The 2022 SCS Dean’s Report, which covers Academic Year 2021-2022, is the focus of this week’s Mission in Motion. The report tells a deeper story about how the School uniquely manifested Georgetown and Jesuit values throughout the year.
Each year, the SCS Dean’s Report offers a meaningful review of the School’s most significant work during the Academic Year and its vision for the year ahead. I like to think of this annual exercise as an Examen of sorts, given the document’s reflective spirit and the wide variety of student, staff, faculty, and alumni perspectives that give the report its life. In addition to individual articles authored by a breadth of voices, the report uses facts and figures to present a holistic snapshot on the state of SCS.
The framing of each report is instructive because it communicates to its readers something important about how the School lived out its prior year of work. This year’s document, “Forging Ahead,” tells the story in a series of reflections about how SCS returned from the pandemic to both pre-existing, pre-pandemic habits and to new ways of teaching, learning, and working together. As Dean Otter offers in her opening reflection, the balance of old and new ways of proceeding are reflected in the unique ways that SCS inspirits Georgetown and Jesuit values in its work: “The Dean’s Report is only a snapshot of achievements across our varied portfolio, and the diverse stories herein capture our community’s perseverance, and also our profound commitment to enacting our Georgetown and Jesuit values.” The document then provides multiple concrete examples of how SCS has put the mission into motion during Academic Year 2021-2022.
Many of the highlighted examples of work should be familiar to readers of this SCS Mission in Motion blog. For example, Miranda Mahmud, Manager of Communications, tells the story of Summer High School Programs returning to the Hilltop. You can read this past Mission in Motion post to learn more about the deeply mission-aligned Summer College Immersion Program (SCIP). Dr. Sherry Steeley, Associate Teaching Professor, goes into depth about the collaboration between the SCS English Language Center and Georgetown’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security that provided direct English language and professional development support to Afghan refugees (the blog shared more about this partnership in a post: “Serving a Community in Dispersion: Reflections on Sharing English Language Learning with Afghan Refugees”). And I authored a piece about how SCS celebrated the Ignatian Year 500 through a set of dedicated activities covered by Mission in Motion throughout 2021 and 2022. The article explores the special events, retreats, and experiential pilgrimages that characterized Georgetown’s embrace of its Ignatian heritage in this milestone year of celebration.
The annual publication of the SCS Dean’s Report is more than a static document about a point in time. The words that comprise this document, a project undertaken by a dedicated team of SCS staff, are living testimony to the School’s enduring commitment to Georgetown and Jesuit values. I hope you will take a closer look at this year’s report and reflect from your unique position in the SCS community about how you have forged ahead over the last year of life and work.
This week’s Mission in Motion savors the scenes from the SCS student and faculty holiday party that attracted hundreds to the 640 Massachusetts Avenue campus.
Psalm of Praise
Sing for joy in summer
When earth is bright and green.
Sing with fun in winter
When snow is velveteen.
In spring sing out with gusto
For the life to soon unfold—
And sing with zest in autumn
For the woodlands colored gold.
Joan Stephen
In another first in a year of firsts since 2019, SCS hosted a student and faculty holiday party this week in the atrium of the 640 Massachusetts Avenue campus. With hundreds of revelers and a bountiful spread of food, drink, and good cheer, the party was a joyous gathering that felt even more so because of the absence of such an event in over three years. The occasion of merriment would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of the SCS Events, Communications, and Operations teams.
Joan Stephen’s “Psalm of Praise” comes to my mind and heart as I reflect on this experience. Every season of the year holds for us some special gifts. This wintertime, we anticipate closing the books on another busy fall semester just in time for a meaningful break for the Christmas and New Year holidays. Stephen invites us to “sing with fun in winter.” While I did not detect any audible singing in the atrium, I did observe the sparks of spontaneously arising affection, warmth, and excitement as students ran into faculty members they did not expect to see and staff members celebrated with one another as another successful semester comes to a close.
The spirit of praise was detectable throughout the space. A gratitude wall invited guests to name the notable gifts they wanted to publicly appreciate about their experience at Georgetown. A festive card-making station offered a welcome opportunity to amplify the spirit of holiday in a colorful and creative way. And melodious tunes and delicious small plates added to the chorus of conversation and laughter. It felt to me, one week after the SCS faculty and staff retreat, like another important milestone on the road to journeying back to each other as a community bonded together by the Georgetown journey.
The holiday party invites deeper reflection about how to enter into the joys of the season. As you approach the coming holiday break, how will you take time for rest, renewal, and gratitude?
Holidays, and especially this one, can be difficult for people. And there is a need to be gracious and understanding about the burdens that many carry in their silence at a time of year that brings to the surface much sadness and despair. But at the same time, this season can be a time to welcome the gifts of ourselves and each other. The celebrations of this season can become meaningful occasions to savor the goodness that we encounter in the people around us. The joy of this season also resides in the expectation of the coming rest.
