Jesus can heal, transform

Deacon Keith Strohm grew up on Long Island, New York, and he knew from an early age that he was different.

Kids told him so. Even a few adults.

“I grew up without a right hand, which was congenital,” Deacon Strohm said. “It was called an ‘in utero amputation,’ so, basically, growing up, I knew I was different. And kids can be cruel, right?”

When Keith was 7, he was standing in line, waiting to hop on a carnival ride, but the ride operator took one look and told him he couldn’t.

“He said to my neighbor, ‘He can’t come on because I’m afraid he’ll scare the other children,’” Deacon Strohm recalled.

Deacon Strohm’s mother often had told him that God had made him “different,” but at that moment, he knew that God had made him “broken.”

“So, there was a lot of anger and resentment and hatred, not only of God, but also of myself,” he said. “As that grew, that dark place in my heart deepened and I really began a pattern of self-destructive behavior. In college, I got involved with alcohol. It was bad, and I was really, really overwhelmed by it.”

The man, who would eventually go on to become a permanent deacon for the Archdiocese of Chicago and speak to priests and Catholics in the pews across the world about the power of becoming a missionary disciple of Jesus, owes his life to a Damascus moment.

While attending graduate school in upstate New York, he went to the campus ministry office to pick up the Mass schedule because he wanted to “plan” his drinking around the campus liturgies.

“I encountered a young woman who interested me, and she invited me to come to a prayer group,” Deacon Strohm recalled. “I came because I was interested in her, and then the Lord touched me and healed me. Over the course of that semester, I had a profound experience at a healing Mass where the love of God just surrounded me. I heard the Lord speak very clearly. He just said, ‘My child, you have peace. I am with you always.’

“I knew in that moment that every time I had suffered because of my disability, because of the self-hatred, that God was with me in the midst of it. That changed everything because I knew that he truly loved me, and I was his son.”

In his travels across the country – and in his three-day series of workshops on discipleship at the recently concluded Priests Convocation of the Archdiocese of New Orleans – Deacon Strohm has seen the life of the church in all of its glory and its struggles.

He knows all about the difficult time the archdiocese is going through right now, with 3 1/2 years and counting of a bankruptcy process, the pain of sexual abuse victims and their struggle for healing, damage from natural disasters and the shrinking of some parish communities.

Deacon Strohm told the 187 priests who attended the gathering that he could sense the pain they were sharing.

“I do a lot of working in healing ministry, and that was the Lord revealing the pain of the men who are there – not only the archbishop, though he carries that burden in a very particular way – but of all the priests who have served faithfully in the midst of very difficult times,” Deacon Strohm said. “I wanted to name that – I needed the name that – because the Lord wants to transform it. I just invited them to surrender their pain and themselves again to the Lord.”

Deacon Strohm said there are three building blocks for parish renewal: using the best of human organizational leadership principles; having a deep understanding of evangelization and discipleship; and actively cooperating with the supernatural dimensions of life in Christ.

“The first two things should be wedded to the third,” he said. “The transformation of the parish requires the transformation of the culture of the parish. For most people, mission and vision is nebulous, and it’s an exercise that you go through just because you’re supposed to go through it and it has no bearing on the life of the parish. But, you cannot transform the parish unless you have a clear sense of where you are going.

“We need to understand that the church’s mission is about sharing Jesus with others. We want to help people have an outward focus. It’s not, ‘How do we get people in the pews?’ but ‘How do we help people go out and share Jesus?’ That means that they themselves must have a living relationship with the Lord. The time of cultural Catholicism is done.”

Deacon Strohm founded catholicmissionarydisciples.com to help parishes begin that important work of discipleship.

“I like to think that disciples are not mass produced – they are artisanal products, handcrafted,” he said. “Jesus invested in a small number of people. If you think about it, he taught thousands, invested in 12 but really spent time with three. He spent that time essentially reproducing himself in the three, and they gave their lives reproducing Jesus in others. So, that spiritual multiplication has to begin.”

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