Transcript of CS#59: Mike Aquilina and Fr. Kris Stubna Take Five with St. Ignatius

Transcript of Interview with Mike Aquilina and Fr. Kris Stubna about Take Five. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Take Five is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033259/Take-5–Job-Meditations-St-Ignatius/

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Chris Cash: And today in the Spotlight, we have Mike Aquilina and Fr. Kris Stubna. They have an excellent new meditation book out called Take Five on Finding Spirituality in the Workplace. Folks, welcome!

Mike Aquilina: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having us.

Fr. Kris Stubna: Thank you, it’s great to be with you.

Chris: You know, it’s always fun having multiple guests on this show. It just makes it all the more confusing since we’re not in the studio seeing each other.

Mike: Right, right. We’ll all step on each other and you can’t see our faces and you can’t tell who’s talking. But it’s good to be here.

Chris: That’s okay because I’m sure…I know you guys have a lot of good things to say. So let’s start off by talking about who was St. Ignatius and why is his work important to the spirituality of us in today’s times?

Mike: Well St. Ignatius was a great saint in the history of the Church. He was born…

Chris: You might want to identify who’s talking to as you see…

Mike: Oh, that’s me. It’s Mike Aquilina and St. Ignatius was a great saint in the history of the Church. He was born in 1491 so a lot of his life was lived in a period of great turmoil in Europe because the Protestant Reformation had really divided the Church and he was part of what is known as the Counter-Reformation. It was a reform movement within the Church that renewed the spirituality of Catholics and really gave a new vigor to the Church’s mission through Europe and then from Europe to the New World and to the Far East. Ignatius was a great inspiration to missionaries as well. But Ignatius had a spirituality that was a great development really. Before that, if you wanted to pursue a life of more serious commitment to Christ, usually what you did was you separated yourself from the world. You entered a monastery. You entered a convent. You withdrew from the world. But Ignatius gave a different spin to spirituality. He taught people to seek God in all things and to be contemplative in action. So he really trained people to live a spirit of sacrifice and of hard work and of offering all things for the greater glory of God wherever they are, in their workplace, in many different fields of endeavor. He founded an order called the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits and of course, that order has prospered now for centuries.

Fr. Kris: And I think part of the wisdom and the grace that comes through the teachings of St. Ignatius or you know, really reflect his life experience. He lost his mother at a young age. He had some sense of a vocation early on but ended up moving into a career that put him, as Mike said, into the world. He had a very prestigious position with the military but then had some great physical sufferings that he had to endure and it was at that time of some personal challenge when he was suffering greatly that he discovered the Scriptures, that his heart was open to God in a way but his involvement in the world really had a profound effect on how he understood grace and faith and really I think is part of why Take Five is meant to help people who are living in that world, that there isn’t a separation really between holiness and life. We can grow in holiness. We can come to know Christ. We can grow closer to God right in the midst of what we’re doing and how we live.

Chris: Now, Fr. Kris, you and Mike have been working together for quite some time on several books, correct?

Mike: We sure have.

Fr. Kris: Right, you know, actually personally, our paths go back, I had done my seminary studies in Rome and had finished my graduate work and had come back to the diocese and Mike happened to be at that time, the editor of our diocesan newspaper, the Pittsburgh Catholic and I had been appointed to a position in the education secretariat and we worked together almost from that moment on. And it came to a deep friendship, I think but also it just really our work overlapped a great deal and we saw the opportunity really to make the teachings of Christ more known to people. And Mike, of course, is a great writer so that helps.

Mike: Fr. Kris, Fr. Kris came back from Rome and he had a good deal of Ignatian formation. He did his doctoral work at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome so he studied under some of the great Ignatian teachers in the world and he lived in that kind of setting. He also lived in England for a while in a Jesuit house, so while he was doing his doctoral research. So he’s the one who had the experience with Ignatian spirituality first-hand experience and that’s how we got it going. He and I have done a number of books together. We did a pocket Catechism for children. We did a little Catechism for adults called What Catholics Believe and also we did a book as part of a series called The Catholic Vision of Love called talking to youth about sexuality. So we’ve been involved together on a number of projects.

