Doing Stewardship by the Right Road

by Dan Masterton

I feel like many of us, at some point, have found solace in the Thomas Merton prayer about striving to do God’s will. To take one of his key points in shorthand, Merton asserts that (1) even if he’s following God’s will, it doesn’t mean he actually is and (2) either way, a faithful effort to do God’s will still pleases God.

Lately, this mindset reawakened in me as another spring has invited me back outside into the yard of my family home. As I bandy about different ideas for the bit of the earth that we steward, I feel a little torn. I have plenty of zeal and, a tribute to my kids’ love of playing outside, a good amount of time. On the other hand, I have almost zero pre-existing know-how – all I have is the four years of trial and error as a homeowner and a dependence on bread crumb trails of social media posts, tags on plants and seeds, and catching just the right tip from just the right person.

So, see if you catch my vibes here as Earth Day prompted me to recollect some of the stuff I’e been trying lately…

+ + +

I have a mail-order subscription with a regenerative agriculture company that ships us the ground beef we use for cooking. In the last shipment, they included a “milkweed mix” seed pack. They hope customers will join their efforts on their land to restore this plant, help the monarch butterfly population, and improve pollination.

I was all too happy to turn up some dirt in our vacant deck planter and get these seeds planted, which my trusty assistant, Cecilia, took charge of happily – a little ditch for planting, a cover-up and sprinkling, and some sun and watering steadily can help them grow!

But it turns out, they may have needed to be cold-stratified? Or maybe the temps in our region and the still-cold ground will take care of that? Not sure. We’ll see. Even if they don’t grow, we can move the planter’s contents to the ground and give them another winter to see again. For now, we wait…

+ + +

Ceci took a break from
backyard trike-riding
to come finish the mulch!

I wanted to plant a tree. Well, I wanted to avoid adding too many material things to my Christmas list. And I also wanted a tree to plant. So I asked for a tree. And my family got me a tree!

It’s really cute and tiny for now, like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. And it’s supposed to be a really good one for carbon capture and climate considerations.

But now that’s in the ground, the suspense is on. Will it grow well? Will it struggle? Did I plant it right? (I swear I read the instructions exactly.) Are we watering it enough? Are we not watering it enough? Is time, like hope, actually an illusion? We’ll see!

+ + +

And my coup de gras for this spring, I decided to step up our native plants game. I’ve done milk-jug planting for two years now, and our little native seeds have gotten nice winter jumpstarts in there! The next puzzle to solve is the low part of our yard where water pools badly after rains, to the point where the grass doesn’t grow and the ground muds out.

This year, I decided to throw down a few bucks – I ordered a pre-arranged rain garden of 32 little impeccably shipped 3-inch-potted-plants, and I followed their awesome chart to plant the garden. It’s meant to catch the rain through awesome root systems, help more with pollinators, and keep the water within our neighborhood to recharge our grounds. It was fun to dig and plant and tag and prep.

Prairie Nursery includes
an awesome two-sided guide,
laminated for the work-station,
to spacing your garden
and tracking size and bloom timing.

But then as soon as I finished, I’m looking more closely… Did I sink the plants far enough? They said full sun is needed, and even a slightly shady 6-hours-a-day spot should work – is this good enough? Should I go get fancier mulch types they talked about, even though they said dried lawn clippings work fine? Was it worth breaking my no-mow April to mulch this new garden? Are the neighborhood critters gonna destroy this? Can I find natural repellents that will keep these flowers living and growing but not hurt the animals that I’m trying to repel? Agh…

+ + +

On the whole, I feel good. I feel glad. I feel like I’m doing something with our little part-acre that is good for the earth, for the animals, for the climate. It comes from a place of practicality as well as a place of spirituality.

Yet I still have these creeping doubts. Is it a waste of money? Am I making tons of mistakes? Am I getting any better at caring for this land?

So what I come back to is this Merton maxim: I think my faithful effort to do something good is good in and of itself, and somehow pleasing to God. So I’ll try to seek and take feedback and guidance in stride, with good nature, and take my lumps when little stewardship projects go awry. Because, I hope and think and believe that, at the root of all this, is a very practical and spiritual desire to do God’s will by stewarding God’s Creation. And I know God will ultimately lead me down that right road.

Introducing my Third Story: Bigger than Ourselves

by Dan Masterton

Happy publication day, folks!

Go Your Way: Stories from Our Lives of Faith is now available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle eBook.

My collection of Catholic fiction stories includes What There Is to be Done, Abundance, not Scarcity, and a brand new story called Bigger Than Ourselves.

This new one is a little different. While the first two stories follow a single main character for the entirety of the way, Bigger than Ourselves is actually a collection of short stories. Each chapter centers on a new character, and the story builds in layers as you go, leading up to a major confluence as their paths overlap at the end.

The setting for all of this is St. Brendan Parish. And Chapter 1 is all about getting the lay of the land. 

Here's a preview of that story -- a reading of this first chapter into the audiobook podcast:

Enjoy! Happy reading! Prayerful reading.

To Gain a Way to Pray

by Dan Masterton

(To listen to this post, click this episode from my podcast feed.)

We have a lot of ways to pray.

