level and I could explain a lot about the mechanics of discipleship, but I lost a sense of the living whole and mired in a world of abstraction. Sure, I loved all my new plans and insights, but, in retrospect, I think it was a kind of intellectual necrophilia.

One day, in the midst of my ossification, I realized that it had been years since I’d actually walked with someone through the process or even witnessed a conversion. I was just talking about it all the time. But, I didn’t get into ministry to talk about encountering Christ, but to help people encounter him.

Eventually, I stepped out of my archdiocesan role and got back into the wilds of parish ministry. The change of context helped get me “closer to the ground,” but, almost by default, I kept trying to force fit all my theories and strategies. It was like my operating system froze. The harder I tried to make my schema work, the less it seemed to work and the more stuck I got. So, I was back with real people in a real situation, but it was almost like I couldn’t quite remember how to do real ministry. I was trying to impose certain organizing structures for evangelization (or a preconceived interpretive grid) down onto the thing before the thing had a chance to spring up out of the soil and reveal itself. The harder I tried, the less it seemed to work. Then, I quit. I had grown jaded and I was burnt out. And it wasn’t till I quit and did something totally different for about a year (i.e., digital marketing sales) that I finally understood what was going on.

Have you ever had the experience of trying to figure out something at your desk and it isn’t till you get up and go for a walk that you “get it?” Or you’re trying to remember something, like “Jim’s last name,” and the harder you try the more the name evades you. Once you stop thinking about it and go back to whatever you were doing previously, then the forgotten name floats back into your memory. The neuroscience behind this phenomenon goes something like this. The more you focus attention on one particular thing, trying to “produce something,” the more deliberately you narrow its range. This is left hemisphere space. Once you broaden your attention (like going for a walk or getting back to whatever you were doing before you tried to remember “Jim’s last name”), you allow the right hemisphere back into the action, which allows the “more remote or tenuous associations of thought” to be made.⁷

By getting away from ministry for a bit and letting my mind relax from its hyper-focused state, I could finally see again. I could see more of the whole picture. For example, I could see that the linear thinking behind discipleship pathways breaks down quickly in the wild. I know plenty of missionary disciples who just met Jesus and plenty of people who have heard the Gospel and are living a converted life who need to hear it again and again as if for the first time. I am one of these people. I know people who have encountered Jesus as if for the first time through what we’d map as “perfective catechesis.” So, I think the whole thing is way more mysterious than our models and pathways and processes allow. This isn’t to say the analyses and models are bad or altogether unnecessary, but that they’re not the whole thing. And when they become the whole thing, they eclipse the real thing I had forgotten: relationships.

Being away from ministry liberated the clutches of my mind from its kind of death grip on discipleship in the abstract. I remembered that people aren’t pawns and that strategies can only go so far in ministry, if they go anywhere at all.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was another piece of insight that hit me around this time, and from an unlikely source: Rod Carew. There was an article about the Hall of Famer in The Wall Street Journal. Though speaking about an entirely different field, what he said confirmed my thinking. Check this out:

I was watching a College World Series game and I noticed that everybody was trying to pull and get under the ball. I just sat there, saying to myself, Don’t these guys understand? They don’t know how to hit. I would rather see kids learn how to track the ball. The baseball tells you what to do with it. I’m not going to swing up on a pitch that’s high. I’m going to swing down, through the ball, because I have a better chance. The inside pitch told me I’ve got to get my hands out and through the ball and try and pull the ball. The outside pitch dictated to me that I could keep that ball up the middle or go to left field.⁸

So when I returned to parish ministry a few years later, I stopped trying to pull every pitch, so to speak. I stopped trying to make the ball (i.e., ministry) do what I wanted it to do, or what I thought it should do. I threw out all the mapping, strategies, processes, and pathways almost entirely. Or, I should say, I’m not building everything on them. I think they have some, but minimal value. Instead, I’m back to a very human, very organic approach again. It’s quite dialogical, really. And, it feels natural. Feels more like friendship than an exercise in evangelical robotics. Yes, it’s hard to explain the strategy, because there isn’t one, in a sense. How do you strategize friendship without killing its very possibility? No, I couldn’t box it up and take it to another parish and scale it and ship it out across the nation as yet another consumable and vaguely capitalistic venture in the “new evangelization market.” Authentic relationships always involve a process of discovery and surprise. And it is wonderful, freeing, and even enchanting.⁹ You can’t package that up and sell it.

