Finding a Lost Mentor in the Halls of the Capitol

I walked the hallway between the Montana Governor's Office and the Capitol Rotunda with the slow steps of someone who had been successful, but not successful enough. We'd just completed a bill signing for legislation that would help Montana's criminal justice system more effectively care and adjudicate offenders who live with serious mental illness.

It was a good win with results will help a lot of people; but I'd just spent the last hour with Michael Hendrix, one of the people whose story helped inspire the bill, and was reminded of how much more work there is to do. During the past few months, I'd attempted and failed at convincing the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole to grant him a pardon for the felony arson conviction he'd received after lighting himself on fire while under the grips of bipolar-induced hallucinations. While we'd been able to help others have a shot at achieving justice, I'd been unable to get Michael the justice he deserved.

I bumped into John Bohlinger, Montana's last Lieutenant Governor, in the hallway. We were catching up when another man came up to tell him hello.The guy looked familiar and he told me the same thing.

We searched through our collective memory banks and then hit me.

"You're Father Gregory. The priest who flunked me in Confirmation class back in high school."

"Flunked you?"

I smiled and said, "It wasn't your fault. I missed a couple of mandatory classes for court and community services. The second year was more than deserved, but I think I may be the only parishioner in the history of the Cathedral to fail Confirmation."

Gregory had left the priesthood and was now working as a mental health counselor with an AIDS Outreach program in Bozeman. We talked for a while and I promised to stop and see him the next time I was in Bozeman.


That night my wife and I took a class at the St. Helena Cathedral's education center to prepare for our son's baptism. I hadn't been in the education center more than a handful of times since taking Confirmation Class back in high school. The memories were still crisp as they played through my mind.

The second year of Confirmation Class, jokingly my red shirt year, was where my faith began to make the transition from the faith of a child to that of an adult. That spiritual development depended upon Father Greg's intelligent lectures that were never short on wit and sarcasm. He engaged everyone who listened and didn't hesitate from answering the hardest questions.

The following year, I would be halfway across the country at West Point - relying on that faith like never before. It's been almost two decades and, more often than I'd like to admit, I still feel like that teenage kid trying to grasp the basics of what this life is all about and what we are supposed to do in it.

Neither Greg or I ended up being quite the people we'd envisioned. The act of living, loving, and following our individual spiritual paths led to a reality both more complex and simple than what we could have imagined in the early 1990's. The winding path continues to wind. As the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton said, "Any vocation is a mystery, and juggling with words does not make it clearer. It is a contradiction and must remain a contradiction."

The mystery of our vocations may be unavoidable, but the clear burden remains to use that vocation and all of our time on earth to fulfill the test of righteousness that Jesus said must be fulfilled to enter Heaven in Matthew 25: 34-40.

"'Come you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you at the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me'

Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?'"

Jesus will respond. "'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'"


NOTE: Please take a moment and send a message to Governor Steve Bullock asking him to pardon Michael Hendrix.  Michael was convicted of felony arson for lighting himself on fire while he was in the grip of mental illness-induced hallucinations of worms coming out of his skin. He's since recovered from his mental illness and is working as a peer specialist helping other. Unfortunately, he still bears the burden of the felony on his record.

The Importance of Obscurity

I don't know anything more powerful than seeing your image reflected in your newborn child's eyes. It's terrifying and wonderful to think how much of an impact you will have on that little being and a reminder of how much of an impact you are having on other beings all the time. There is no stronger call to be a better father, mother, husband, wife, friend, co-worker, etc.

Moments of insight can be far too fleeting. They are here and gone. Like dew dried up by the rising sun. A meteor blazing through the heavens before winking out forever.

We rightfully cherish and value these moments. Crafting our life around their insights, but we do not value the moments of obscurity when our true purpose and mission seem lost. They are two sides of the same coin, yet we pray for one side and curse the other.

The words of Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, reveal the critical nature of the lost times. "If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his corruption: if there were no light[,] man could not hope for a cure."

We should all look for higher truth, the footprints of the Creator upon the Universe, both in sacred texts, prayer, charity, love and through science. However, it is critical to remember that the lack of certainty is essential for faith. Hebrews 11:1 ("Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.").

Without faith, is is impossible to please God, "for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him." Hebrews 11:6.

Dr. Eben Alexander highlights the importance of the obscurity of the divine mission in his book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife. Dr. Alexander uses his training as a neurosurgeon and a near death experience to argue that one function of the brain may be to act as a cloak for a broader spiritual reality - allowing us to demonstrate our faith in this realm without concrete proof.


