Beauty Refresher: Steven Garber, Author, Sign-Post of Hope
Steve Garber has helped me to come to grips with what I can be and do in a chaotic world. We can be hope-givers. We can do small, steady good work where God has planted us. He calls it “making peace with the proximate.” He served many years on the Board of Directors of InSpero, Inc. What an honor it has been to have his support and guidance in shaping us. He has personally helped me through his gentle wisdom, his deep questions, and his books.
A longtime professor of politics and political vocation, he now serves as the Senior Fellow for Vocation and the Common Good for the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, the Senior Advisor for the Economics of Mutuality, the Senior Fellow for the Institute for Marketplace Transformation, and the Senior Fellow for Access Ventures. His books include Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good; The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work; and his latest, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate. He and his wife, Meg (another shining example of a long love), live in Virginia among family, friends, and flowers
I asked him this question
What do you want to give to the world?
“I live my life for signposts, which by definition. point us in the direction of, showing us where to go and where not to go— not the end of our journey, and never the telos of our hopes, signposts keep us going. Believing as I do that we see through a glass dark in this very now but not yet world, I need windows into what is more beautiful and more good and more true, simply to remind me of the reality that heaven and earth are twined together all day long, if we have eyes to see.
Like many, I am a long reader of Tolkien, the masterful author of The Lord of the Rings. While every page is one more adventure into the mysteries of Middle-earth, paragraph by paragraph going deeper into unparalleled wonders full of adventures and surprises beyond what we have ever imagined, there are moments along the way that simply stop us in our tracks, the words so very real, so very true, so very right. In the final book of the trilogy, Samwise says to Gandalf, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” There is not a human being in history who does not hope for that, feeling in our very bones the weight of the world, longing for something more.
And that is why we need signposts— otherwise we will forever be “lost in the cosmos,” in the words of Walker Percy, the Birmingham native and great American essayist and novelist, not knowing enough of ourselves or the world around us to know who and why we are, lost to all that matters most.
I want the work of my life, the vocation that gives coherence to all that I am, to be a signpost of what could be, of what should be, of what someday will be.”
Read a wonderful preview of Steve’s latest book, Hints of Hope, here. It is available for purchase through Byron Borger’s Hearts and Minds Bookstore and any place you buy books.
Steve will be visiting Birmingham November 12-15. We will keep you posted on where you can hear him speak and purchase Hints of Hope.