On this episode of the Catholic Leaders Podcast, we welcome Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics and founder of the Dignity Index. Through personal experience, he and his family learned a priceless lesson about unconditional love that shaped his life and work. He joins hosts Kim Smolik and Kerry Robinson to share his inspiring story of faith, leadership and service with our listeners. Plus, discover how Catholic Charities of the Diocese of St. Augustine has been changing lives with Camp I Am Special for over 40 years.
To grow up in Tim Shriver’s family — populated by senators, ambassadors, best-selling authors, illustrious awardees, a president — one was constantly measured by how fast, how smart, how successful. But through personal experience with his Aunt Rosemary, who had an intellectual disability, Tim and his family gained a priceless lesson in human dignity and unconditional love. “You have to be able to see the dignity in another person, but you can't see that dignity in another person with your head. You have to see it with your heart.”
Join hosts Kim Smolik and Kerry Robinson as they welcome Tim to share his inspiring story of faith, leadership and service with our listeners, including:
Special Spotlight: New this season, we highlight a Catholic Charities leader whose work champions a theme of our episode. Anita Hassell, who leads Catholic Charities of the Diocese of St. Augustine, shares the inspiring program, Camp I Am Special, which has brought a joyful summer camp experience to those with intellectual and developmental disabilities in northeast Florida for more than forty years.
Chairman, Special Olympics | Chairman, UNITE | Chairman, CASEL | Best-Selling Author
Tim Shriver is a husband, father, grandfather, educator, and social entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to advancing human dignity. As Chairman of Special Olympics, he drove the largest expansion in its history—growing the movement from one million athletes to over six million athletes in more than 170 countries around the world.
After passing the CEO torch, Tim co-founded UNITE and pioneered the Dignity Index—a groundbreaking tool to help Americans disagree without demonizing each other. Before joining Special Olympics in 1996, Shriver co-founded and currently chairs the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the leading school reform organization in the field of social and emotional learning.
Education: B.A. from Yale University | M.A. from Catholic University | Ed.D. from University of Connecticut
Books: Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most (NYT Bestseller) | Co-editor of The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening
Films: Executive producer of Amistad, The Loretta Claiborne Story, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Front of the Class, The Ringer and more films that spread hope and connection across differences.
Connect with Tim: LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram
More Resources
CEO, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of St. Augustine
Anita Hassell brings over 30 years of nonprofit leadership experience to her role as CEO, where she has served for the past decade in progressively senior positions. Her career spans program development, human resources, fiscal management, strategic planning and accreditation oversight.
Before moving to Fernandina Beach in 2006, Anita served as Executive Director of Deaf Services Bureau, Inc. in Dade County and spent 10 years at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, ultimately overseeing a division with an annual budget exceeding $13 million.
Education: M.S.W. (Social Work) | M.B.A. (Business Administration)
Credentials: Peer Reviewer, Council on Accreditation
Connect with Anita: LinkedIn
More Resources
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Kerry Alys Robinson (KAR)
Welcome to the Catholic Leaders Podcast, where we sit down with inspirational leaders to explore how their Catholic faith informs their leadership. I'm Kerry Robinson —
Kim Smolik (KS)
— and I'm Kim Smolik. We are thrilled to be back and we are excited to share these conversations with you in season three, conversations with Catholic leaders who have enriching and diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and who offer lessons for all of us on living and leading with our faith.
KAR
Kim, it is so exciting to be back together with you co-hosting the Catholic Leaders podcast and releasing season three. Can you believe it? Just wonderful. I'm so excited that we have an extraordinary lineup of deep, deep thinkers and people of faith whose leadership is so inspiring.
Our listeners are in for such a treat this season. We get to begin with a riveting conversation with Tim Shriver that I have just been pondering all of these these days, since we met with him, and I love that this season we are trying something new, which is at the end of every interview. We are going to spotlight one leader from the Catholic Charities Network, whose ministry aligns with some of the themes that are featured guest has illuminated that should be really a treat for people as well. So, Kim, you're you're joining us from Minnesota. How are you doing?
KS
Kerry, it is so good to be with you. And it is a bright light for me, in the midst of a really challenging time that we're facing in Minnesota right now.
And this conversation with Tim really highlights some of the things that are sustaining me and many of us here and guiding us in the work that we have to do to be neighbor to each other, to follow the gospel call to love one another unconditionally, and to stand together with each other. I'm so grateful for leaders who point us toward love.
I was just at a gathering to honor Martin Luther King Day, and a community leader spoke about what sustains us during times of difficulty. And the interviewer said, we need a lot of discipline to move forward together. And he said, yes, discipline is important but our strength and our sustenance comes from loving one another and loving the stranger.
KAR
So beautiful. In our conversation with Tim, I was really struck by this undercurrent of love, both when he is, of course, talking about Special Olympics and his long, rich history and engagement with Special Olympics, and with the wonderful athletes from all over the world, but also more recently in his work promoting dignity and overcoming contempt.
You know, he names contempt in our society, in our culture and how corrosive it is and how the antidote is, as you just said, so beautifully, this drawing from the deep reservoir of love.
