Finding My Mission in Life
By Governor
Timothy M. Kaine
December, 2005
A little over two months ago, Anne and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, by traveling to a place that was central to our meeting each other. I had lived there long ago, but Anne had never visited until now.
In 1979, I left Kansas City to attend Harvard Law School. I was raised in an Irish Catholic family where life revolved around church, school, friends, sports and hard work. My brothers and I all grew up working in Dad’s small ironworking business. Mom, a former school teacher, ran the house and helped Dad by designing and marketing decorative iron products. After going to college at the University of Missouri, coming east to school at age 21 was exciting and a little intimidating. When Dad took me to the airport, he tried to take the pressure off me by saying, “Tim, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay.”
I instantly loved the intellectual challenge of law school and the energy of the big city, and I admired my classmates, whose brains and accomplishments were inspirational. But our paths had differed in one distinct way: my buddies had taken time off to work, travel, or volunteer before enrolling at Harvard. I had finished college in three years, come straight to law school and was one of the youngest people in my class. During my first months in Boston, I started to wonder, “What’s the rush?”
This question led to bigger questions. What did I want to do with my life? Most of my classmates were set on going to big cities to work at big law firms. I wasn’t sure that was for me. What did I believe? Being far from home caused me to question my faith and my place in the world for the first time. What was my responsibility to others? My student life had been pretty self-absorbed, but now I walked by homeless people sleeping on the streets in the cold of winter, and it made me question my path.
I made up my mind to take a year off and go to work with Catholic missionaries in Honduras. My Catholic high school had long sponsored a mission drive to raise money for American and Spanish priests working in this poor Central American country. I had visited Honduras for a week when I was in high school and hoped I might return. Now was my chance.
I arrived in Honduras in September of 1980, and I lived with Jesuit missionaries in a little town called El Progreso until May of 1981. Progreso was bustling, surrounded by mountains on one side and miles of banana plantations on the other. Since the 1950’s, the Jesuits had run churches, schools, medical clinics, radio stations, printing presses and just about anything else that would help the people in the region. My job was to run a small vocational school, teaching teen-agers basic carpentry skills.
I worked with a number of amazing people during my time in Progreso. Father Ramon—a big priest from Oklahoma—ran the local parish and was beloved by all. Father Patricio lived in the mountains, and I would travel with him on weekends and holidays, going village to village, often by mule, to celebrate Mass. Father Jack ran a theatre group with local kids and campesinos, taking ragtag drama productions with a message into tiny villages throughout the country. But, my real mentor was Jim O’Leary, an energetic man whose skill with his hands made up for his fractured Spanish. Jim moved from St. Louis to Honduras in 1962 and stayed until his death in 2002, building just about everything, from churches to schools and homes. He was the founder of the vocational school I was to run.
My Spanish was limited to only four years of high school classes. It was tough at first, but the kids were patient, and I soon fell into a good rhythm. I worked with the kids in the shop, designed projects for them, and taught classes in math, technical drawing and religion. I wrote letters to foreign aid organizations all over the world to raise money for more equipment for the school. I went into the local neighborhoods to find new students. And, to round out the curriculum, I found some used arc and spot-welding rigs and started to teach the kids a little bit about welding.
Jim selflessly gave his whole life to helping others. Working with him changed the direction of my life and grounded me in my faith. As I worked with the kids and watched Jim, the conversations back at law school, like which law firm paid the best for summer clerkships, seemed very distant. Jim and my students were living faith in a much different way than I had ever encountered. It wasn’t about words or doctrine. It was about action. It was about another poor kid, a carpenter, who grew into a wise man with a message of hope for even the most lost or destitute. It was about a father God who understands what it is to lose a child -- a powerful comfort in a community where many families lost kids to disease or malnutrition every day.
I returned to law school committed to using my life to help people, just like Jim did in Honduras. I soon met a beautiful young woman, now my wife, in class. She started a year behind me and, because Harvard is so big, I probably wouldn’t have met her had I not gone to Honduras. I told Anne about Jim and the others in Progreso and how they shaped what I wanted to do. I soon realized she was a soul mate, a person of faith who wanted to use her gifts to help others rather than simply to advance herself. We married and moved to Richmond, where we have balanced careers of service with raising three great kids.
Over the years, we have talked a lot about Honduras and the people there. Anne has heard all my stories, and we have contributed financially to the mission every year. We traded letters with Jim until he died in 2002, and then followed in letters the remarkable stories of the tributes he received from the town and its people following his death.
With our 20th anniversary approaching last November, I suggested that we do something special to celebrate. Anne suggested a trip to Honduras. And so, right before Thanksgiving, I took her back to show her El Progreso and to visit the Jesuits still working there.
Father Ramon and Father Patricio met us at the airport 30 kilometers away from Progreso. We visited all the sites in Progreso where the Jesuits still do great work. I went by my old school, now moved to a new site and grown to nearly 400 students learning carpentry and welding, but also electronics, plumbing, computers and other technical skills. I even found one of my old students, now a married father working for Father Jack’s theatre group.
The highlight was driving up the hill at the edge of town, as the river valley gives way to the wild mountains beyond. A sloping cemetery climbs the mountain and, at the top, looking back toward Progreso, is Jim’s grave. Ramon and Patricio told us that Jim’s funeral procession stretched almost the entire two miles from the church in the town square to the cemetery. I could see that route and imagine it filled with all the people Jim had worked with over his forty years.
As I have grown older, and reflected on Jim’s life, I have realized that doing good is not really complicated. It involves a simple battle that every human must fight: the battle against selfishness. We all have a desire for comfort and ease, and it takes effort to help other people out. But the battle against one’s own selfishness is much easier if you have a role model to follow, someone who does it and shows you how to do it, too. Jim O’Leary showed me how to live at a time when I was searching for a mission in life, and my wife Anne has kept the mission before me every day of our marriage.
We came home already talking about when we could next visit Progreso with our kids. I was 16 the first time I went to Honduras on my high school trip. Our oldest son is 15 now, studying Spanish at high school and preparing for the questions that a young man has to ask and answer for himself. I hope to share with him and all of our children first-hand the life-changing experience I had in Honduras, and the important lessons about serving others that I learned there.