Chris: So how do come up with the ideas for what you guys are going to do together.

Fr. Kris: Usually over a cup of coffee.

Mike: We get together, we have talk…

Chris: You don’t go out and get rip-roaring drunk, huh?

Mike: No, no, no. But you know what? Fr. Kris tends to be very positive and I tend to be grumpy and what will happen is, I’ll complain about something and then he’ll kind of nudge us toward a solution so if I complain about the problem that a lot of people just didn’t receive doctrinal formation in my generation, well Fr. Kris nudges me toward working with him on writing a couple of catechisms. If I grump and grouse that parents don’t have good resources for raising their children Catholic, well then he nudges us to write a couple of them and it’s the same thing about Prayer in the Workplace. I can grump and grouse but Fr. Kris comes up with practical solutions like writing books of meditations for the workplace.

Chris: So in some sense, your writing Mike then becomes your penance assigned to you by Fr. Kris.

Mike: That’s one way of looking at it.

Fr. Kris: I think one of the hopes I think we’ve shared from the beginning though is when you look at the culture in which we live and the tremendous challenges that families in particular face as they raise their children in the catholic faith and so many of them in our experience have been people that weren’t well catechized and well formed and they don’t always have the know-how or the resources to make their faith known and yet, we’re also faced with an experience in the Church that’s very exciting especially with the young people, there’s a great desire to know Christ. A great desire to know what the gospel is, how to live it out. So I think the attempt was at least our shared desire to really try to help to teach the faith, to help people grow in holiness but do it in a way that they can understand, that’s easily accessible and for example, like Take Five, I mean, the hope is that you can take one of these chapters or one of these reflections and spend five or ten minutes and really help to grow in holiness. It’s not a huge investment of time. I think we’re trying to recognize the struggle that people have in just time management.

Chris: Well, let’s see. Why don’t we talk a little about the book itself right now. Could you tell me a little about the thought process that went into putting this book together as well as the format that you used in presenting the meditations?

Mike: I think that in a sense, some things have never changed. The crowds said to our Lord, teach us to pray and I think people want to be taught to pray. They really want to be led to pray and we don’t know how to pray as we ought. So what we wanted to do is to really guide people very methodically, step-by-step through Ignatius’ method and so what we did was we had an introduction. We have an introduction here that gives kind of a short biography of St. Ignatius so you feel you’re getting to know him as a person. You’re coming to see that he was kind a notorious sinner early on in life and he came to know God’s mercy in a big way and then he was a very committed and even desperate seeker for the Lord and he was willing to follow the path as if he were a knight errant and not count the cost. And then after that, we tried to give a sketch of Ignatius’ spirituality, breaking it down into some main themes that people will encounter again and again in his spirit.

Chris: Yeah, I think Ignatius’ prayer was somewhat unique in a way that it was contemplative in a way but Ignatius really believed you needed to stir the imagination and reflect on the things of the world that were occupying, you know, you wanted to dismiss them but you could enter into them in a way but to stir up the imagination. I mean, part of the heart of the method is coming to know Jesus, a personal encounter, reflecting on the Scriptures in a way that invites you to enter that scene or that activity and place yourself there and to come to know the person of Jesus in a deep way so that you can grow in your devotion to Him and to His Holy Name and then of course to that kind of contemplation would led to service, lead to action.

Mike: He really wanted us to be more than readers of Scripture and even more than eye witnesses of the Gospel. He wanted us to enter the Gospel scenes and if we were a character in that scene, he really wanted Catholics to experience the touch of Jesus Christ. And in order to do that, they had to enter that time imaginatively. One of the basic truths behind all of this is that our Lord did not come to save great crowds of people. He came to save you and He came to save me and He came to save Fr. Kris and He had us. He had you and He had me in mind when He did all those great things in the Gospel. That’s a powerful, powerful truth when we come to realize it. He did this for love of me, not just crowds of people, but for me and Ignatius knew that the key to coming to that realization was to imaginatively enter the scenes of the Gospel so we tried to build that into the meditation that are in the book. So the meditations breakdown, we have a little excerpt from the writings of Ignatius and we…

Chris: And of course, these meditations are all designed as the title of the book says to Take Five out of your lunch break and be able to bring the continuity of your faith home in the workplace.

