From Music Man to Holy Man

How does a former Lutheran music major and IT professional find his way to the Catholic Church and the priesthood?

For Father Craig Lusk, pastor of St. Mary Parish, Marshall, and St. John the Evangelist Parish, Albion, the seeds of his faith journey were planted during his childhood, years ago in his quaint South Redford, Mich. (suburban Detroit) neighborhood.

“I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood and always had a certain wonderment about the [Catholic] faith,” he remembers.

And while most children go through phases where they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to faith services, Father Craig found himself drawn toward his Lutheran church and was especially fascinated with the music aspect of the liturgy. He credits his gifted Sunday School teachers for cultivating that interest, which eventually lead him to study music at Concordia University in Ann Arbor.

After graduating with a degree concentrated in organ performance and choral conducting, Father Craig found himself working as the music director for St. Genevieve Catholic Church, Livonia, Mich., where he grew in both appreciation and curiosity for Catholicism.

“It made me inquisitive — was the Church really Catholic in its inception?” he says. But his road to becoming a Catholic would take a few detours along the way as his professional life took him to California, then Atlanta, and then finally back to Michigan.

It was while working at St. Genevieve that a good friend invited him to California to pursue a career with Hewlett Packard. He packed his bags and for the next 10 years held a number of positions earning promotions along the way, as well as a transfer to Atlanta. Then in the mid-1990s he decided to move back to Michigan and took a job with a start-up in Ann Arbor.

In his own words he was “enjoying the good life.”

Then tragedy struck.

His dad passed away at the age of 74 and as Father Craig explains, “I went to the wilderness that year.”

It was during this time that he began attending Our Lady of Good Counsel, Plymouth, Mich., and after instruction with the pastor and the RCIA leaders, Bob and Marian Smentowski, was welcomed into the Catholic Church on Pentecost Sunday 2001 — just a year after his father’s death.

Father Craig became involved in RCIA at the parish and remembers that, with just one year of official Catholicsm under his belt, he was asked to give a presentation on the Eucharist. He began devouring all the information he could, from books by fellow convert Scott Hahn to the writings of the early Church fathers.

“I was on fire for the faith, involved with my parish, attending daily Mass,” he remembers. His earnestness for his faith caught the attention of a fellow daily Mass goer.

“I was attending daily Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle in Ann Arbor and an elderly woman approached me and told me I should check out this ‘Men’s Fellowship’ group — she called it,” he remembers. “Well it turned out to be the Diocese of Lansing’s Cairo House, which is a program for men discerning the priesthood.”

It was during this time that Father Craig was exposed to praying the Liturgy of the Hours, an experience he describes as “very powerful.”

“I was doing financially very well — I owned my own home, had a successful career and plenty of time to pursue my hobbies. But yet with all that I really was feeling hollow about life. Oftentimes I would just pray at the foot of the Crucifix — look toward Jesus and ask Him, ‘What do you want from me.’

“My own brokenness made me rely on and depend on God,” he says, “that surrender made me look at the meaning of life in an entirely different way.”

For Father Craig that meaning meant pursuing the call to the priesthood. He entered seminary in 2004 and four years later was ordained a priest by Bishop James A. Murray. A special blessing, according to Father Craig, was that his mother had become Catholic the previous Easter and he was able to give her Communion as a newly ordained priest.

For those men discerning a vocation, Father extols the advantages of his own experience. His advice: “First go to college and then get some work experience. I really believe there’s a great deal of learning to be had when you’ve had the experience of being a self-sufficient person,” he says.

Now just past his tenth anniversary as a priest, Father is learning that his vocation may be demanding “but it’s a beautiful and fulfilling life. “Just being there [with people] as God’s priest can be the best thing I can do — to let God use me as his instrument.”

It’s a lesson he learned early on in his priesthood. He was coming back from a fellow priest’s first Mass when he hit an enormous traffic jam. “All the cars were being diverted to back roads due to a horrible accident on the interstate,” he remembers. “It was hot, I was ready to change out of my clerics and I couldn’t wait to get home.”

But as chance (or as he believes, likely the Holy Spirit) would have it, Father’s new route brought him face to face with another horrific car accident.

“I could see a man outside a car. Instinct kicked in and I just ran toward him. I was in my clerics and the police were yelling at me, but I chose to ignore them. A woman ran up to me and started begging me to anoint the man who was seriously injured. He was alive at the time I was able to anoint him, though he was unconscious.

“I remember thinking this is exactly where God wants me right now.”

Father learned later that the man had died.

“That was a divine moment,” he says.