Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601

Steve Spilde: Welcome, everyone. Today it is my great honor to welcome John Heagle as my guest. I’ve had the privilege to know John for about 10 years. I first was acquainted to him … He is the presenter for our Spiritual Direction Preparation Program, our weekend entitled “Personal Growth in Faith Development.” John has had a great influence on me and my own personal growth and faith development, so it’s a real privilege for me to join John in conversation today. Thank you.

John Heagle: It’s good to be with you – very much so. Thank you.

Steve: Could you talk about how when you first met with the participants in the Spiritual Direction Preparation Program, how long ago that was, and what your first experience was.

John: I couldn’t give you the exact time. I think I’ve been there four times now, and that would be every other year, so it would be about 10 years ago I think that we began that process – particularly because the topic was one that I felt so comfortable with.

Steve: What are your credentials to talk about that? Where does that come from? I know you as having experience as a priest. I know you have experience as an instructor [and] as a therapist. Talk about your background.

John: I guess I would like to start briefly [with] how I would frame my early life. I grew up with two main elements of energy. One is a very close farm Catholic family. My parents were survivors of The Great Depression, and they got married in 1934 and began farming together on the same land they lived on for 65 years, and that’s where I grew up. They had four boys; I’m the second oldest. There was a lot of boy energy in our house, a lot of physical interaction, a lot of testosterone energy that was there. We were never a perfect family, but [we were] a close family. What I remember in addition to my farm-close family is that I was born in the context of the beginning of the Second World War. Obviously I was too young … I was born in 1938. In November of that year, seven months after I was born is when the famous Kristallnacht happened in Germany when the Nazis began to persecute the Jewish people. I was too young to remember. I was even too young to remember much of Pearl Harbor; I was about three years old. All I remember is my parents being very upset. Only later did I come to understand that that was kind of a background setting that I didn’t become aware of until my adolescent years. I could remember the blackouts, the rationing of gasoline, butter, and sugar. Of course we made our own butter, so that wasn’t a problem with all that. But I just think that was a very important part.

I also remember when you turned six, you officially started helping with the chores in the barn. Also, since mom only had four boys, she also taught us how to cook and clean, so we also learned that. We had to get up before going to school and throw out the sileage and feed the cows, and then go back in and take a bath and catch the school bus. There was this kind of sense of uber responsibility. I know I was raised as kind of a pleaser, to be “a good boy,” and to jump through all the right hoops – not just with my parents, but [also] in school with the sisters and with the whole church part of it, which was also very important. We went to church every Sunday and prayed every day. We had all our meals together because we were working in the field or doing the chores together, so it was that kind of setting, I think, that really helped shape me. I think that’s a very significant influence, anyway. And also, the war part of it got me back into social justice work.

Steve: You grew up in northern Wisconsin, near Menomonie. You became a priest. Can you talk about that journey and at what point that idea entered your mind and kind of the path that led you in that direction?

John: It’s interesting that probably the two sources of what I would call spirituality – in those days they didn’t speak of it that way – but the two sources of mystery I guess is the word I would use, or of religious presence, were the forest, farmland, the fields. And we had a creek at the bottom of our land, and a river within a quarter of a mile, Red Cedar River. The rivers and the forest and the fields were one real profound source for me of spontaneous nature mysticism. I had a real sense of union with mystery, with the holy. I wouldn’t have called that “God;” God was more in church. The second part of it was I became an alter server early. As soon as you receive your first communion in second grade you could become an alter server, but you had to memorize the Latin. In those days, the mass was in Latin. For some reason I was always a questor; I always wanted to know “why?” I remember the first response prayer before the alter was, “Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam.” It took me a long time in the second grade to memorize that. I went to the sister who was training us and I said, “What does that mean?” She said, “It doesn’t matter what it means. It’s from one of the Psalms. Just pray it.” But I was determined to find out what it meant, and when I found out it was Psalm 42 and it meant, “I will go to the altar of God, and I will do so with the joyfulness of youth.” I thought, “Holy mackerel, that’s great.” Being an altar server, there was something about church, the eucharist or the mass, that really was very sacred even though it was in another language and the ritual was outdated.

I experienced another kind of mystery in the fields and the forest and the river. Probably going into high school and especially in college, the question became for me, “What’s the connection between creation and the holy in religion?” The message often was the world is a veil of tears, and it’s something that we’re here to find the escape route from. Yet I kept saying, “I don’t know what they mean by the world, but the world I know is something that I deeply love, and I find life in it. So I kept trying to resolve this paradox of, the world is a suspicious place or a dangerous place, and our purpose is to get to heaven. That was an ongoing struggle for me in college.

Steve: What I’m hearing you say is, the struggle is to get to heaven to get out of this bad place. But you’re thinking of the forest where you grew up and thought, “This is not a bad place. I could spend my time here.”

John: Precisely. In grade school, on the last day of school, we get off the school bus at the corner and take off our shoes, carry them home, and we never put our shoes on until it’s time to go back to school again in the fall. That’s how it was. I’ve come to understand now what Jesus means by, the world is not creation. He means the world of oppression and political mechanizations and the power of imperialism. That’s what he’s talking about. That’s the world in the Gospel of John when the Gospel of John says, “God so loved the world …” That’s not the systems of oppression. That’s creation. But I didn’t know that at the time. That was a struggle for me, and I think that the breaking point for me was in 1958 [when] I was sent to Catholic University for my further seminary training. I was studying philosophy at the time, and it was still kind of the old, worn-out scholastic philosophy of studying St. Thomas in Latin. I was getting more and more bored with it. I remember reading someplace this book [entitled] “The Human Phenomenon.” It was forbidden in the seminary library. One Saturday afternoon I took the bus downtown to Galleries Bookstore, and I purchased a copy of “The Human Phenomenon.” I brought it back under my coat, and that night I told my roommate, “I’m going to read this book after Grand Silence.” I was still reading it when the bell went off at 5:30 to get up. It was a breakthrough because Teilhard [author Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] basically resolved that issue of, there’s not the world over here and the holy or the divine over there. They’re both together through the process of evolving creation and evolving human beings. It was like a light went on for me. It was at the same time a great relief because I was saying, ‘Maybe I’m in the wrong place and I shouldn’t even be in the seminary because I don’t believe this stuff.’ ”