A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART THREE OF THREE

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel

On masks, Rottweilers, circling the block, and what she wants to say to the person who is still afraid to be see

She told me about Lent.

She had made a commitment during that season to feed homeless men in her community. Some concrete contained, entirely private act of charity. And one afternoon she drove out to do it — and circled the block three times. She had the food. She knew the men were there. And she found reason after reason, loop after loop, not to stop.

In the quiet of self-examination that followed, she named what was happening: she didn’t want anyone to see her doing it.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because Judy Joseph McSween is not a timid woman. She is a woman who walked into a shop in 1978 and was singled out while every other applicant was turned away. A woman who left a secure consultancy and drained her savings to pursue a calling. A woman who facilitates emotional intelligence retreats for archbishops and clergy across the Caribbean. And here she was, circling a block in Trinidad, afraid of being seen doing something good.

“I didn’t want anybody to see me doing it.”

She names this as the central interior struggle of her life: the movement from hiding under the bushel to becoming a lighthouse. Matthew 5:14-16 — “You are the light of the world” — was the scripture she received at her very first Life in the Spirit seminar, and she has been holding it ever since as both a promise and a provocation. She knows what she is called to be. The bushel is still close.

The masks arrived during her training as an OD Facilitator. She was asked, as all the participants were, to identify the mask she was wearing. Her response — characteristically — was to draw five Rottweiler faces. She owned five Rottweilers. She turned it into a joke. The facilitator was not deterred.

When she was required to write what the mask represented, the exercise became painful and deeply personal. She looked at her dogs. She thought about what she valued in them: unconditional love, empathy, presence, the quality of being met without reservation. She realized, sitting with the exercise, that these were precisely the qualities she was giving abundantly in her marriage and not receiving. The dogs were not a distraction from the question. They were the answer.

She was giving unconditional love. She was not receiving it. She had found a way to live with the gap so long that she had learned not to see it — until a training exercise in a room full of strangers made the invisible visible.

The marriage had other textures. Her husband delivered the news of her mother’s death with a flat “Your mother died” — no preparation, no comfort, no reaching toward her in the shock of the moment. When she was excited about something — even something as simple as a new bottle — her effervescence met near-silence. A road trip to Disney World that got them lost became an adventure for her and an irritation for him. His son made her feel unwelcome in her own home, and her husband did not manage the dynamic. These were not dramatic betrayals. They were the slow accumulation of a particular kind of loneliness — being present in a marriage while being fundamentally unseen in it.

She filed for divorce. She handed her husband the papers in an envelope after a football match, having arrived in separate cars. She never saw his reaction. Her lawyer was focused on material assets. She had a single focus: freedom. “All I need to do,” she said, “is to get out of this relationship, and I’ll be happy.” She prayed that all ties would be severed in a single court hearing with no ongoing entanglement. The prayer was answered.

The divorce, she says, was filed for the right reason. She has no regrets. And it was the catalyst for the most intensive period of interior work in her life — the meditation practice, the OD training, the introspective turn that eventually led her to Maine, and then to the 22-acre retreat facility, and then to sixteen years of helping others do what she had done for herself: pause long enough to hear what truly matters.

The archbishop called her out of the blue. He was not yet an Archbishop when she met him — a former cloistered nun named Rose had asked Judy to introduce herself to the priest who said mass at her parish one weekend. Judy had no real intention of following through. God, she says with a quiet smile, has a sense of humor. Fr. Jason said the mass that weekend. She introduced herself. Years later, now serving as Archbishop and Chair of the Caribbean Archbishops, he called her to facilitate a six-day clergy retreat for sixty priests.

She describes this as one of the moments when God pulled her from under the bushel and placed her on top — not once, but twice. She did not seek the platform. She did not engineer the relationship. She was asked to show up, and she showed up.

This is the pattern she has named across her whole life: every time she hid, she was found. Every time she circled the block, something eventually stopped the car. Every time she tried to make herself smaller, the calling found a way to make her visible. She is not naive about it — she knows the fear is real, that visibility invites judgment, that there are people who actively seek to diminish what rises. She also knows that the light is not hers to keep.

“I’m feeling the lighthouse next to the bushel — eventually it’s gonna get on top of the bushel.”

She does not claim to have arrived. She does not offer the finished version of herself as evidence that the journey is complete. She says the lighthouse is still moving — that each day may call the light to shine in a different place, that no one fully becomes a lighthouse once and for all, that the movement is ongoing. She is sixty-something years into a life of being found, and she is still learning to step into the light rather than wait to be placed there.

To the person watching who is still circling the block — who has the food, who knows where the need is, who has made the commitment and is now finding reasons not to stop — she said this:

“You’ll never find your fullest strength until you learn the power of the pause and be able to listen to the true source of strength that lies within you. In life, we must take risks. Without taking a risk, you’ll never know what you have the potential to achieve. There is always something that must be released to move to the next level. You cannot conceive what God has in store for you unless you are willing to let go.”

Three conversations with this woman. Three movements of a life that has always known more than it was willing to show — and that has spent decades learning, slowly, gracefully, with humor and honesty and the occasional Rottweiler, to let the light out anyway.

The bushel is still close. The lighthouse is closer.

If this conversation touched something in you, we invite you to explore what it means to step out from under the bushel and into your calling — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.