One Step Enough For Me

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to visit friends who are currently studying abroad in Heidelberg, Germany. As we sat in my friend’s apartment, chatting and drinking wine, my other friend asked me, “Has there been a moment this year when you’ve been hit with the feeling that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be?” It was a surprising question, but not a difficult one to answer. The truth is, there have been several moments in which I’ve felt a deep sense of my purpose in Dublin: when I’ve been sitting in daily Mass, when I’ve been goofing off with my housemates, when I’ve been walking alone to work in the morning. The moment I shared with him, however, was perhaps the most distinct instance of this feeling that I’ve ever had. 

My freshman year at Notre Dame, when I first joined the Folk Choir, my faith life was essentially nonexistent. If someone had told me then that in four years, I would be in Ireland serving the Church, I wouldn’t have believed them. But I loved music, and from that love came a thin thread that still connected me to the liturgy that I’d grown up in. In participating in Mass each week with the choir, I felt quite suddenly and jarringly thrown back into my faith life in a way that was both exciting and terrifying. I genuinely missed my faith, and I realized how much I wanted to return to it, but it was going to take a good bit of work on my part to begin to feel at home in the Church again. As I began to piece together what this journey was going to mean for me, I clung to music, particularly the music of the Folk Choir. 

One song that I began to pray with was Steve Warner’s setting of “Lead, Kindly Light,” originally a poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman, a person about whom I knew absolutely nothing.

I knew that the lyrics resounded with me on a deep level, and at some point during that year I looked up the original poem, which is as follows:

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

Shouldst lead me on;

I loved to choose and see my path; but now

Lead Thou me on!

I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still

Will lead me on.

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone,

And with the morn those angel faces smile,

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

Meantime, along the narrow rugged path,

Thyself hast trod,

Lead, Saviour, lead me home in childlike faith,

Home to my God.

To rest forever after earthly strife

In the calm light of everlasting life.

During that first year, I particularly resonated with the line “I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.” That, I thought, was the key to this faith journey; I didn’t need to know the entire picture. I just needed to keep taking one step at a time and to trust that God would make things clearer to me in time. 

I never had any particular devotion to John Henry Newman, only to this one poem. I didn’t know that he had founded Newman University Church when I signed on to do House of Brigid Dublin this year. I didn’t know that he was being canonized in October, and that as a staff member of the Notre Dame-Newman Centre for Faith and Reason, I was going to get to attend his canonization mass. I didn’t know that the weekend after we went to Rome, our choir would be singing Steve Warner’s setting of “Lead, Kindly Light” from the gallery of Newman’s church.

Agreeing to do House of Brigid was just another step I took without asking to see the distant scene. I don’t think it was a coincidence that four years after I first discovered Newman’s poetry in musical form, four years after those words started to sink into my skin, I was singing them in the format in which I first loved them, as a minister in the church Newman founded. I don’t even think it was a coincidence that my friend asked me about a moment in which I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I think God wants me to look at how far I’ve come in these four years and to recognize what beautiful and vast changes He has made of every small step I have taken. All He is asking me to do is to keep taking them without asking to know where I’m going, to simply trust that the destination is going to be something wonderful.