We have Hail Mary’s, Our Father’s, and Glory Be’s. We have rosaries and chaplets. We have Mass and Adoration and Reconciliation. We have mantras and meditations and centering prayer. We have chant and sacred music and Taize Prayer. We have the Liturgy of the Hours and monastic Psalm cycles.

Some are familiar, maybe even boring, but they bring the words when we’re not sure what to do or say.

Some are favorites, the ones we relish and look forward to doing, whether to celebrate our joy or contextualize our struggles.

Some are dreaded, valued but still intimidating or daunting, perhaps not least on a Sunday morning after a long week and late Saturday night.

Some are confusing, maybe not quite ideal for our spiritual flavors and tastes.

Some are new.

And I didn’t realize this until I was in college, developing a faith out on my own. There are ways to pray that I didn’t even realize could be prayer.

I did a lot of running in college, and by running with good friends, I found how running could be a prayer. The physical action itself could be offered up to God. The time spent outdoors on the winding trails of our campus, around lakes, under trees, along lawns and gardens, was a way to be in God’s Creation. And the conversations we carried would often take on a spiritual tone as our physical movements uniquely fueled the movements of our hearts.

I also often met friends one-on-one for lunches or dinners. Even while plates and silverware clanged, even while countless other conversations echoed around us, even as dozens of fellow students came and went beside us, something oddly transcendent would happen. The choice to have a dialogue made a special space for the spirit, which catalyzed great faith-forward friendships. It became my staple for getting to know people, and it was the way I found my best friends (and discerned that one of them could and would be my partner for life).

What’s more, I came to find that reading could be a prayer.

As a first-semester freshman, involuntarily pressed into a great books seminar, I once fell asleep on my dorm bed with Plato’s The Republic sitting open on my face. That was not prayerful.

A year later, I was home on winter break, with a clear vocation to pastoral ministry, a declared major in Theology, and a gift card to Barnes and Noble burning a hole in my pocket as I walked the aisles. I stopped in the theology section and lingered for a long time – for the first time.

My eyes were drawn to the newly released Jesus of Nazareth, a bit of spiritual reflection in which a renowned theologian adjusted his approach a bit. Benedict XVI aka Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger made the choice to downshift a few gears from full-blown academia to more accessible reflections, albeit one with more training and experience than the rest of us.

I bought it and blitzed through it faster than anything I had read for required readings in my courses. Something about the way he meditated upon the person of Christ and Jesus’ actions in the Gospel claimed me and kept me close. When the second and third volumes came out, I got those and ripped through them quickly, too. As a senior, I had a chance to take a semester-long course on his theology and reread this same book. BXVI’s clear and profound understanding of the Kingdom of God became the framework for my senior honors thesis in Theology.

But before that moment, 20 years into life, 14 years into Catholic education, I don’t think I really thought that reading could be a prayer.

And that’s kind of silly.

I think I had imagined that reading the Bible or listening to Bible passages could be a prayer especially at Mass. But could reading some other nonfiction, or even just reading a fictional narrative be a prayer, too? It was a whole new world.

It led me to CS Lewis, especially The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters. It led me to Shusaku Endo, who we read for my World Christianity undergrad class, and his amazing works Deep River and Silence shook me to my core in the best ways. And it eventually even pushed me to bring my spirituality and my Catholic curiosity into other really enjoyable fiction, such as the interpersonal and mental health themes of Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People or the deep-space, cosmological, and macro-ontological questions of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.

For me, as someone who’s curious, as someone who wants to bring parts of me and my world into dialogue, someone who wants to identify tensions and search for resolutions and resonances, it is a deeply spiritually satisfying capacity to develop. But if it weren’t for the right moment and the right gateway to this world, I don’t know if I would ever have gotten there.

I think something has to happen at some point to bring your spirituality of prayer into the action of reading. And if Benedict XVI and Augustine and Aquinas intimidate you – heck, they still intimidate me a bit, too! – or if even the reputations of CS Lewis or Graham Greene give you pause, what about a low-key alternative? What about another author who doesn’t have their gravitas or pedigree or reputational weight?

What about me?

A few years ago, I got into fiction writing. Using some writing aids provided by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month - an annual November campaign), I worked out a fiction story, wrote it, edited it, and began to share. I repeated this process twice more. Each time, the story focuses on a Catholic person (or people) who is trying to discover God’s invitation and live it out in his or her life of faith.

The result is a collection of three right-sized stories that I’m calling Go Your Way.

The cover art is one of my Camino de Santiago shells
that I wore on my backpack while I walked the pilgrimage.

My hope and my goal is to bring spiritual reading to you. I want there to be accessible, plainly told stories that can draw you into the possibility that reading can be spiritual and can be a prayer. And rather than point you toward theological treatises or to wide-appeal self-help stuff at the big-box bookstore, I want to offer you relatable characters with relatable lives and relatable problems. I want to offer you nuance, reflection, and a grounded optimism. I can’t offer much by way of dime-store romance or shocking, thrilling, twists-and-turns drama. But I can offer you spiritual resonance and consolation, by way of Theresa, Noah, and the many folks of St. Brendan Parish.

And I think if you give it a shot, reading these stories can do some new things for you in your reading and in your prayer. With these stories in your hand, you can find a new avenue of prayer.

Go Your Way is available via Amazon as a paperback or Kindle eBook starting on Easter Monday (April 10). For more information, visit the Go Your Way page.

Happy reading! Prayerful reading!