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Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
https://www.fscenter.org/
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Welcome to the Franciscan Spirituality Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin's “What is Spirituality?” podcast. Your host, Steve Spilde, is the associate director at the center. His guests talk about the revolving understanding of God, prayer, healing and wholeness. So, tell me, who is Steve Spilde? I am married to wife Jeanette, father to a daughter, Sophia, and I grew up in a farm in
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North Dakota. After doing a couple different things, I ended up being a Lutheran pastor for a while, about 15 years, and then my wife and I adopted Sophia from China, got home from China and quickly discovered that she had some developmental delays. She has a diagnosis of autism, and we had to rearrange our lives to take care of her. So, I stayed home with her for a period of time as a stay-at-home dad, coordinating all of her various therapies, and I had to step away from parish ministry. During that time at home with my daughter, I learned a lot about myself. We ended up moving to La Crosse because of my wife's job and found my way to the spirituality center. I became a spiritual director and found my life's calling in that. I really enjoy meeting with people, hearing the story of their lives, and that's what I get to do and that is who I am. So when you spent that time at home with your daughter and you had all that time to think about things and you did some soul-searching and you found out who you were, did you like who you were? Probably not at first. I’m becoming to like who I am. I’m coming to like that person, but it’s been a journey. What did you find out most about yourself that you didn't know? My daughter. I thought that time at home was about teaching my daughter and helping her to become a good person, healthy person, a person who could function well when she grew up. The joke of it is I think she's taught me a lot more than I've ever taught her. So much of that time with her at home was really learning to accept her because when we first got the diagnosis and I was first at home with her as a father, we were doing lots of therapy and lots of different education, trying to help her overcome her autism. I think inside of me the goals was trying to stop her being autistic. But she can't do that, and so over time I started to realize that wow my daughter is fine. She's a really cool person. The challenge was I need to learn to accept her and learn what works for her. And the irony is I needed to learn those lessons for myself, so she really taught that to me. I’d spent my life up to that always trying to fit in with what other people said that I should be, who I was supposed to be, trying to hide my shortcomings and maybe exaggerate my gifts, and she really taught me some important lessons about self-acceptance. I think I like myself a lot better than I used to because I realize that hey the person I have to live with all the time is Steve, and if other people don't like that, that's their problem. I had to learn that to get along with her and she continues to teach that back to myself. What drew you to work for the Franciscan Spirituality Center. So, when I first left, technically they call that a leave from call so I was a pastor I had to take a break from that. So I went on leave from call and I thought that was going to be short time, just a year or two. I thought we’d do a lot of therapy was Sophia we would heal her of autism and off we would go. It sounds kind of silly and naïve to say that now, but I think honestly that's what I believed. So, I thought you being at home with her would be kind of a short-term thing, but I have a lot of time. The part that I missed most about being a pastor in the parish was meeting with people one-on-one. People would say, Pastor, I need to talk. I'm having trouble on my marriage or I’m having trouble with my kids. I don't like my job or whatever and they would schedule the appointment and we would sit and talk and I would listen to them and then at the end of that meeting, I would offer suggestions I would know, kinda try to be of help and that always felt really good to me and that's the piece they really missed about being in the parish and so I kinda thought that's what spiritual directors did and when I start thinking about wow maybe I could use this time to do training to become a spiritual director. Maybe that's something I could do once I go back into the parish. Once I started doing the training, got to know that the spirituality center and discovered that there was maybe a spot for me to get involved there after I graduated from the spiritual direction preparation program. I joined the staff as a spiritual director and that's where I’ve been for the last seven to eight years.
So, what does the word “spirituality” mean to you, Steve? Spirituality: In an earlier stage in my life, I would've said that religion and spirituality are synonymous and if they're not synonymous, then the spirituality is wrong or even dangerous. But now I understand religion to be a subset of spirituality. Spirituality is about connection and wholeness. Spirituality, in my mind, is the connection between ourselves and forces bigger than ourselves. The connection between ourselves and what we understand as God or spirit or the universe. Spirituality is about our connection between our ourselves and nature. It is about the connection between ourselves and the people around us. We are not isolated in this world. We are part of a whole that's bigger than ourselves. “We” is bigger than “me.” Spirituality is about wholeness within ourselves, connecting the various parts of ourselves: our mind, body and our spirit, our emotions. When we bring all those together, that's an important part of spirituality. You mentioned the word isolation when you just answered that and nowadays we’re all kind of in isolation and our self-imposed isolation with the pandemic that's out there and we’re supposed to shelter in place and all that. How has the time of pandemic changed your understanding, or maybe helped your understanding of spirituality and how people deal with being alone and things like that? I think my time at home as a father with an autistic child really prepared me for the pandemic because I was at home with my daughter starting at about 18 months, and my daughter didn't really start speaking until she was 4. It wasn't clear that she would ever speak, so there was a lot of silence and isolation during that two- to three-year period, early on, and so I had to do a lot of that work of just getting to know myself, living with myself in silence. I think that's what a lot of people are going through right now during the pandemic. So many people have just been so busy with day-to-day life. They just haven't had time to look at the deeper questions like: Who am I? What do I want? What am I doing? Is this what I want to be doing? They haven't had time to listen to their emotions, they’ve oftentimes not listened to their bodies; they’ve ignored their bodies. Pretty much all the things that we've neglected really come up during this time of silence and isolation, and so that’s some of the struggles that people are having. And that's really what spirituality seeks to do, is to address that, to bring all that isolation into connection. Like the connection between people. People who are living together, whatever issues that have been there between them, is pretty hard to ignore right now because people are spending so much time with each other and there’s really no place to hide. They have to work it out. I think that's a part of spirituality as well, working out things that are broken, things that need healing. Do you think we’ll get back to a non-broken society? Our society's been broken your whole life, my whole life, all of our time in society as a whole has been fragmented and broken the entire time, but do you think that once we all get back together, do you think we’ll also be sitting around the fireplace singing “Kumbaya”? I hope that things will change and they will change for the better. I don't think it's going to be an overnight fix, but I also believe that many times in life, once we see something, we can't un-see it. Once we notice something you know we can't un-see that and so you know for example if people were ignoring their bodies and really letting themselves go to pot. And really, during this time start to say you know what I got take better care of myself. They start the exercise, they start to, first, it's kind of painful, whatever. But once they start to recognize, you know actually do feel better when I've paid attention to my body, that sort of thing I think that'll it's gonna be hard to un-see that on the other side. Likewise, if they this time repair some relationships, I think those relationships will stay repaired on the other side. The whole idea that we need each other is one of the things that has really encouraged me about this time is way has brought the world together what's happening in Italy really matters to what's happening here. What happened in China really matters to what here; in that regard, we’re all on the same team. I think I hope on the other side of this, we really do see each other differently. Are religion and spirituality. The same thing Steve. I think that religion is the way we practice spirituality or another way of putting that religion is how we as a group back to spiritualized and agreed-upon way that as a group we practice spirituality spirituality is kind of a personal thing, how I connect with God, how I connect with nature. Religion is basically a group of people kind of agree on certain ways that they practice to spirituality certain beliefs that they hold in common. My own understanding. It's a subset. So is it different or weird to be working for a Catholic institution as a Lutheran pastor. No, couple of reasons why. First of all, as Lutheran
3 years ago
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