A new academic year brings with it so much anticipation. These feelings are experienced in both similar and different ways by our students, faculty, and staff. Many new students are likely asking: Do I belong at Georgetown? Can I effectively balance my academic, professional, and family commitments? What decisions will I make during my time at the University that will have a lasting impact on my future? Our staff members are likely asking: How can I best serve these incoming students? What challenges in the student experience should I be prepared for? How do we handle both the sameness of a new semester and its unpredictability? And our faculty are likely asking: How can I innovate and refine my craft of teaching in a way that registers with my students? How will I engage sensitive discussions that will inevitably arise about the U.S. presidential election and conflicts in the Middle East? What will inspire me when the semester feels long and the work is tiring?
All of these are questions that I have either heard from others or asked of myself as a student, staff, and faculty member. I think that the recurrence of these kinds of questions is a healthy sign for an academic institution like Georgetown with a lasting mission and set of values that are intended to guide our way. In his article in America Magazine, “The Classroom as Holy Ground,” former Georgetown Vice President for Mission & Ministry, Fr. Kevin O’Brien, S.J., describes the nervousness at the root of this regular experience of working in education:
“Every semester begins the same way. I walk to the door of the classroom and catch my breath. Like an actor walking on stage, the nervousness of a teacher on the first day—or any day—is natural. It is the same now that I am teaching college as it was when I taught high school before joining the Jesuits. The more I teach, however, the more I realize that it is not just nervousness I feel on the first day. Along with the anxiety is awe, because I am beginning to appreciate how the classroom is holy ground, a place where I can encounter God.”
In this way, the pre-semester nerves of a new academic year tell us that something deeper, more meaningful than surface-level worry is happening when our attentions turn to the start of fall classes. If we give ourselves the time and space, we can actually convert these anticipatory feelings into some soul-searching and self-discovery that can animate our personal and professional growth at Georgetown. Our jitters can become our joys. I believe that our mission and our Jesuit and multi-faith traditions can inform this journey for all students, faculty, and staff as they begin anew this fall.
Here are three suggestions arising from Georgetown’s religious heritage that you might consider as a new academic year gets underway:
- Pay Attention to Your Feelings: There is something very important about spending a little time each day pausing, slowing down, and growing in awareness of your inner experience of the day’s activities. The Ignatian tradition offers a spiritual practice, the Examen, to help with this need to slow down and process the many emotions that we experience on a daily basis. By regularly attending to the flow and movement of our feelings, we become more able to recognize patterns, both consoling and desolating, and then make better choices about how to flourish and live into our gifts and talents and pursue our mission and purpose in life. Try attending a Digital Daily Meditation (sign up here) if you would like to practice these kinds of pause moments during your semester.
- Engage Your Georgetown Experience with All of Your Senses: The Spirit of Georgetown invites us to educate Whole Persons who become Contemplatives in Action. To realize this ambitious vision of personal formation, we must allow ourselves to enter into every learning experience by using not only our heads but also our hearts and our hands. The transformative potential of a Jesuit education is only possible when we use all of our mental, emotional, spiritual, psychological, and physical faculties in the knowledge process. St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, would strongly encourage you to daydream, use your imagination, and savor your sensory experiences.
- Find a Mentor or Guide To Accompany Your Journey: The spiritual life should not be a solitary venture. Instead, the inner journey of the self should be joined with resources in a community, including the steady guidance of trained spiritual teachers and directors. St. Ignatius counseled that retreatants be paired with these trusted guides who could help direct a path to deep inner knowing and experience of the Divine. Today, we might say that any kind of mentor figure, whether a leadership coach, advisor, counselor, chaplain, or spiritual director, can play this role. Regardless of the type, I encourage you to find someone to accompany you and journey alongside your Georgetown experience.
I hope the coming weeks reveal new possibilities for you. As your fall semester journey begins, whether this is your first semester at Georgetown or your twentieth, I wish you peace on the next steps.