KS
And I particularly appreciated the story he shared, which is personal to his family, about his Aunt Rosemary and how it's through the relationship with his Aunt Rosemary, who had a disability, the family really learned what it meant to love unconditionally, to recognize the human dignity in every person. And from that flow this incredible service to the world, the Special Olympics. And so, from his own personal experience, his family's personal experience, they drew on that and then thought about, how can we be of service to the wider community and to the world?
KAR
We were so fortunate to have this conversation with Tim Shriver, and I cannot underscore how wonderful it is to be back in your company. Kim, I'm very excited for this season, and I think our listeners are in for such a treat when they hear Tim's wisdom.
KS
Tim Shriver is a husband, father, educator, bestselling author, chairman of the Special Olympics, chairman of unite, and CEO of Bigger Picture Media. As chairman of Special Olympics, he has driven the largest expansion of the organization in its history, growing the movement from 1 million athletes to over 6 million athletes in 193 countries around the world, is chairman of the nonprofit unite.
He has helped to pioneer the Dignity Index, a new tool to help Americans disagree without demonizing one another. In all of his work, Tim models and inspires us to practice civility and lifting up the dignity of every human being.
KAR
Tim, we are so delighted that you are with us on our podcast. Welcome and thank you for being here.
Tim Shriver (TS)
Thank you, Kerry. Thank you for having me. And thank you for including me in your leadership work and, and, the work of Catholic Charities, which is a beacon of hope to so many millions of people who benefit from charities, but also a beacon of hope for people who can see the gospel at work in you and in all the people you support and all the people you work with. So thank you.
KAR
Well, we want to begin just with a little bit of a biographical insight into your family and how your family has formed the person you are. And of course, you can talk about your extended family, but I'm hoping you will also speak about the family that you and your wonderful wife, Linda, have created, your five great kids. And if I could persuade you to speak a little bit about New Haven, Connecticut, which we have in common.
TS
We do, and I was just there. I'm headed there tomorrow. So. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I could, obviously as a — I'm, I'm old enough that I could go on and on about my family, but the short version is I, you know, I grew up in a family of five. I'm the middle kid, 28, 29 cousins, lots of uncles and aunts. Most of the work and activity in my house growing up was competitive, vigorous, ambitious, fun, oriented towards what we thought of as the work of social justice, the work of the gospel, I would even dare say, in my house. My mom was very devoted to her faith tradition. The day she died, I counted in her bedroom. There were, I think, 34 images, cards or representations of the Blessed Mother, in all sorts, pasted on walls and hanging from walls and on bureaus and so on. My dad, too, was grew up in a kind of, early 20th century apologetic-ly oriented Catholic family in Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore Catechism — you know, he memorized as a kid, and forced me, at least through the first couple of questions, to memorize. So the work in, in my house was, as I say, vigorous. We played lots of sports, and winners were better than losers. And the dinner table was a place in which you had to answer for your score, so to speak in life.
But the bright side of that was that the orientation was really towards my mom, you know, founding the Special Olympics, really in my backyard, started camps for kids with special needs when they were all institutionalized and no one, no one claimed to have ever even seen a person with an intellectual disability, much less gone swimming with a person or run a race or ridden a pony, or played on a team.
So she was very active in bringing her faith to life through that work. My dad, you know, Peace Corps, traveling around the world trying to bring peace to the world. I mean, it sounds quixotic and maybe even naive in retrospect, but he was serious. Dead serious that the work of peace could only be done eye to eye, heart to heart, face to face.
So those were the big influences in my life. Not to mention my older brother and sister and my younger brothers, and all of whom have done extraordinary work in their own ways over the last 50 or 60 or 70 years, almost. I started my professional life in New Haven. You asked me about New Haven. I went to college there, and as part of my college training, I decided to become a teacher because I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer and I didn't think politics was the right path for me. But all of a sudden, it seemed like, well, teaching, that's something I could learn how to do. I stayed in New Haven for 15 years after I graduated, working in the New Haven public schools and really struggling with the issues around, you know, poverty, racism, under-resourced communities and schools and public-health institutions and so on.
And it was an extraordinarily powerful experience for me to be so close and so intimate and working with young people, learning from young people, being challenged, and changed by people who come from experiences that seemed so different from my own, with their own vision of what social justice looked like or what justice itself looked like that was foreign to me. It was much more based on trust, relationship. I was thinking, you know, economic growth or, you know, getting education. They were thinking, get someone who believes in you, be decent, be open, be real. Geez, I didn't know what the heck that was. So that was a great experience. But I got married, and with my wife, Linda, and I moved back to New Haven, after we got married, we had four of our five children in New Haven, and our fifth here in Washington, DC, where we live now.
And they're all grown-up. They're doing all kinds of wonderful things in their own right. Our youngest daughter just moved back home, just as an example, for a month because she's assistant choreographer of Fiddler on the Roof that's being shown here at Signature Theater here in Washington, DC. So, you know, and you talk about a faith-based story. Wow. You know, I know Fiddler, but I'm learning it again through the eyes of my daughter, who's working on the nuances of music and movement and so on, and just grappling again with this story of a family trying to hold on to their traditions. Why? Because that's the only way they make sense of life through the holy book, through the tradition, through the patterns. And losing those things, what it feels like to lose those things in the midst of change and discrimination. It's a very contemporary story.
Anyway. That's a long answer to a short question.
KS
Beautiful. Tim. It's so wonderful to hear how your upbringing has continued into your adult life in your commitments, particularly, I think almost 30 years you've been in service to the Special Olympics. Is that right?