There would be no glory in serving God if the evidence of his grandeur was so clear that it was impossible not to. Just as there is little glory in swearing one's loyalty to math or science when it easy to prove that one and one always makes two or that the Earth circles around the Sun.

Jesus's statement to the Apostle Thomas illuminates the core value of obscurity in demonstrating faith. "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed." John: 20:29.

While we cannot wait to live completely in the light. The importance of the occasionally overwhelming darkness can't be understated while we remain as John Steinbeck wrote - "East of Eden." (Referencing Genesis 4:16).



NOTE: I couldn't resist adding a full passage from Blaise Pascal's Pensees.


“Let them at least learn the nature of the religion they are attacking, before they attack it. If this religion boasted of having a clear vision of God, and of possessing Him plain and unveiled, then to say that nothing we see in the world reveals Him with this degree of clarity would indeed be to attack it. But it says, on the contrary, that man is in darkness and far from God, that He has hidden Himself from man’s knowledge, and that the name He has given Himself in the Scriptures is in fact The Hidden God (Is 45:15). Therefore if it seeks to establish these two facts: that God has in the church erected visible signs by which those who sincerely seek Him may recognize Him, and that he has nevertheless so concealed them that He will only be perceived by those who seek Him with all their hearts, what advantage can the attackers gain when, while admitting that they neglect to seek for the truth, they yet cry that nothing reveals it? For the very darkness in which they lie, and for which they blame the Church, establishes one of her two claims, without invalidating the other, and also, far from destroying her doctrine, confirms it” (Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 194).

From Braiding Hair to the Tapestry of Human History

My five year old daughter, Fiona, recently decided that she was going to have to send me to hair-braiding school. This decision didn't come from out of the blue. Fiona and her sister have bore the brunt of all my struggles with tending little girls' hair. During my time as a single dad, they were regularly dropped off at preschool with huge knots on the top of their head. When I did manage to get the tangles straightened out, their pony tails usually pointed in the wrong direction and barely had the staying power to make it through the beginning of the morning.

Thankfully, my wife handles the majority of  the hair issues in our house now.  That is almost entirely a good thing, except for the fact that Fiona's hair expectations have increased dramatically. Where my little princess used to be happy with half-cocked pony tail, now she expect full braids. Unfortunately, my hair tying skills remain bleak, similar to my knot-tying skills in the military and tie-tying skills in the corporate world. I'm lucking to keep one out of two of my own shoes tied.

Despite my inadequacies, I do appreciate the physics of hair braiding. The over-and-through of a braid combines force against force. Using the power of one series of strands to secure and bind another series. The binders, become the bound, and then bind again. Each comes from a different direction, a different position, yet is essential to the creation of the whole. The combination of the series of strands working together to create something more strong and beautiful than they could be alone.

While hair braiding evades me, I've learned a lot of other lessons through the process of being a father. One of the most interesting lessons is how pre-programmed every human being is straight from the womb. Good parenting, a safe environment and schooling is important; but there's no denying that a certain amount of temperament is just born in. Dr. Jerome Kagan's research team at Harvard University developed some of the strongest research in this field, particularly as it applies to people with highly reactive anxious temperaments. Susan Cain's book Quiet: The Power of Introverts expands on Dr. Kagan's theories to explain how people with inborn introverted characters play essential roles in our society - roles traditionally can't be filled by people with a more outgoing and exuberant nature.

In a similar but different direction, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi's book, A First-Rate Madness, makes a strong argument that leaders who live with depression or bipolar disorder are essential during times of crisis because of the slightly different way that their brains perceive the world. Winston Churchill credited his depression with allowing him to understand the threat that Hitler posed when Neville Chamberlain did not. Dr. Ghaemi points to President Lincoln, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. as other examples of leaders' with depressive viewpoints that changed the course of the world.

Each individual is born with our own temperament, intellect, strengths, and weaknesses. Like strands in a braid, we interact with each others observations and viewpoint. This mix of religions, cultures and philosophies forms the tapestry of human history. It's a exacerbating and sometimes painful process whether the interactions are occurring in our homes, at work, or half way across the world; but it essential to fulfilling Creation.

While I'm fascinated by the psychological, anthropological, and evolutionary descriptions of this process; my personal favorite overall description of the human condition, our interactions with each other, and the goal of those interactions will always be from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called Children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for their is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.

Matthew 5:3-12.


Note: Check out Susan Cain's Ted Talk to learn more about about inborn temperament and the power of introverts.