Mike: That’s right, that’s right. It’s for the lunch break, the coffee break, or on the bus on the way in to work or whenever you have…

Chris: Even as a small group with the other Catholics in your office.

Mike: Hey, that’s another great application of it.

Fr. Kris: Yeah, one of the things Ignatius…if you read St. Ignatius, he counseled people a great deal. He was a tremendous spiritual director because he had come to a sense of faith itself. He really would argue against people that would kind of struggle with the preoccupation of how to pray. How should we do this? What message should we use? You would just say you just have to do it and do it calmly, do it faithfully, do it gently, but do it. I think that’s the invitation of Take Five. You just have to make that time and spend with the Lord and what helps I think is that people are preoccupied. As you look through the list of reflections, these aren’t esoteric abstract concepts. This is real things that people face in the workplace, gossip and…

Mike: Yeah, how to take a sick day? Why you should take sick days? Avoiding self?pity, avoiding the blame game, making correction well, taking correction well, listen more than you talk, how to ask for a raise. Ignatius gave nitty-gritty practical advice about the things that we have to face in everyday work and this is very important for us to realize. He wrote many letters of spiritual direction. He wrote constitutions that included very practical advice for the priests and brothers in his order. So we can look at these things and we can draw a lot of lessons for the things that we have to face everyday. Very often we can fool ourselves in the things of our professional life. We can put off asking for a raise out of a sense of false humility. Well, the truth is as Ignatius points out that sometimes you need to ask for that raise. You owe a debt of justice to your family, to your parish, and to the poor and all the other people that you can serve with the extra money you’re going to make and it might be that you’re helping your employer to discharge you that debt of justice by paying you a just wage. So all of these things play into it and it really gives us a sense of how we can live as Catholics out there in a world where sometimes the decisions are difficult.

Chris: Okay, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor. But when we come back, we’ll be speaking more with Fr. Kris and Mike Aquilina about Take Five Meditations for the Workplace. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

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Chris: And we’re back with Fr. Kris and Mike Aquilina talking about the spirituality of St. Ignatius and how it can be use in the workplace in their new book Take Five from our Sunday visitor. Fellows, can you tell us a little bit about how the meditations are structured in a way that help us to be able to use them in the workplace as well as any other place where we’ve got five minutes put toward them.

Mike: Well, we got a bunch of them. We got I think 74 meditations in here and the way each one is structured is that we have an excerpt from the writings of St. Ignatius with a little bit of historical context given so that people know why did he write this? When did he write it? What was the situation he was dealing with or the person he was dealing with? And then after that, we bring out a couple of points, a few points for meditation. It’s a section called Think about It. And you can play about these things one by one in a contemplative way. Then we have a section called Just Imagine and we try to get people to do that Ignatian practice of entering the gospel scene. We give them a little excerpt from one of the Gospels or one of the Epistles and give them a chance to enter imaginatively into the Gospel teaching. And then finally we have a section called Remember. And what we’re trying to get people to do is to learn a little bit of Ignatius by heart everyday. So this line, it’s usually one sentence and it’s a line from Ignatius and it’s something that people can use as a prayer throughout the day. You can write it down on a sheet of paper and every now and then you can key it to when the phone is ringing or when somebody knocks on your door or when something…one of your regular milestones in the workday and you can offer that prayer very quickly. And by the end of the day, you’ll probably know it by heart. You might have it memorized. So that’s the way the individual meditations are structured. As I said before, you lead into this with a general sketch of Ignatius and then his spirituality.

