Twelve Wicker Baskets Steier Group

The mission to teach is at the very heart of the Church; a mission she received from the Lord himself: “Go, therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19). At Hayden Catholic High School, where Shelly Buhler serves as President, fulfilling that divine mission is something integrated intentionally into everything they do.

Flowing from the school’s strategic planning process and an evaluation of its Catholic identity, the school’s administration and faith formation team meets weekly to strategize and to accept the challenge to go deeper and raise expectations. In their desire to articulate what the value of a Hayden Catholic education is and what culture is required to foster it, they began drafting an aspirational document called a “Portrait of a Hayden Graduate” to establish the characteristics that are the hallmark of the well-educated and well-formed individual. And because teachers must first possess what they hope to instill in the Hayden graduate, the school is working toward a similar “Portrait of a Hayden Teacher.” In this episode, Shelly discusses these portraits and how working toward them is both a challenge but also a profound blessing.

Students are taught to seek wisdom and are led to pursue the virtuous life, i.e., to develop the habits of choosing the good in order to achieve excellence in human behavior; virtues like magnanimity, self-motivation, integrity, time management, perseverance, and humility. Both students and teachers are encouraged to maintain a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world in which we live; an ordered and intelligible world that speaks to us of God revealed in the nature of things as they really are, and of the human person as he or she really is. The four hallmarks of the Hayden teacher is someone who seeks wisdom, pursues the virtuous life, is driven to love neighbor as self, and who lives with an eternal mindset. Practical virtues are also encouraged, such as to maintain a sense of humor, to steward resources well, and to operate from a mindset of abundance.

Hayden’s objective is to impart an education of the heart just as much as an education of the mind. The encounter with Christ alters one’s whole outlook and worldview, but it is also the most difficult to measure of all Hayden’s objectives. It is an aspirational hope that every student encounters and establishes a life-defining relationship with Jesus and Hayden does all it can to create the environment and culture designed to facilitate and nourish that encounter. God ultimately is the author of conversion but prayer, adoration, quiet, contemplation and discernment all help balance the technological, hectic, busy pace of life, enabling students and faculty alike to hear God in the heart, to hear vocation, to contemplate what is learned and to order it all to eternity. Graduates of Hayden ever since 1911 have contributed to their communities, lived lives of service, and have witnessed to the beauty of the Catholic faith. Hayden has every intention of carrying on that tradition in teaching the Catholic faith unabashedly, witnessing to the love of God in Jesus, pursuing virtue and excellence in all aspects of life, and in establishing the intellectual life.

Guest: Shelly Buhler
Title: President, Hayden Catholic High School
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As the great-granddaughter of John and Helena Raskob, and a lifelong member of the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities, Kerry grew up involved in philanthropic support of the ministries and good works of the Catholic Church throughout the world. It wasn’t until Father Bob Beloin, Catholic chaplain at Yale University, invited her to lead a capital campaign in support of the St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale, however, that she grew in her appreciation of fundraising. She recounts her experience of leading the campaign and all the lessons she learned thereby in her 2014 book, Imagining Abundance: Fundraising, Philanthropy and a Spiritual Call to Service, published by Liturgical Press. She began to experience a greater understanding of how fundraising can ennoble people to become a part of an important mission, thereby revealing that “philanthropy and fundraising are two sides of the same coin” and are “inter-related, necessary corollaries.”
Kerry’s involvement with fundraising also exposed her to “theological ambivalence about wealth,” causing some to regard money and financial administration to be a distraction from mission, if not an obstacle. Leadership Roundtable seeks to equip Catholic leaders, clergy and lay, with the resources to be trustworthy and competent in collaboration with and reliance upon the financial acumen and lived experience of lay leaders. Kerry notes that ordained and religious leaders at the head of important apostolates and ministries, can often carry out their work with a disposition mired in fear, thinking of fundraising as nothing more than asking friends for a personal favor. They can worry that they’re asking too much. But when grounded in mission, then inviting becomes a joy and excellence becomes the standard for the mission itself. 
Generosity is humankind’s birthright; we are all called to be generous and to serve as catalysts to inspire generosity in others, Kerry noted, helping them to give according to their philanthropic passion. The starting point of generosity is gratitude because, as Kerry learned from Henri Nouwen, once we realize that we are loved by God, we are moved by an immense gratitude to live a fruitful life of giving in return. Kerry reminds us that great leaders think in generations and decide today what matters, not allowing the vagaries of life to deter them from working toward that vision. Hearkening to St. Oscar Romero’s comment, “We are prophets of a future not our own,” Kerry understands both fundraisers and philanthropists to be such prophets when inspired, not by their own ends, but by the mission they serve.

Guest: Kerry Robinson
Title: Executive Director for Global & National Initiatives, Leadership Roundtable
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In this episode, Meg Hunter-Kilmer, author of Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered and Struggled On Their Way to Holiness, shares how she left her position as a high school theology teacher and set off to be an itinerant speaker, witnessing to the love of God, inspiring deeper faith, and sharing the universal attainability of sanctity by demonstrating how the saints in every age cooperated with grace. 
Meg heard the baptismal call of the Lord in Matthew 16:24 in a very personal and direct way: “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Calling herself a “hobo for Christ,” Meg has spent over a decade on the go to over 25 countries and all 50 states speaking from her heart about God. Charging nothing for her speaking events, she has relied upon God’s abundant providence in a radical way. One of her central messages is that the saints were not born saints. They are not “dull outlines of immaculate lives, saccharin, plaster images gazing vapidly heavenward,” as she had once imagined them to be. Thinking of saints like that makes becoming one impossible. No, saints “were real people, broken people made whole by grace, and that far from being [an] impossible standard…they offer nothing but hope.”