None of this is to say that left-brained approaches are bad or unnecessary. They are necessary. But they have a place and bad things happen when we make them the whole thing. When we turn everything into maps and quantifiable datapoints. When we turn everything into consumables and base success off people consuming those consumables. When we try to make people analyze their own spiritual lives and map themselves. Who really knows where they are, anyway? And the more we think we know where we are, the further we probably are from where we think we are. Maybe allowing some mystery into the mix is okay. Maybe allowing things to be a little messy is okay. Maybe being more whole-brained, or putting the right hemisphere back in charge would go a long way. Maybe we need to decommission the tyrannical emissary and stop foisting 500 years of modern, “left-brained” thinking onto evangelization. Maybe widening our attention and remembering, say, Jesus, and the non-mechanics of relationship, maybe that’s okay. Maybe letting the Spirit move outside the models we try to map him in, maybe that’s okay, too. So, sure, maybe there is a process of evangelization or a pathway of conversion, and maybe these are helpful tools in some cases, but they’re not the whole thing, or the only thing, or everything, or the first thing, or the last thing. You can’t engineer evangelization. You can’t reduce it to a series of techniques. An evangelist ought not become a technocrat, because evangelization lives in the wild realm of relationship, charity, and freedom, and not in a contrived space where the evangelists acts like a wizard trying to pull all the right levers.

Okay, enough.

Just so we don’t lose the point, I’m arguing that the dominant left hemisphere approach to evangelization, which is symptomatic of modernity, arrests evangelization from its broader, dynamic, and organic context of friendship, charity, and freedom. It does this through a process of abstraction and then reduces the whole thing to its part. Or, said another way, it projects an aspect of evangelization as the whole thing. This isn’t to say there is no value in articulating a process of evangelization, but that it needs to be re-situated within its broader context and instead of claiming to be the whole. And within the broader context, we begin to see its helpful, but limited value.

I’ll conclude with a couple of passages from Ratzinger I’ve come to appreciate:

After the end of the apostolic age the early Church had as yet developed only relatively little in the way of a direct missionary activity as a Church, that it did not have any particular strategy for proclaiming the faith to the heathen, and that nevertheless this became the age of the greatest missionary success. The conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the life of Christians and of the community of the Church…The Church’s community of life invited people to share in this life in which was revealed the truth from which this kind of life arose. On the other hand the apostasy of the modern age rests on the disappearance of the verification of faith in the life of Christians…The new evangelization we need so urgently today is not to be attained with cleverly thought out ideas, however cunningly these are elaborated: the catastrophic failure of modern catechesis is all too obvious. It is only the interaction of a truth conclusive in itself with its proof in the life of this truth that can enable that particular evidence of the faith to be illuminated that the human heart awaits: it is only through this door that the Holy Spirit enters the world.¹⁰

And…

I think that organization should follow life. It is better, therefore, to see how life evolves, without rushing to tackle the organizational questions.¹¹

1. Dreher, Living in Wonder, 44. ↩︎
2. McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, ↩︎
3. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 14. ↩︎
4. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 2. ↩︎
5. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 4. ↩︎
6. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 55. ↩︎
7. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 41–42. ↩︎
8. Gay, “Rod Carew: A Baseball Hitter for All Fields,” The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2022. ↩︎
9. See Dreher’s book Living in Wonder. ↩︎
10. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 34–35. ↩︎
11. Ratzinger, New Outpourings of the Spirit, 73. ↩︎

A couple days ago, I was chatting with a parishioner before a talk we offered at the parish. He mentioned that ChatGPT was alive and well. He’d recently returned from a graduation tour that spanned multiple grandkids and states. He told me he heard one high school valedictory address that offered the typical niceties: we’ve grown so much and we’ve grown together, now it’s time to step out from here to pursue our ideals of success, but we’ll always be part of this school and the school part of us, and so on. He said it was fine and whatever. Then, a week later in a different state and with a different speaker, he heard something familiar — the exact same, practically word-for-word commencement address. AI was alive and well, indeed.

Of course two speeches amounts to a minuscule sample size, but I’ve seen enough and graded enough undergrad papers to see a trend, here.

I could comment on the lack of effort or creativity behind these speeches. The fact that an LLM generated the whole thing cheapens the message and somehow makes light of the magnitude of the moment and the experience people have of journeying together through the ups-and-downs of high school adolescence.

But the real cause of my melancholy might have to do with the complete loss of uniqueness. What does a high school in Kentucky have to do with one in Mississippi other than practically nothing? Yet the homogenized speeches accounted for no such uniqueness and turned the speakers into mere mouthpieces for robots. How interesting. The LLM-generated speech paid no regard to the situation of real graduates at a real place and in a real time, and the speakers apparently didn’t care enough to pay attention to that real situation of real people. How could it? Only the attentive mind of a person can do that.