Chris: And have you gotten any feedback so far on the book and how it’s affecting people’s lives in the workplace?

Fr. Kris: Yeah, I think both Mike and I can speak to that in a sense, but we’ve had some I think overwhelming feedback even more than we had anticipated from people who really end up picking up a copy or coming across a copy and then they’re going out and buying the whole bunch of them to give to their co-workers and friends. I know that I’ve been told that people are using them for example in little office gatherings and a way to get people together so that they could share their faith which is a great thing to because our faith is communal. This was the hope that it would enable people to be a little more willing and courageous to be able to talk about the issues related to faith in the workplace. It’s been a very positive response to date.

Mike: We’ve been blown away. The publisher has been blown away. What’s wonderful is that the book sold out in its first printing within 2 months. In less than 2 months, the book was sold out in its first print. It was already entering its second printing. And what Fr. Kris…

Chris: It’s always a good sign from a publisher.

Mike: It is, it is. And I think it speaks to a hunger that’s out there. What Fr. Kris described is exactly the way it happened. Our Sunday Visitor, our publisher was giving this out at a couple of national conventions and what happened was the people who got the free sample ending up ordering 100 copies because they fell in love with the book. They found it useful and gosh, that’s a great feeling when you do something like that and you find that it’s really igniting a kind of zeal out there and just to know that these prayer books that we put together are really being prayed. This is a great thing and it really speaks to something even greater that there’s a great renewal underway. The Holy Spirit is working in the church. The Holy Spirit is working in our country and great things are happening. We might not see them on the evening news. We might not see them in the New York Times, but they’re certainly happening out there and I think that this is good evidence of it. The kind of evidence I like to see especially since I’m the breadwinner for my family and I’m raising six children.

Chris: Is that all, huh?

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Now, is this style of meditation that’s used in this book is that something that you personally use in your own prayer life or is this something that you have twiddled down a bit from what you would personally do to meet the requirements of being able to fit it in on a schedule?

Mike: Well, prayer is something that’s intensely individual and as Fr. Kris pointed out before, one of the great emphases of Ignatius was personal freedom and he thought that you had to find your way to pray. He would give some guidance and he would give some practical tips here and there, but he really did not want us to become enslaved to a method. I would say that there are elements of my style of prayer in here. There are elements of Fr. Kris’ style of prayer in here. But again, prayer is something intensely individual. I mean what we’ve come to as practicing Catholics. Both Fr. Kris and I were raised in devout homes and we have very different circumstances now. I’m a father of a family and he’s living in a parish and he’s secretary for education in our diocese. We have very different work circumstances. So in each case, our prayer is adapted to our everyday lives.

Fr. Kris: Yeah, I found it though to be so helpful especially even for myself as a priest. I mean the day…I have my time in the morning where I stay in my office and have mass before I even come to work, but once you’re in the office and at work, the day could become very cluttered and filled up like any…I’ve come to appreciate people who have a full work schedule. It’s difficult sometimes even to carve out a little bit of time in the day, but the ability or the call from God to make our day holy. What we do is sacred. Sometimes it can be overwhelming. It can be difficult. We being to see our work as an obstacle to grace and to faith and I think the challenge is the Ignatian method is to say let’s just take time. Let’s stop down and don’t let that experience be an obstacle, but take the experience you’re having. Use the scripture, reflect and I think that’s one of the Ignatian method is to bring scripture to bear, to enter into that experience, to reflect of what Jesus is doing and saying and to allow that to transform that moment into something sacred and holy. I think that’s a timeless method that can be a source of grace for everyone and it takes something that is ordinarily a frustration for people and it turns it into something very positive, a positive experience of the presence of God. That’s really the challenge, it’s keeping that awareness of God’s presence through the day, remembering to lift up the work we do and offer it to God, remembering our intention that we’re working, we’re doing this ultimately for the greater glory of God, and Ignatius really does give us a way to do that. He gives us very practical advice in carrying that true full work base. So again, what ordinarily is a frustration becomes a very positive experience, what is ordinarily a distraction really becomes a path to God. It’s like suddenly the brush is cleared away and you can see this path through the forest and the sunlight shining on the other end.