"Everybody’s got some element of their life that makes them think they’re ineligible for the love of God, or certainly ineligible for great holiness” Meg observed. But the diversity of saints, from varying backgrounds, cultures, ways of life, gifts and talents, shortcomings and sins, dismantles the notion that we are not the “stuff” of saints. “God is delighted with you exactly as you are,” she points out, “and he is working to make you a saint right now, not in spite of your circumstances, but in and through them.”

Wanting to tell stories and not just restate facts, Meg tells her audiences about the lives of saints from the human perspective. In this episode, she discusses four whose lives exemplified the heroic virtue of generosity and who understood their time, talent and treasure as gifts to be offered in stewardship: Ven. Pierre Toussaint, Ven. Satoko Kitahara, Bl. José Gregorio Hernández, St. Katharine Drexel.

Guest: Meg Hunter-Kilmer
Title: Author/Speaker
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In this first anniversary episode, a clip from each guest of the past year is woven together to provide a montage of collective wisdom, reflecting on the themes of God’s abundant and astounding generosity, personal relationship as the foundation for fundraising, the connection of discipleship and stewardship, to name a few.
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In this episode, Mother Mary Clare, Mother Superior and foundress of the Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus, along with Sister Annunciata, share how God has proven to be astoundingly generous to each of them in their own vocational journey, but also in the life of their community. Relying upon divine providence for all their material needs (the sisters have no income beyond free-will offerings), the Handmaids have experienced first-hand how God not only provides, but does so in abundance. 
The name of the community derives from the mystery of the Annunciation. Upon hearing the Lord’s invitation from the Archangel Gabriel, Mary embraced her unique vocation with the words, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done unto me as you say” (Luke 1:38). Seeking to live in imitation of Mary’s own fiat, the Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus is a community of Catholic religious sisters who serve as spiritual mothers in the diocesan life of the Church, being a stable presence in parishes in a manner complementary to diocesan priesthood.
Established in 2010, this relatively new religious community has grown to 36 sisters living in convents in the Diocese of New Ulm (the community’s mother house), the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, the Diocese of Duluth, and the Diocese of Bismarck. The sisters make it clear that their own vocation to be generous of heart stems from their relationship with the Lord, who has given us everything-including himself in reparation for sin. The stories shared in this episode are a good reminder of the Lord’s command, a command the Handmaids keep before them by relying upon God for everything:  “Without cost you have received, without cost you are to give” (Matthew 10:8). 

Guest: Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus
Titles: 
Mother Mary Clare - Mother Superior
Sister Annunciata – Administrative Assistant
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Father Jarrod was introduced to the stewardship as a way of life from childhood, calling it “the context for my Catholic formation.” Stewardship “became the lens through which we understood how to be a disciple of Jesus Christ,” recognizing that everything we have is a gift we have received. And once we recognize the giftedness we each possess, then we start recognizing the response. The stewardship way of life, which began at St. Francis of Assisi parish, gradually spread and eventually characterized the entire Diocese of Wichita.

Pastors are by necessity stewards, and stewards first and foremost of the mysteries of God (1 Corinthians 4:1) such that there is no such thing as a non-stewardship pastor. At the same time, the stewardship way of life has specific actions, attitudes, and articulations that produce an identity. Adopting this identifiable spirituality is what makes a pastor a “stewardship pastor.” Father Jarrod sums up the steward’s regula vitae as: “I participate, by gifts of time, talent and treasure in a grateful response, such that other people are able to benefit from my gift.” A stewardship parish and diocese will have this same rule of life. And the grateful response of gratitude is what leads us into the spirituality of stewardship since gratitude requires an Other to whom gratitude is due.

In the Old Testament, creation itself is a revelation that God’s very nature is Gift. Creation, therefore, calls us into relationship, into a life of exchange. The human person is created in God’s image and likeness, which means that he is created in the image and likeness of relation. Stewardship, then, is an exercise of our human dignity since it is all about a relationship of gratitude. In the New Testament, God’s nature of Gift is preeminently seen in the gift of his own Son, through whom our relationship to God, each other and creation is recapitulated and healed. The stewardship of life is opened further in the New Testament by the parables of the widow’s mite and of the talents. In 1 Peter 4:7-11, Fr. Jarrod notes, Saint Peter presents all four pillars of stewardship (hospitality, prayer, formation and service) all in the context of love. Living all four pillars of stewardship is to experience the joy of being fully human.

Every pastor knows that his parishioners are already stewards, Father Jarrod observes. Every parish has people who are naturally giving of their gifts, their time and their treasure. Father Jarrod recommends that if a pastor wants to move his parish towards a stewardship way of life, start where it’s already happening and then begin giving it structure.

Guest: Fr. Jarrod Lies
Title: Pastor, Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, Diocese of Wichita
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