TS
Yep, more actually. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but it is more, but. Yeah.
KS
Wow. Well, I mean, I think you've described it as one of the most formative experiences of your life. And I had, the opportunity to watch you give a presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and you told this beautiful story of an athlete who was standing on the winner stand, and you showed a photo of her, and I think she was in — not like first, second, third, fourth — but like seventh place.
And she was standing with so much uprightness and calm and radiance and joy. And I think you called the image, an image of interior freedom. And so it feels so connected to what I think the Special Olympics shows us and has revealed to us, the joy and the dignity and the worth of people aren't measured by our accomplishments.
They're measured by our presence and what we carry inside of us and just who we are, just by being who we are. So we just love to hear about this extremely formative part of your life. How has your life with athletes, and your relationships with them, as you describe relationships as being so core, informed your understanding of this interior freedom and how are you in your work bringing that to others?
TS
So first of all, I would just quote you back. It's just such the most beautiful introduction ever. Look, the Special Olympics movement, you know, there's almost 5 million athletes who participate every year in 180 countries around the world, 50,000 games a year, right? 99% of the workforce is volunteers. And people can be forgiven for thinking, it looks, almost obviously, like a track meet or a swimming race or, you know, a soccer game or a ski race. It's so much more, the movement. You know, if I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times from a volunteer. You know, the Special Olympics changed me, gave more to me than I gave.
And you hear this, too, I think, probably in your work and in what we call charity. Oh, I'm so happy, you gave me the chance to do something I couldn't — it meant more to me than whatever I meant to someone else. And I started to really think a lot about that. What do you actually get back?
So, you know, I started asking people a lot that question. And people say, well, you know, the first answer is, well, you know, I got to be able to see other people happy. And I was like, yeah, but you said you got something. And then the second question answer is usually, well, I got to be next to people who are happy.
And I said, okay, well that's the surroundings. But you said you got something and then you get a deep breath. And people imagine themselves looking at that image, looking at that 12 year-old with Down Syndrome running 100 meters. And getting to see her charged down that track and people become — look at that, I'm getting emotional now just remembering the image. Because it's so liberating, because we’re carrying so much baggage, so much judgment. Even when we say we're not, we are. And we're so used to thinking of that little girl as lesser and God forbid, you know, people say, oh, there, but for the grace of God go I, thank God this didn't happen to me.
Think of all the all the pain that that's holding in people, all the fear. Thank God; God has spared me this pain, this horror, this sadness. And then this girl throws her arms up in the air. The image you have there, she's in seventh place and she's like, I don't know what you're afraid of. Because, you know, I'm not afraid of being me. I'm not afraid of saying, in seventh place, I gave everything to it. I'm not afraid of that.
And you're sitting in the stands and, you know, there's 12 people, and it's a Saturday morning and a high school track meet. And you're thinking to myself, yourself, where the heck am I, you know? What world is this, where everybody rejoices in the gift that everybody brings. It's like, holy moly.
So that's what I think people get back. They get freed somehow from the pain of judgment and fear. You know, we all know that the most common words in our scriptural tradition is, be not afraid, right? I kind of feel like that's what the Special Olympics movement taught me. It's like, you know, we're not, you know — everybody might say, well, you're so kind to help these people. I mean, are you kidding me?
I think that these athletes all over the world, in their races, in their words, in their leadership, they just keep reminding me, oh, my God, have so far to go to learn what it means to not be afraid, to be free to be myself. Imagine living like that. So, you know, I often say, my Aunt Rosemary, you had an intellectual disability, she had a brother who was the president. She had two brothers who were senators. They wrote books. They won prizes. They ascended to the highest levels of power, sisters who did similar work and ambassadors and so on. Rosemary never gave a speech, never wrote a book. Never won an award. Never starred at the dining room table, never sat down at the end of the day and said, I won.
But I think she made a bigger difference than all of her brothers and sisters combined. Because she held that space for her family. She held the space that God's gift to us is unconditional. Here I am. I don't need any of that to be a child or a daughter, in that case, of God.
So that's a pretty powerful set of challenges. So you can see … why the guy stayed in it for 30 years. He has a lot to learn. And, and that's part of what, that's part of the journey of being in a movement like this. It's continually upending the hierarchies and the fear-based judgments of life, continually. It's like practice.
You know, we Catholics say you should go to mass once a week or some crazy people like me, almost every day, and I should say the rosary, you know, the old tradition, you say the rosary every day or at least once a week, or, you know, you'd say your prayers in the morning. But the reason for that is because you have to practice. You don't learn about Jesus or about the resurrection and then get it. It's not an idea. You have to practice.
So I practice. You know, the Special Olympics movement has been a practice for me of continually trying to deepen my capacity to be open to the goodness of God in every human being.
KAR
So beautiful, Tim. When you describe that stadium filled with people cheering for everyone, all of the athletes, the image that came to my mind was heaven. This is what heaven must be like. Just so much joy and connection, you know, human connection, that we all belong. And, the contrast to that you also speak about, and you speak about a culture that is lacking in human dignity. A culture of contempt is how you reference it and you argue that we're all complicit in it, even when we're unaware of our complicity.