Still, the consequences go beyond a common, saccharine and Hallmark-like speech. They touch on a willed out-of-touch-ness with and lack of care for the real in all its similarities and differences in Kentucky and Mississippi and everywhere in between. So there’s a flattening, a loss of dimensionality, and a loss of the self all mashed up in the nonuniqueness of (at least but probably more than) two valedictory addresses given back in mid-May.

The intimacy portrayed in the icon caused me to double take. I had never seen anything like it. I’m speaking, of course, about the piece depicted above. It’s an early Coptic Christian icon depicting Jesus and Abbot Mena. Some refer to it as “Christ and his friend.” I see that, and I see in this icon something of an icon of lectio and life.

Jesus stands taller than the Abbot Mena, and he holds the Bible, reminding us that he is the One we encounter in the words of Scripture. He is the greatest fruit of lectio divina. Jesus has one eye on Mena and the other one on the viewer. He sees Mena and he sees you. He sees me.

Then, we have the figure of the good abbot, surely struggling through all the things any abbot — or priest, or abbess, or father of a family, or mother of a family — struggles through. Mena’s trying to be a good shepherd, and here is the Good Shepherd shepherding him. Jesus is guiding him into Scripture and guiding him in life. Mena holds a scroll, possibly the rule of his monastic community, and he, too, has one eye on Christ and one eye looking out. He raises his hand in blessing. He is blessing Christ in return, but in return for what?

An embrace.

The whole scene is wrapped in an embrace. Jesus, draws close to the Abbot, puts his arm on his shoulder. This is a gesture of intimacy, vulnerability, and friendship. He is pulling the abbot closer to his heart and under the wing of his protection. “Under his wings you may take refuge” (Ps 91:4). In drawing the abbot closer to his heart, he is simultaneously drawing him deeper into the Gospels.

The icon teaches us that it’s Jesus we encounter in Scripture, in Christian friendship, in the created world “out there,” and in the mysterious depths of the heart. Lectio divina fixes our gaze on Christ who encounters us in the book of Scripture and in the book of life. It attunes the ear of our heart to attend to the resonant voice of Christ in all of God’s revelation.  Lectio can show us the way, because lectio gets us in touch with the real Jesus Christ who is the way, truth, and the life — indeed, the only way to the Father (cf. Jn 14:6).

Spend any time at a Midwest parish (really any Catholic parish) and you’ll find some Garys and Debbies around. I’m talking about the parish fixtures, the small group of guys and gals who make the parish go ‘round. They volunteer to everything, run everything, sacrifice for everything. They know everyone and anticipate needs. They do the thankless jobs nobody else wants to do. They, with the Holy Spirit, are the lifeblood of the parish. The Garys and Debbies get stuff done. 

Sure, these parish people have their rough patches. They can be stuck in their ways, scoff at the younger generations, grumble because people don’t step up, and move about within exclusive circles that seem impenetrable to the outsider. But the toughness of their callouses makes them endearing to those willing to appreciate them. 

I appreciate these parish Garys and Debbies, and I appreciate them more and more each day. My Family of Parishes is filled with them. But they are a dying breed, an endangered species on the verge of extinction.

These are the same kinds of Garys and Debbies that Stephen Wilson Jr. sings about in “Gary,” a tragic ballad about the decline of the working class. You can read more about the inspiration behind “Gary” in this article, but to pull a few of Stephen’s comments for you:

The song is sad. I mean, that’s the thing. I’m definitely celebrating a working-class human, but at the same time, it’s a very sad story. I wasn’t trying to make Gary some superhuman. I wanted to try to be real about the situation, because the Garys are endangered. We experienced that when we had this ice storm in Tennessee [in late January 2026]. We had to import Garys from all over the country to get everybody’s power back on. There’s logistical evidence that we just saw recently to prove that, yeah, these Garys? We’re running out of them, and maybe we should pay attention to that because we rely on them to fix things. … Instead of just letting them drive off into the abyss to go save another person’s day, how about we give them a moment and celebrate them?

And that’s what I wanted to do with this little post, to pay tribute to the Garys and Debbies out there — my fathers and mothers in the faith on whose shoulders we built our parishes and who still, today, silently carry the often unnoticed burden.

Streaking across the sky like a meteor, a firebird in flight.

A bald eagle flapping wings on an easterly flight path aimed for the rising sun.

The golden globe’s rays were, at the same time, reaching out to the earth, waking land and sky, and transfiguring the eagle before my eyes.

As it flew higher and faster towards the sun, the bald eagle was enveloped by its light and turned into blazing gold.

It didn’t transform itself, but was changed by what it was seeking.

It had to be undone to become like the sun.

And it was undone.

Then redone.

The eagle became the sun. It became sun-like yet remained itself an eagle.

Here, in this firebird, flies a meteoric metaphor for the Christian life.