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The Meaning of My Ministry

When I joined the Jesuits I expected to become a teacher in one of our college prep schools. That held through the years of seminary and on through some very enjoyable and satisfying years of priesthood, at Marquette High and then Campion High.

Before I reached ordination, I had spent two summers doing maintenance work at the Jesuit mission on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. There I worked with Lloyd One Star, who taught me some plumbing and also some of the traditional ways of life among his people. This experience, too, was very instructive and enjoyable, but did not at all change my sense of my call as a Jesuit to be a prep school teacher.

Then, toward the end of my term at Campion, I found I was encountering over and over the phrase, "Good News to the poor." This bothered me a bit, led me to think that, for the sake of my priesthood, I needed to spend some time with poor people to get some insight into their experience of Christ as Good News. It seemed not an intellectual idea that could be put into words, but an experience of the heart more than of the mind.

So I told this to my provincial and we agreed that I might spend a year or two on a reservation to explore this. The school at the Rosebud had an opening for a math teacher and this gave me a suitable reason for my presence there and an opening for involvement with people.

As things developed (in a rather odd and unexpected way) I found myself appointed superior of the Jesuits at the mission and continued in the role for a bit over six years. After a study sabbatical for a couple of semesters I looked forward to going back to the reservation. That did not immediately develop; instead, I worked four years in the spirituality ministry of the Emmaus community in Des Moines. Then in 1987 I was appointed by the provincial to work at St. Stephen’s Mission in Wyoming on the Wind River reservation.

I was mission director and pastoral worker six or seven years. I had another interim away from the reservation until about 1998, when I returned to St. Stephen’s as an assistant pastor, the position I still officially hold.

So what does it all add up to? A young teenager joins the Jesuits in response to his experience of God’s call, anticipating a career as math teacher in a Jesuit college prep school. That was OK for a start, but God, in his own wonderful way, gently nudged me into a career among people on Native American reservations, a career that shifted from academic teaching to pastoral service and spiritual guide.

God does not come into my choices by dictating to me, and God leaves me free to make mistakes and poor choices. But in spite of mistakes, perhaps through my mistakes, the loving care of the God who has called me to this service has nevertheless led me through it all.