And that seems to be in stark contrast to this image of the stadium where everybody is cheering for everyone. Can you talk a little bit about the culture of contempt, about UNITE and the Dignity Index, which you have brought to the world?
TS
Yeah, well, it's beautiful that you start that by saying, Kerry, that this is what heaven must be like, you know, imagine, you know, I don't know, we all have jokes about Saint Peter and you get to the pearly gates — and there's a hundred jokes about the Jesuits aren't going to get in and all that kind of stuff.
KAR
Remember, you're on Georgetown's campus right now.
TS
I know, I know, Jesuits, they understand.
But the — you know, in a way, I agree with you that maybe, maybe that is what it feels like to get to heaven. You kind of walk into the stadium and there's a hundred thousand people cheering for you. Hey, you made it. Kerry, yay, welcome Tim, you know, yay, you know, here you are. But I actually think that's what we are supposed to be doing here. If the kingdom of God is here, is among us, is within us. I think we're supposed to try at least to create that experience here. With God's grace, through and because of God's mercy and all those things. But I think that's kind of the mission. Let's make that happen here. So if it's not happening here, we have to kind of be honest with ourselves. We're now at a time in our country, and maybe in many parts of the world where it's not just that we're not there yet, it's that we're actually cheering the opposite.
We cheer when you humble humiliate another person, we cheer when you demean another. We post, we retweet. Your tweet, if you really zing the other side, hooray! Good for you, Kerry. You really gave it to him. Look at this one. Look at this one, guys. She really got him. Look at that. And then everybody says, yay for our team. Bad for their team. We got them again. And most of that culture has very little to do with what everybody says — they start with policy. Most of it just has to do with I think we've all become a little trapped by the idea that to humiliate someone else is to be successful, and to be popular. And, you know, the gospel has a lot of texts about the cost of joining the group at the expense of your soul.
So, you know what, I, six years ago, I left my full-time work at Special Olympics to try to take the message of the movement and try to bring it to our culture so that people would see it, maybe without the filtering of it through, “oh, that’s a charity.” Maybe they'd see it more clearly.
So we started working around this concept that I learned from those athletes. Everybody has dignity. That's the first. That's the starting point. Your kid who's on her way to Harvard or medical school or whatever, becoming an engineer or, you know, whatever, has no more dignity than a person who is nonverbal and none, not even an inch more dignity.
Right? So if that's true, if everybody has it, if it's a gift, not an earned credential, then wouldn't that awaken us to thinking about, well, maybe my goal shouldn't be to destroy or humiliate or, you know, if if everyone through the eyes of God has dignity, even people that have committed serious crimes or are violating moral principles, maybe there's a way to unlock the goodness and justice in each of us by treating them with dignity as opposed to by treating them with contempt. Contempt, very simply, is, “I'm better than you.”
And most of our political conversations today are either tinted with contempt, or fully immersed in it. “We are better than the other side.” “Those people are the problem.” So we built a scale, Kerry. We built an actual tool you can score. How much contempt is in your speech? Or, how much dignity is in your speech?
And we spent two years working on it. We normed it and validated it and created an inter-rater reliability score so that if you are very conservative or very liberal and you used this scale and judged President Biden or President Trump or your senator or congressman or your husband or wife, you could be objective. You could say, honey, that was a three.
Not because you're mad at honey, but because it was a three. It objectively is a three. So we built this scale thinking it would help us get politicians to pay attention. But what it actually has turned out to be — so you can see this at the Dignity Index or dignityindex.us —our dot is not com or org, it's us. It’s us.
So, dignityindex.us, you'll see the scale there, and when we started teaching people the scale, we thought it would turn out to be a great tool for judging people. Other people. But what people actually became interested in what we call the mirror effect, they got really interested in what it meant for them. So almost like, I taught this a little while ago to a group of college students, and halfway through — I was doing the overview of the dignity [index] — halfway through it, a young woman raised her hand. She said, you know, yesterday I posted on my, I guess, on Facebook, you know, that this such and such a person was, a Republican, and then she had a bunch of expletives and that she was cutting off her — she says, I'm going to go take it down. I'm going to go take it down.
So there's, there's almost a way in which, you know, the contempt that we have operates in disguise. We think we're being self-righteous by really zinging the other side. If I can just really humiliate them, that's righteousness. But when we see it as contempt, it's like, that's kind of, that's gross. You know, I don't want to be that. So when you reveal the disguise and, again, our scriptural traditions, when you think of it, have a lot about this, that that contempt operates in disguise. But when you see it in yourself, it becomes a little harder to use it. We like to say contempt is hard to see when you use it, but it's hard to use once you see it.
KAR
Yes.
TS
And that's our hope, that we can awaken, you know, just in the beginning, small, maybe, subcultures. We're working with school systems. We're working with businesses that want dignity to be at the core of how they treat their employees and their supervisors, their managers, their senior leaders. And some people are using it in business. People on higher education campuses are looking at this as a way to maintain free speech, but try to protect people's dignity. Faith-based leaders are talking about, could dignity be a means of communication across denominational lines, or even within congregations? I mean, look at us Catholics. I mean, we've got people who hate each other in the church.
KAR
Yes.
TS
Who say the same creed and go to the same altar and kneel at the same consecration and say the same penitential rite. And they look if they looked across the church and saw half the people that are calling themselves by the same name, Catholic, they treat them with contempt.