In the spirit of the holiday break, I invite you to rest and reflect during your brief but welcome time away from study and work. I invite you to consider: How are you going to find time in the next few weeks to pause and reflect on what in your life is worthy of your greater praise? How will you mark the occasion of rest from work and school in a way that helps you savor this season? What is stirring in you as a possible course correction or transformation in your inner life or external actions as we approach the new year?
This week, members of the SCS staff and faculty community made their way out to Georgetown’s Calcagnini Contemplative Center for a day retreat. Nestled between the gratitude themes of Thanksgiving and the joyful anticipation themes of the coming holidays, the day-long retreat offered a welcome bit of pause from the demands of daily work.
I co-led the retreat with Rabbi Rachel Gartner, SCS Senior Advisor for Pastoral Care, and we began the day by inviting the group to open themselves up to the experience. While the day retreat might feel like a limited window for meaningful reflection, we encouraged everyone to allow themselves to fully experience the transformative potential of a few short hours away from campus.
This week’s Mission in Motion is about the SCS Faculty and Staff Retreat, “Reconnection, Relaxation, and Reflection,” that took place at Georgetown’s Calcagnini Contemplative Center this week.
In a circle, retreatants reflected on the meaning of work in their lives and how that meaning has potentially shifted over the years of pandemic, transition, and return. Offering wisdom from the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Rachel invited the group to consider the joys, the challenges, and the so-so of work life.
Rabbi Rachel’s series of questions invited deeper reflection on each person’s “why” at work. This open-ended question led to a final question about the possibility of making a change, either internally or in an external action of some kind, that puts one in closer touch with the why of their day-to-day life. The group grew in its understanding, empathy, and kinship by listening to what individuals anonymously named as their own thoughts and feelings. Within an hour of arriving, the group had already begun to develop some significant communal bonds.
In the afternoon, I offered a short presentation on the examen of consciousness and then led the group in the practice. By taking stock of each component of the “long, loving, look at the real,” we can appreciate that taking time for pause and quiet in our day, reflecting on the meaning of our daily experience, is possible even without a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains. A daily examen can happen anywhere and its practicality reflects the Spirit of Georgetown value of Contemplation in Action.
Like the retreat offered for SCS students last spring, this was the first in-person retreat of its kind for SCS faculty and staff in over three years. The desire to be reconnected to one another in person, in a community-building setting, was evident throughout the experience. I noticed the joys that are possible when colleagues, some who did not know each other, come together in a relaxed and reverential setting with the explicit purpose of slowing down and savoring the particular details of our daily lives. I noticed myself feeling deep joy overhearing laughter and energized conversation at lunch. I also noticed the formation of deeper relationships between co-workers and a deeper appreciation of the possibilities of living out the Spirit of Georgetown.
The retreat focused on practices intended to spur deeper individual and communal reflections about the meaning of work.
We left Calcagnini with a renewed sense of how we can serve Georgetown’s mission as individuals and as a community. And we left the retreat with an energy about the need to pause every day to notice and savor the world around us and the world within us.
Rabbi Rachel ended the morning session with Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House,” which is a fitting affirmation of the need for retreats like this one.
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
As we near the Thanksgiving holiday, it feels appropriate to reflect on the place of gratitude in our individual lives and in our collective experience at Georgetown SCS. The Jesuit tradition of spirituality, embodied in the practice of the examen, makes gratitude the centerpiece of regular reflection and prayer. Growing in awareness of the gifts of our daily lives, from small details to the major sources of thanksgiving, can shape us into ever more generous, more discerning, and more large-hearted people. To enter into reflection on our lives in a spirit of gratitude makes us more available to become the authentic people we are called to be. St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, believed that gratitude was the proper response to our encounter with the divine.
It is important to note that naming gratitude does not always come easy. And it is ok to acknowledge that today, this week, or this semester has not surfaced much gratitude in our reflective awareness. It is not advised to force an expression of gratitude when it does not feel true to who we are or the reality of the world around us. If you’re in a place like this, you might need to pursue support, help, and guidance from friends, mentors, and trusted guides who can accompany you in your journey and help locate the blockages to experiencing gratitude. But we must also acknowledge that the social reality around us also gets in the way of freely naming a sense of our gifts. The endless episodes of senseless violence, including the recent shooting at the University of Virginia, and the reality of injustice and oppression make us more aware of our responsibility to build up and restore the common good. But this awareness of suffering and injustice might also make us feel the opposite of gratitude.
In this week’s Mission in Motion, we pause in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday to savor gratitude in our individual lives and in our collective experience of Georgetown SCS. Several events this week at SCS, including a Thanksgiving potluck and an Instagram Live for Jesuit Heritage Month with alumna Karim Trueblood, were sources of gratitude.
