His wife had died, and he was raising his son, who was pretty smart and had just been accepted to a prestigious university. Years ago, I had a conversation with an older African-American gentleman who was shining my shoes. If you’re clear on your cause, you can navigate anything else thrown at you. The clearer I am about that, and the more consistently I return to it, the more my doubts diminish, whether they be about the church and the world or my own abilities. My mission is to help people to find their way to a loving, liberating, and life-giving relationship with God, and with each other as children of God, and ultimately with the whole of creation. But I’ve never had a doubt about the reason I do what I do. I still have those moments when I wonder whether someone made a mistake when they chose me, or whether I’m really supposed to be doing this. Did you ever have doubts about taking on that role?Īnybody assuming a new leadership position with more demands and larger responsibility would have to be a fool not to go through moments of self-doubt. Since then you’ve become presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, an organization with 1.7 million members (including me).

It was different from hearing him, or hearing about him, and it made me realize that there was the potential to do real social good from within the Christian religious tradition. I shouldn’t say I actually heard him: He was the last preacher out of a whole bunch of them up there talking, and I fell asleep. speak once when I was about five years old. My daddy took me to hear Martin Luther King Jr. But my dad was a priest, and his father was a Baptist preacher-that was in my blood. I considered public service, having worked on Bobby Kennedy’s political campaigns as a kid, licking envelopes and knocking on doors. HBR: What made you want to become a priest? Did you ever consider another career?Ĭurry: By the time I went to college, I knew that I wanted to do something that had a positive impact on the lives of people and on society.

Love is the Way by Michael B. Curry