So I think we have work to do. We have a lot of blind spots in our country right now. And, we're doing our little part to try to, to maybe, reveal some of the blindness so that we can maybe at least strategize on ways to get out of this contempt industrial complex.
KAR
Well, this way that you have framed it, framed a call to uphold human dignity and to be self-reflective in our own complicity in a culture that that demonizes others or denigrates others, has been impactful at the work of Catholic Charities, especially in these in these recent times when the people Catholic Charities are serving are often denigrated by others, the poor, vulnerable, those who have nowhere else to turn, people who are hungry, families living out of their car, migrants, refugees, you name it.
The people we are serving are often denigrated and we in turn are denigrated for our very service. And when we examine that in the context of the Dignity Index, what I have come to realize is our response at Catholic Charities is to say to those who would revile us for this gospel service, that in your own hour of need, when your family is hungry or needs safe shelter, we will feed you.
We will lift your family out of poverty. We will call you by name, restore your dignity. And there is something so profoundly Christ-like by that commitment. So I just want to thank you for the way you are helping all of us live out who God intended us to be in right relationship with one another.
TS
Thank you. I think you know, Kerry, we have to be, mindful of, the idea that, you know, as I said to someone the other day, we Catholics keep crucifixes in our church to remind us where loving our enemies leads us. Let's not be deceived here. This is work that will cost us, if we're doing it.
But it's also work that, at least in my read of the work and teachings of Jesus, it's also work that we are called upon to do, even when we are emptied by it, with love. And so those people who would revile you, or who would revile the person whose hand you're holding, or whose work you're lifting, they too are children of God.
And, you know, we have a lot of unstated debate in our country about what it takes to change someone's mind. And there's an assumption that the louder and more vicious and more pointed our criticism of the another person is, the more likely our position is to prevail. And I just don't think there's a lot of evidence that that's true. As we like to say, you know, Donna Hicks has written this, who's written on dignity and its work, you know, the troubles of Northern Ireland and the recovery in South Africa. She says, you know, contempt makes an enemy for your cause. So, you know, let's just say you've got an enemy for your cause already. Treating them with contempt will make them more of an enemy, even if their contempt is damaging your work. But treating them, I mean, at least again, in my read of our tradition, is treating the person who loathes you, with love, with dignity, with forgiveness, even as you oppose their positions.
You know, this is not a this is not about bending down to someone else's version of what's truth here. Your passion, your mission, your work, that the social teachings of the church, the social gospel, this is something about which you have deep conviction. I would never tell you to compromise that, but I would encourage all of us who believe, as you do in that work, to be wary of assuming that the people that don't are somehow hopeless, or somehow to be humiliated, or somehow to be, you know, treated with contempt, you know, that that's the that's the part we slip into quickly.
I do anyway. I was imagining, like somebody asked me about this the other day, and they they said, picture all these people who you call Catholic in the church with you. Just show up at church someday. And there they are, all the, you know, people that are on the opposite side of that political sphere. And they're in church.
You know, I was like, argh, I'm going to come back, go to a later mass, you know? But that's what we're supposed to do. What's a Catholic church? It's a church where everybody, theoretically at least, or at least conceptually, it's a church where everybody's in that stadium you described.
KAR
Yes, exactly.
TS
And everybody walks in and you cheer. Yeah. Not because they're bright, not because what they're saying is true, but because they're children, sons and daughters of God. And so, you know, the best way to change them might be to humiliate them. But I think the best way to change people who you really believe to be doing something that's really morally or ethically or spiritually, painful or offensive or oppressive, I think the best way to change them, at least according to our tradition, is to love them out of it.
Not to concede the ground, but to use as your means of communication, dignity.
KS
You know, Tim, you mentioned, earlier about the importance of practices in your life that continue to ground you in the ability to do this work. And you also have talked about proximity. You didn't use that word, but the proximity to the athletes and participants and people cheering on in the Special Olympics and the work that you're doing now. And I think about those as important topics related to the interruption of this contempt culture and this, I think you used the term somewhere you talked about, contempt has become a devotional anger in our culture. And that really struck me because the word devotion to me has a lot of sacredness around it.
And I think about my own faith life and the role that devotion plays in that. And then we put that word next to anger, and I think, okay, what is happening inside of us when we are devoted to anger and what are the things that can interrupt that? And I think about practices and proximity and, you know, in the last few years and we speaking about the Catholic Church, there have been this practice Pope Francis brought us through this synod, which was asking us to get together, in listening circles across the world and to sit with people that we might not know or might not agree with, and listen to each other's stories and the desires of our heart and the longing for God and for our church, and a lot of big things happened. And bridges were built. And so I'm curious about some of these practices that you're promoting and ways that you see this kind of action that people can connect to in order to interrupt this contempt cycle we're in.
TS
Yeah. Well, I think, my experience is, proximity is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think all we have to do is look at really the most vicious wars in history. You know, the proximity by itself isn't good enough. The recent wars in the Balkans, the massacres in Rwanda, all these people knew each other, grow up together, went to schools together.
You know, if they were in America, they would have had barbecues together. So proximity by itself is, I think, necessary, but it's not sufficient because, you know, some of the most virulent hatred in our country right now is people within families. I've seen this in my own family. I mean, we're proximate, but we're not getting along.