Chris: So it sounds like this book would be a very good resource, for say, Parish offices where they’re having meetings as a good opener to meetings or just any type of small gatherings where you’d like to open with a prayer. It kind of could be a good starting point for reflection and those environments as well.

Fr. Kris: I would think it would be an excellent tool and resource to bring people together particularly those that are working in a church setting like you say that we’d have an opportunity to pray together. It’s brief, it invites people to integrate the scripture into their prayer and really to maybe talk a little bit that probably are concerns for everyone and they may again not be talking about it with each other but this would be an opportunity really to find a way to bring the light of faith and grace to that kind of experience.

Mike: Especially in church work there’s a certain unanimity. It works for that kind of group setting. Obviously, everyone there is Catholic. It’s a common thing and so Ignatius is part of our common heritage and he can really feed our souls as we’re beginning meetings and other…

Fr. Kris: There’s a section at the beginning of the book that talks about the overall spirit of Ignatian teaching and spirituality and there are a couple of characteristics that really we know but his two great mottos were to seek God in all things and really to the greater glory of God which is the motto of the Jesuits. Those two ideas really are I think the goal and the heart of what this book tries to lead people on the spiritual journey that we want people to be able above all that they’re doing and they’re worldly experience to seek God in all things, to see God, to come to an experience of God. And what we do, we’re doing really for God’s glory and we participate through our work even in the struggles with the building of the kingdom of God, so nothing we do really is insignificant and how we approach it, how we enter into that, how we allow God’s grace to be part of that is really the challenge of the spiritual life.

Chris: Now, do you have any other suggestions for those of us out in the workplace, on how to continue to bring ourselves around into greater holiness through the work that we do?

Mike: Well, one thing is, as Ignatius tried to do with many different people, both lay people and the people and its orders. Whenever they had professional complaints or they faced obstacles in their professional life, he tried to get them to see the spiritual roots of those problems, because often there were spiritual roots and then to address those with spiritual means and also material means but to find out what’s really behind it. For example, we might face problems with coworkers or with people we have to manage or with our managers and that root of it might be that we don’t speak our mind and so we have this resentment that builds up. Well Ignatius says that we can’t allow that to happen. We have to learn to make correction well when correction is needed. So we have to find the courage, and that’s a spiritual courage. It’s a spiritual work of mercy to correct when they’re in error and then we have to learn to take correction well. We have to have the necessary humility, the humility of a saint who can say, “I’ll take criticism, I’ll take correction because this is going to make me better.” It’s smart sometimes to face up to our critics and to acknowledge that there’s some truth in what they say but we have to learn to do it if we want to advance not only spiritually but also professionally. These are very important lessons for the workplace but also the spiritual roots. One thing that he kept coming back to whenever he wanted to advise his priests who working in the world is, he said that they had to learn to listen more than they talk. And of course, there’re spiritual roots to that. It’s a matter of humility; it’s a matter of respect for others. It’s a matter of seeing others as the image of God and as really mediators of God in our lives, but also it’s very practical. Really, any good management consultant is going to tell you the same thing, listen more than you talk and, gosh, right now I’ve been talking for a long time so I better start listening to Fr. Kris.

Chris: You know, it’s amazing how some of these spiritual leaders just happen to match up with what the management consultants tell you to.

Fr. Kris: There’s a chapter…

Chris: Makes you wonder where the management consultants got there.

Mike: They’re all Jesuit trained.

Fr. Kris: There’s a chapter in the book called work and continuous prayer but St. Ignatius says the time you devote to your work can really be a continuous prayer and that isn’t to say the great danger of our work is our prayer so we don’t have to pray. I think that the challenge of Ignatius was to see that, what we did as really an opportunity at how we do it and what comes across, our experience in the course of our work. So how we treat the people that we deal with everyday becomes an opportunity for grace, how we speak to them, how we handle problems, do we do it a Christ-like manner? Do we do it in a way that we seek to serve God? So that really becomes an opportunity for us to grow in holiness and faith as we look at our work and see how we do it, how we enter into it, how we deal with the people around us. I think those are the challenges of the spiritual journey.

