6/17/2010 6:43:00 PM
One Jesuit's wisdom: 'Expect the unexpected'
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Catholic News Service
There’s a sense of adventure deep in Father Tom Lankenau.
The 51-year-old Jesuit priest grew up hunting and fishing. He taught riflery, hiked, climbed and rafted.
As a Jesuit, he has served on the Blackfeet Reservation of Montana, in Belize, Bolivia, Poland and Zambia.
He walks in the cowboy way, slightly bow-legged, and is not afraid to expectorate when outdoors.
But since 2007, Father Lankenau’s service to the Jesuits and to the church has been carried out in a plain office in Southeast Portland. He is the Oregon Province of Jesuits’ socius — an aide, adviser and consultant to the provincial superior. It’s a job of details and he’s taken it on joyfully.
Accepting the post was the continuation of a conversion that began decades ago. The defining characteristic of this priest’s metanoia is openness.
He is a natural administrator who processes data efficiently. On one recent day at the Jesuit offices, he spoke with clerical volunteer Joyceann Hagen clearly, crisply and kindly. He then ambled to an appointment where he gave absolute attention to an interlocutor for more than an hour. Following that, he gave a tour of the grounds, cheerful and unruffled all the while, despite pressing duties.
“It’s a job of service,” Father Lankenau says. “There is fulfillment in that. If I can help Jesuits in the field do their jobs more and more fully, I am a part of what they do.”
Raised in Denver, he attended Catholic grade school and high school, aware of the Jesuits only because rival Regis High destroyed his school’s football team each fall. He earned a degree in wildlife biology at Colorado State University.
He weathered a brief period of unemployment in the 1980s, an experience that taught him that it’s possible, and even beneficial, to survive failure. He later directed a wildlife organization, helped conservation and hunting groups raise funds and sat on many boards. For a time, he was a resident of the nation’s capital, driving around that urbane city in a pickup truck with his dog and girlfriend.
After a 1987 move to Lewiston, Idaho, while on a walk along the riverbank, he sensed a clear message: “Go back to church.” He joined the local parish and before long was acting youth minister and pastoral council president.
In 1993, he led a delegation to World Youth Day in Denver. He went because he thought he could be helpful, not necessarily to see Pope John Paul or have a spiritual experience. That changed as the papal helicopter floated out of the sky and landed at Mile High Stadium and the white-clad pope stepped out to tell the teeming international crowd that the church needed their youth and enthusiasm to serve God.
“I couldn’t get it out of my head that God was calling me to do something different,” Father Lankenau recalls.
He returned to Idaho and began researching religious communities, about which he knew little. Even before he chose, he sold his house and his belongings, even his camping gear, guns and dog.
“I was ready,” he says.
About that time, the Jesuit vocations office phoned to follow up. He could see himself as part of that 500-year-old society of men, using whatever talents they had for the greater glory of God. He entered the novitiate in 1995 at age 36.
In the Jesuit way, he is highly educated but no egghead. He earned a teaching certificate in conservation education at Gonzaga University, then studied Christianity and modern culture at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif., writing a thesis on the salmon crisis in the Northwest.
He has taught biology and led campus ministry at high schools run by the Jesuits. Among his fondest memories are two years spent teaching at St. Andrew Nativity, a middle school in Northeast Portland.
Now, his run as socius is up and he’ll return to the faculty of Gonzaga Prep in Spokane.
“We have our own plans and it’s OK to have those but we also need to expect the unexpected and be full of joy,” he says.
The priest eschews the old bromide about Jesuits being Renaissance men. But he is one.
He’s a trained biologist who has thought and spoken about the relationship between faith and science. “Science and religion are both quests for truth,” he says. He tells students that science cannot capture the entirety of matters. To think so is like describing a Michelangelo painting by the weight of the canvas and chemical makeup of the pigment. It takes something like religion to offer meaning, he insists.
Father Lankenau is a wordsmith, having been a correspondent for the National Jesuit News.
He’s a photographer, too. On the walls of his office are images he has captured, including an old Belizian man playing a home-made guitar and an amused student from St. Andrew Nativity School with a painted face.
He has not hunted since he entered the Jesuits, but he does birdwatch. He’s identified more than 50 different species at the community’s seven-acre property north of Powell Boulevard.
On top of it all, he has been a vocations director.
Versed in the teaching of the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, he urges young people to make decisions based not only on utilitarian needs, but on what is in the depths of the heart.
“I’ve never looked back,” he says of his own choice.
He cherishes his priesthood for the way it bonds him with people. “Not having a family of my own has allowed me to love so many different people in so many different ways,” he explains.
And the more he has given away, the more free he has felt.
“Now I own nothing,” he says with a grin and shrug.
Father Lankenau relishes weekend work at parishes, traveling to spots like Arch Cape and Albany. He covers for Jesuits on the Washington coast and in Alaska. In his homilies, he tries to bring messages of joy and hope.
During his current administrative stint, Father Lankenau has kept himself sane by digging up large plots of grass on the Jesuit administrative grounds and creating gardens for flowers and vegetables. The harvest is coming in now. He often sits in an Adirondack chair beside his small farm, puffing a cigar, admiring bees and praying to the God that set it all going.
“He’s got a very nice way about him,” says Father Jack Morris, a Jesuit for 60 years. “His garden is his way of praying. It’s something that he loves.”
“Tom Lankenau has been very generous to leave the classroom and become the executive assistant to the provincial,” says Jesuit Father Jack Bentz, a novitiate classmate.
“The job requires him to remain very open, upbeat, and keep looking for service of God even in a pile of paperwork.”
Among Father Lankenau’s Jesuit brothers are astrophysicists, veterans of war, artists, physicians and businessmen. Still alive are Italian Jesuits who hid Jews from the Nazis and men who almost went hungry during hard times at the Oregon novitiate in the 1940s.
They are conservative and liberal and everything in between.
But, Father Lankenau says proudly, all aspire to serve God, wherever that takes them.
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