So, proximity, I think, in our tradition, actually calls upon us to do the work you've described that the Synod suggested, which is actually to do the inner work of trying to learn how to see another person's story. That's not just proximity, that's conversion. That's, you know, one of my teachers, Cynthia Bourgeois, is an Episcopalian priest.
When I was talking to her about dignity, she said, you're absolutely right.
You have to be able to see the dignity in another person, but you can't see that dignity in another person with your head. You have to see it with your heart. So what's the training we have for being able to see from the heart? What's the training we have in our tradition for being able to drop out of our judgmental, dualistic minds? She's good, he's bad. She's smart, he's stupid. She's right, he's wrong. All that work, you know, which is necessary, by the way, we need to know whether the food is good for you or bad for you. I mean, it's not bad to have a mind. It's just not sufficient. So we're taught to see from the heart in words, but I'm not sure our tradition has done enough to help us find the practices to enable us to walk into a room and say, in this room, my mission, my purpose is to see you from the heart, first.
Our contemplative traditions are really good at this, but most people are taught them. They're taught that contemplative traditions belong to people who give up their lives and go and live in a monastery. Not me, thank you very much. So that's not for me. No, that's not true, folks. And we have a burgeoning, in the Catholic tradition, the World Community of Christian Meditation launched by a Catholic, a monk, the, Centering Prayer Movement launched by Cistercians and others, the contemplative and prayer movements launched by many religious women.
Even the traditional work around things like the rosary, which in my view was an early form of the genius of contemplative work, which is the repetition of words so that you drop out of words. The Hesychasts would do this, you know, they have competitions. How many times a day can you say, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the…have mercy on me, a sinner. And then we have competition. I said it 4,000 times today. But what they were trying, I think, to do was learn how to get out of the words and down into a deeper place, which is, you know, I like to say the heart is not just, you know, a place of emotion.
It's an — and I don't know if this will make sense to your listeners, but I see the heart as an organ of perception. It's a place from which we perceive reality. So it has its own way of, you know, when people talk about energy or you, Kerry, you bring great energy to the room. What they're really saying is there's another dimension of experience that happens that I can feel, but I'm picking it up. I'm thinking, oh, who came into the room? You know, or I love the, you know, people say the feng shui, the energy in here is cool. What they're saying is there's something that my heart is picking up here that's not in the dualistic frame. It's not just the ceiling’s higher. The ceiling, you know? So anyway, I think proximity is super important. I love the, you know, the prophetic tradition here, but I love the, I love, like, when Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah, says, you know, give to the needy, clothe the naked, care for the widow, the orphan, and so on.
The end of that isn't you'll get a plaque on the church or the end of that isn't you'll be rewarded in heaven. The end of that is, then your light will break forth like the dawn. And you're meant — it'll be like the noonday in the middle of the night for you. Because you're — you'll open up so. So the proximity, the giving act, is a way of revealing within you who you are at your best. You become close to the goodness and the God in you. So anyway, that's a long answer. But I do think proximity is necessary. But I think we need our religious traditions to reveal to us ways to be proximate that will help us overcome what typically can often happen in proximity, which is it just stimulates our age-old stories of anger and contempt to people.
Because after all, I know this person and I know she's horrible. I know he's done horrible things. That's what we have to avoid.
KS
But I love what you, how you've extended this into talking about that. We need to not just be near each other, but we need to create, we need to create pathways for people to come together and to have these conversations with each other and to know each other at the heart level, not at the intellectual level, not at just the idea level.
This is where the barriers begin to get broken down. And that's what our meditation traditions teach us. So just appreciating that and the recognition that in order to do that, one of the most countercultural aspects of that is, that it asks us to slow down, a completely different pace. That's the experience I've had over this last year living alongside a monastery, is my internal pacing has changed, so considerably. It's working at the beat of a chant of the monastic prayers. And what happens in that space is, with our heart that you're speaking of, becomes open and available. But our culture asks us to work at a much different pace. And so that kind of turns us to practices, right?
What are the practices that allow us to connect to our heart, to connect to each other? Not at the pace of, you know, 24-hour news cycles and, you know, the very busy schedules that people have today. I'm just wondering about yours, like your practices that keep you in a rhythm that allows you and sustains you to do an incredible amount of service and leadership in the world.
TS
Yeah. Well, I think your point is exactly right. The pace at which the heart or the perception of the heart works is different. Let's remember that all the people that wrote these great texts that we call scripture, they didn't have a light bulb, they didn't have running water, they didn't have electricity. They, most of them, didn't have books.
So they spent a lot of time at a really slow pace — not an easy pace, but by the time the sun went down, that was it. You know, it wasn't like you're going over to somebody's house and, you know, lighting up the chandelier. So there is in those texts and in people who lived in those environments, a certain capacity for reflection that we've been robbed of.
I mean, you know, we've all done it willingly, but we've kind of don't have the space for that, right? Where unless we deliberately make it, as you've done by, by living there, in Minnesota. You know, for me, I, I, I discovered what centering prayer found me when I was in my 20s. I read a book at the time called Centering Prayer by Basil Pennington, who was a monk, in Spencer, Massachusetts, where he was there with Thomas Keating, who became kind of the founding father, if you will, of the Centering Prayer movement.