Mike: Ignatius isn’t going to make our days less busy but he will make them more serene and that’s half the battle at least. He really told people that if they want peace and if they want happiness, they have to stop thinking about themselves all the time and their problems and all their obstacles and my frustrations. He said, “Once you start turning outward and you look to serve others, then you find happiness. If you’re trying to make life better for others rather than for yourself, you’re going to make life better for yourself.” There’s a strange paradox there, but it’s true. We learn that through experience that when we stop focusing on ourselves and our problems, we do become a lot happier. The Ignatian emphasis of service is so important for us to learn today because we live in a culture that many people describe as narcissistic, it’s focused on “Me, me, me” on the self and that’s something that just makes people miserable. They…

Fr. Kris: It’s interesting because Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict both have really said that one of the greatest obstacles in our modern society to growing in faith is the self-centeredness of people and the isolationism and that was…if there was one group of people Ignatius hated it was selfish people because someone that really was selfish was turned inward really wasn’t living out the great virtue of charity which was at the heart of prayer and the spiritual journey and being oriented outwards was always his stance of being a person that had a sense of connection to another that we would see the needs of others and be able to respond out of a sense of charity and love for others was at the heart of any real attempt to grow in prayer.

Mike: And because he himself had been a great sinner in his youth, he really urged people to be patient with others even when they were in error and even when they were these people of tremendous selfishness that they had to be patient and they had to find a gentle way to get those people to recognize their own fault. He did say that they had to correct people but he said always find a way so that, it says if the people are making the discovery themselves. And that’s an important thing for us to learn even today.

Chris: Well, Fr. Kris and Mike…

Fr. Kris: He is a father, that’s true.

Chris: He is a father, you’re right absolutely! Go Fr. Mike! Fr. Kris…

Fr. Kris: And a great one, I might add.

Chris: I would hope so, I would hope so. It’s been a great pleasure to have the two of you on the show today. Were there any closing remarks that you guys had for our listeners before we close this out?

Fr. Kris: I was just very grateful for the opportunity to be with you today and to share our thoughts. Our hope and prayer continues to be really that this will have in some small way help people to grow in their love for Christ and grow in their own faith so that they…together we can help to build up the body of Christ. The Catholic faith, I think, there’s just a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. We hope that people can really take their faith seriously and we can do great wonders in the world around us if we are courageous and we are committed to Christ.

Mike: Yeah, I hope a lot of your listeners will have an opportunity to take five with our Lord and every now and then, remember the authors and their prayer.

Chris: Oh, well that’s it, that’s a great idea! I don’t think anybody recently has asked for personal prayer, but hey, guys make sure to remember Mike and Fr. Kris in your prayers as well as all the other authors we’ve had on our show. And on that same note, please pray for our show so that we can help to continue to grow it and reach out and bring you these excellent interviews with these wonderful authors who are really reaching out and trying to bring about Christ’s presence in the world through their writings. Also please go on over, it’s the middle of the month now, so if you haven’t yet, please go over to Podcast Alley and vote for us this month. Help us to get up higher on their lists and get in front of more people with the show as well as leave us a review over on iTunes, that also helps to bring us up higher in the lists so that people will maybe even find us when they’re looking just the general Christian stuff and be brought in to the faith a little bit more.

Chris: Gentlemen, thank you so much and we look forward to hearing from you again sometime in the future.

Mike: Thank you Chris.

Fr. Kris: God bless! Thank you!

Chris: God bless!

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Transcript of Interview with Mike Aquilina and Fr. Kris Stubna about Take Five. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Take Five is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033259/Take-5–Job-Meditations-St-Ignatius/