In the Gospel, Jesus fed 5,000 with only five loaves and two fish. After the crowd was satisfied, there were 12 wicker baskets left over. God provides the abundance. In each episode of this podcast, we will explore, with pastoral leaders and development professionals, all the many ways God meets the spiritual and temporal needs of our parish communities, our Catholic schools and the diocesan church. And not only meets those needs but provides in abundance.
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THE LATEST EPISODE
EPISODE 14: Generous Disciples: What the Saints Teach Us About Stewardship
Meg Hunter-Kilmer, author
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
ABOUT THE HOST, CHRISTOPHER BEAUDET
President of Diocesan Services for the Steier Group
Twelve Wicker Baskets host Christopher Beaudet hails from Massena, New York. He obtained a B.A. in History and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame; a Master of Divinity and an M.A. in Dogmatic Theology from the University of Saint Thomas (Saint Paul, MN); a License (J.C.L.) and Doctorate in Canon Law (J.C.D.) from the Catholic University of America; and an M.A. in History from Boston College. Previously, Christopher served as Vice Rector for Administration at the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity of the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Chiefly responsible for engaging the hierarchy and diocesan leaders across the United States and Canada to address fundraising needs, Christopher gains familiarity with the unique pastoral context of each diocesan Church, assists in identifying and defining their funding needs, and then orchestrates the Steier Group’s design and implementation of planning studies and capital campaigns to address them.