And it completely changed my life. It completely shocked me. Started out with a quote from Ephesians that you know about your inner life. I was like, inner life. What the hell is that? You know, I literally I mean, that's embarrassing for me to say now, but I just like what that what the, who, you know, somebody that inner life and like, that's weird, you know? So anyway, I started, you know, and I try, you know, whatever this is now 40 years on, the, you know, the guidance is 20 minutes twice a day, I, I would say I'm way short of that, but I'm, I, you know, I stay at it. But I, I'm a hard case, you know. I try. I have a rosary in my pocket. I have a 5:30 liturgy I go to here, every day when I'm in town. So I work hard at it. I mean, it's like...and people always say to me, geez, you spent a lot of time in church, don't you? You must have a lot of problems.
And I'm like, yeah, I do like, I have. It's hard work. God has a lot of work to do with me. So, you know, it takes time. You know, it comes naturally to other people, but not to me. So I have to work harder than most. But, I do think that we've made a mistake in religious traditions, by not emphasizing that we are about practices and skills, and we've spent too much time talking about ideas and theories.
I mean, think of the fights we've had with the Orthodox community for a thousand years. Well, with the Protestant traditions for 3, 400 years, mostly about words. Mostly about sometimes about just 1 or 2 words. I mean, with, you know, I mean, maybe people say it's overemphasized, but, you know, the Filioque, “and the Son,” that split millions of people from each other for a thousand years.
I mean, I get it. It's important theologically, I understand the distinctions that are being called to mind there, but what about what are we calling to heart? Why haven't we emphasized prayer with the Orthodox for a thousand years, even as we differ on the Filioque? Okay, if we do, I mean, I'm not sure we really do, but that's a different question.
So I think, you know, and what would prayer look like? What would silence look like? I mean, Thomas Keating has this beautiful line. God's first language is silence. Everything else is translation. So why don't we speak that language to each other for like a week? You know, like, why don't we try that with our Orthodox brothers and sisters or our Lutheran or our Methodist or our congregational or our evangelical brothers and sisters? Why don't we just try speaking the language of silence, God's first language, for like a little while? Just seeing where that takes us. We know where the words take us. It's not such a such a great place.
KAR
Tim, I, I love the sentence from just our conversation today. You said in this room, my mission is to see you from the heart, and I, I wonder, like I picture the stadium, that we started with, the stadium full of people cheering on all of the athletes with such joy and how different our days, our world, our communities, our families would be if every one of us woke up and said, in this moment, in this room, in this community, my mission is to see you from the heart. How different things would be. Thank you for providing that to us and to our listeners.
TS
Thank you.
KAR
I think our listeners are asking if we could go on for another couple of hours.
TS
No, I don't think so. But we all know things that they're probably like, isn't there anybody else on this podcast?
KAR
We always like to end with one final question of all of our guests, and we'd like to end by asking you, who is one leader whom you have drawn inspiration from and emulated in your own life?
TS
Well, it has to be one?
KS
No, it doesn't.
KAR
It doesn't, yes.
TS
No — I, when I'm paying attention, I'm overwhelmed by the generosity of spirit that surrounds me. I just give you one example. I was on the plane the other day, two days ago, and, I was working on the computer, and I wanted to start taking notes, right? Because I was preparing some remarks for something, and I didn't have any paper, so I just grabbed the, you know, the little drink napkin they give you. And I have a, like, a pen that has, you know, inky pen. So you can write on that drink napkin. And I'm writing along it and I'm taking notes and I'm taking notes.
I'm going all the way. I get to the bottom of the thing. I flipped it over and I started taking more notes, and the flight attendant walks over to me and says to you, would you like a piece of paper? I'm just sitting in the freaking aisle seat. And I looked up and the guy was like, do you want a piece of paper? And I was like, oh, I mean, yeah, but I'm okay. He walks up to the front of the plane, opens up his thing, takes out a piece of paper, walks back and hands me a piece of paper. I thought to myself, you are obviously an angel because first of all, you saw me. I mean, like I wasn't — I didn't raise my hand and push my button or anything like that.
The guy just noticed me. And, I, I am so moved by those little things. Because I think, you know, there's a beautiful line, I think, from Alice Walker, that God gets angry when we don't notice the color purple. I think God gets angry when we don't notice the love that's all around us, the goodness. I think God is like, I just I'm, you know, I show off all the time, and you don't see it. You know, this monk I was with the other day, we were we were at a sunset and he says, oh, there's God showing off. And I was looking at the sunset. Yeah, that is God showing off.
But God shows off a lot. So, I mean, that's not a good answer, but right now I'm going to give you the flight attendant. Now, who made this little tiny, insignificant gesture to me. I would have been fine without the paper. You know, I could have made it with my little napkin. But I just thought this man is as generous as a human being could be to me in this moment.
So I think that's the call. You know, my mom was like that. My wife is like that. The great Loretta Claiborne, a Special Olympics athlete who grew up in the housing projects of York, Pennsylvania. Woman of color, vicious discrimination, thrown out of school, beaten up because she had an intellectual disability, sent to a sheltered workshop to do menial work for the rest of her life.
But she ran, you know, she could run. And she ended up running in Special Olympics. And, you know, the first time she got there, she looked around she said, oh, my God, what is this place? You know, kind of like what you were saying, Kerry, she kind of came out of, what she might have thought of as the real world, into an imaginary world where everybody cared about her.
