A signature event of November’s Jesuit Heritage Month at Georgetown took place this week in the Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart. Organized as a Sacred Lecture (which Mission in Motion has written about before), the event featured former Georgetown President, Fr. Leo O’Donovan, S.J., reflecting at length about “Coming Home.” The intention of the lecture was to promote deeper consideration about the various meanings of the word “home,” which can be opened up with questions like: “Is ‘home’ the place we can always return to? How does the Gospel call us to respond to ‘the homeless’? Is ‘home’ an appropriate image for heaven? And what practical effect does our understanding of home have on how we live our daily lives?” In an hour’s time, Fr. O’Donovan gave the audience plenty to think about in response to these questions.
The lecture provoked some deeper pondering about how “home” can be understood both as a particular place in time with material reality as well as a more cosmically-significant reference. Fr. O’Donovan had in mind the person of Jesus who was incarnated, in one sense, into the material history of human existence at a particular place in time but also, on the other hand, is a living, present reality according to Christian Theology in the wider cosmos. In this way, God is both very particular and very much totally complete in a way that no finite person, place, or thing can be. This might seem like a very philosophical observation, but I think that the duality of “home” as particular and universal has much relevance for us at Georgetown.
Recently, Mission and Motion has increased explicit reflection about the meaning of the Capitol Campus’s evolution in downtown D.C. I found myself making some concrete connections between the various meanings of “home” presented in the Sacred Lecture and our understanding of the Capitol Campus as a growing “home” for Georgetown. Fr. O’Donovan talked about how beauty can be uncovered in the “always new, always surprising.” In so many ways, the Capitol Campus, a project very much still in progess, reflects this potential. So much is new and so much is and will be surprising about this experience. But the Capitol Campus is also already a home to so many: both the existing academic units that inhabit the spaces of the Downtown East neighborhood, but also the student residents who occupy the rooms of the 55H dormitory. This literal home will grow to become more of a home to more students as the Capitol Campus enlarges.
As we reflect on the meaning of the Georgetown “home,” we are invited to consider the many ways that the University is a home. In the religious sense, Georgetown is a Catholic, Jesuit home for all faiths. In the disciplinary sense, Georgetown is a home for a wide array of humanistic, professional, and graduate programs. In the geographic sense, Georgetown is a global home for many different campuses, institutes, and experiential learning opportunities. And in the urban sense, Georgetown is a “home” within the home of Washington, D.C., a physical reality becoming more and more evident as the Capitol Campus emerges in new buildings and facility renovations. In these ways, there are both particular manifestations of Georgetown as a physical home but also ways that Georgetown is a more universal home in light of our mission.
Fr. O’ Donovan shared that “home” is at one level the places where we most learn to be ourselves. This process is only realized if we give our time in a “home” to patience and fidelity to our truest selves. As we end this week and prepare for the months ahead, I invite you to consider where you are finding your “home” these days. How might you be called to grow in self-awareness and self-actualization about who you most authentically are in the places you call home?