And now she's become the, you know, one of the most inspiring human beings on earth. She talks to companies and all over the world about seeing people, for their abilities, not their disabilities. You know, she ends up running the Boston Marathon, finishing in the top 100 women in the Boston Marathon. And she gets an award from Denzel Washington at the ESPYs.
And I go up to her afterwards. I said, Loretta, that was so exciting. I was in the audience, you know, what was it like? What was he like? What was who like? I said, what was Denzel Washington like? And she said, is that the guy who gave me the award? I said, yeah, that's the guy. Oh, he seemed like a nice guy.
Didn't see him any different. Didn't even, I mean, in this case didn't know who he was. But she saw him just as wonderful man. That was it. That was enough. She's another hero of mine. So I've been showered with role models. In faith, in goodness, in love, in dignity. And I, I sometimes, sometimes I pray to God stop giving me so many gifts. Give them to other people. You're too generous to me.
KAR
What a beautiful conversation. I thank you so much for joining Kim and me today. You write beautifully about Loretta in your fabulous book, Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most. I commend it to our listeners. You speak of other personal heroes in that book. Tim, thank you so much for joining us and for being who you are in the world in this moment of time.
We are indebted to you and inspired by you.
TS
Thank you, Kerry. Well, I'm, it's the other way around. I yeah, to the extent we can, we can follow I'll follow you particularly, but the work you do and be in your service. It'll make us all that much better. So thank you both. It's so important that you're elevating voices, and continuing to hold the ground for the work that's so important.
KS
Thanks, Tim. Thank you so much.
KAR
Today we are spotlighting an inspiring program run by Catholic Charities, Diocese of Saint Augustine.
The program is called Camp I Am Special, and it is a beautiful, living example of so many of the themes we were blessed to discuss with Tim. With us today is Anita Hassell, chief executive officer of Catholic Charities Diocese of Saint Augustine, with diverse experience, including successive roles at her agency, as well as more than ten years of experience at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami.
Anita brings considerable gifts and passion to her leadership.
Anita, welcome. We just had a terrific conversation with Tim Shriver about the Special Olympics. Your Catholic Charities agency has a summer program that is more than 40 years old with a similar mission. Can you tell us about Camp I Am Special?
Anita Hassell (AH)
Well, this is the jewel in our crown. Camp I Am Special was initiated in the 80s by the late Bishop Snyder. He was a strong believer in serving the special needs population, especially children and young adults. So, initially, he created just Camp I Am Special. But when our children with disabilities started growing out of the childhood age, he created Camp Promise.
And he said, because we do make the promise that we will be here for you as long as you live, and as long as you want to come back. And it was [the] beginning of a very beautiful story and a camp design that is very unique. I would venture to say we [are] probably very different than any other program that's provided for children and young adults with disabilities.
First of all, our camps accept pretty much any type of disability that does not require nursing assistance nonstop. We train young people, students of eighth grade and up, in interfacing with one child with a disability for five days, 24 hours a day. So they basically play with that child in a group, follow them when we have pool activities. They become their best friends — we call it the buddy — for the five-day duration of the camp. And the camp offers to those children any kind of experience that any of our children really is exposed to during the summer. So we have a beautiful aquatic center that was made possible through a donor’s generosity with special adjustments to address children on their wheelchairs.
We do have a beautiful adjusted campground, we have boat rides, we have a petting zoo, we do have fishing trips and many other attractions. And, my personal favorite is the talent show, when all the kids on, usually, Thursday night, come together, when they all showcase their talents. And it's wonderful to see because they are very proud of what they have to share.
It touches everybody's hearts. Children, when they leave, often we've heard from parents that when children leave the camp, they mark on their calendar next year so they can start counting times for the following year.
KAR
What a beautiful, joyful, meaningful ministry. Thank you so much for sharing that with our listeners. And thank you for your leadership and your compassion. Before I let you go, what is giving you hope as a leader working in the Catholic Charities network in this moment?
AH
What really fills my soul is there is such a tremendous difference in working for a faith-based and mission-driven organization. And, you know, the staff and the leadership looks at everything beyond the job type of the, you know, arrangement. Everybody has great dedication, great compassion. We get great support ourselves from our faith communities. So when the times were really difficult for us, especially during the closure of our refugee program where, we all know, overnight we pretty much had to stop providing services, we were pretty desperate for the refugees who just arrived. And so our goal, after having to reduce agency in a very significant way, was how are we going to help people who are already here? And who often have no family and have no language, no culture? And I have to say, in a very short time, our donors stepped in and donated over $600,000 to allow us to continue assistance.
This is all very uplifting. We believe in hope. And we also, from the practical aspect, what gives me hope? We started our new strategic planning process. And one of the things, with the lessons we have learned and want to carry on, is how are we building our organization to sustain, even in the worst situations, so always the heart of our mission can always be alive. So we always will be here to help the poorest of the poor.
KAR
Well, thank you so much, Anita, for dedicating so much of your life and your heart and your leadership to improving the lives of others. I am grateful for you.
KS
We're so glad you joined us today. Thank you. To our Catholic Charities USA producers, Kevin Brennan and Tina Kilroy. To Rachel Taylor for our theme music, to our incredible guest, our featured Catholic Charities leader. And to you, our listeners.
KAR
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