This week at SCS has surfaced much gratitude. Students and faculty are hard at work in their courses, nearing the end of a full semester. This community is also finding ways to build community and convene outside the classroom. This past week, SCS staff helped put together a series of dynamic public events, including a fall lecture series by Project Management, an International Student Series about the H-1B hosted by Hoya Peers to Peers, a Community Listening Circle for faculty and staff hosted by the Diversity, Equity, Belonging and Inclusion Council (DEBIC), an Instagram Live session for Jesuit Heritage Month with alumna Karim Trueblood, and a Rock Creek Hike hosted by the English Language Center (ELC). The ELC introduced its students to the American rituals of Thanksgiving by offering a panel discussion of SCS colleagues reflecting on their own holiday traditions. For faculty and staff, ELC also organized a Thanksgiving-themed potluck lunch.
This is just a small list of the many ways that SCS students, faculty, staff, and alumni are working to construct a more just and generous society and world and realizing the Spirit of Georgetown’s commitment to becoming People for Others. However you experience next week’s Thanksgiving, I hope that you can find some quiet time to savor the gifts of your life.
In recent years, SCS has deepened and expanded the presence and integration of Mission and Ministry in the life of the community. Mission in Motion has highlighted these efforts, including dedicated retreats, pedagogical and faculty support, communications, and course offerings. Bringing the Spirit of Georgetown to life has included opportunities for service-learning, community and global engagement in Washington, D.C., and beyond, and advocacy for justice and the common good. All of this work is presented in an inclusive and invitational way, presenting Jesuit values in a holistic and context-tailored manner that sparks inspiration and reflection for our diverse community.
SCS is growing this commitment to the Spirit of Georgetown with the appointment of Rabbi Rachel Gartner as Senior Advisor of Spiritual Care. Rabbi Rachel arrives at SCS having served for more than a decade as Rabbi and Director of Jewish Life at Georgetown. Rabbi Rachel brings many professional gifts with her to the work of animating the SCS community with mission and values. I am so excited to work alongside Rabbi Rachel because I have witnessed firsthand her skillfulness in interfaith engagement, her resourcefulness for spiritual accompaniment, and her creativity in meeting the pastoral care needs of a diverse constituency. I could go on!
I encourage you to watch this introductory video by Rabbi Rachel that now lives on the SCS YouTube page. As you watch, I encourage you to pay attention to three important points articulated by Rabbi Rachel:
The work of spiritual care is to deepen, develop, and diversity SCS Mission and Ministry offerings so as to enhance the lives, learning, and leadership of ever-growing circles of the SCS community;
Interfaith engagement is so powerful because different traditions can provide new angles, food for further thought, and sometimes deeper illumination about the places where traditions connect without having to connect in every place; and
The Ignatian, Jesuit tradition of education, spirituality, and mission presents resonances and entry points for other religious, non-religious, and spiritual traditions.
This is such an important message for a diverse community like SCS. Mission lacks meaning unless it comes alive, and it only does so when deeper connections are made within the context of one’s lived experience. Rabbi Rachel offers a fresh perspective on how to do this work by bringing her considerable experience in pastoral care and interfaith engagement to bear on the opportunities and challenges facing our community. In a turn toward the practical, Rabbi Rachel’s introductory video ends with a “how” of this work: an invitation to Journey together on the path of mutual discovery through inclusive retreats and informative and inspiring communications.
This week’s Mission in Motion highlights Georgetown’s Jesuit Heritage Month, which includes a special Instagram Live with SCS alum Karim Trueblood.
Every year, Georgetown explores the enduring contribution of the University’s Jesuit heritage and values through an entire month of programming. You can check out the diverse array of activities occurring across Georgetown that invite participants into a deeper consideration of what the five centuries of tradition of Jesuit spirituality and education mean today. Jesuit Heritage Month can be especially helpful for community members who do not know much about Georgetown’s Jesuit characteristics and desire to learn more.
Mission in Motion attempts to narrate the myriad ways that SCS lives out Jesuit values across the school community. This blog is intentional about practically telling the story of mission and values at SCS by emphasizing how this work is approached inclusively and invitationally, encouraging everyone in the community to take part in activating the core principles of the Spirit of Georgetown. The emphasis is on the “motion” of the mission, signaling that mission and values are critical because they inform how we act more generously and justly in the world. The religious diversity of SCS is celebrated in these posts and Jesuit values are offered as a resource for deeper learning and service for everyone, especially in the context of the diversity of lived experience and religious identity.
SCS uniquely manifests the Spirit of Georgetown in curricular innovations, like instructional design processes that intentionally incorporate Jesuit values into online and on-ground courses. All of the Master of Professional Studies programs include a core class in Ethics that explores professional decision-making from diverse philosophical vantage points, with special attention on the contribution of Ignatian discernment and Jesuit values. And a dedicated community-based learning course, “Jesuit Values in Professional Practice,” allows degree-seeking students to deeply explore the implications of incorporating Jesuit-inspired reflection practices, like the examen of consciousness, for professional life.
With the uniqueness of the SCS way of living out Georgetown’s Jesuit values in mind, it is very exciting that Georgetown’s Jesuit Heritage Month will include a special SCS event. On November 17 at 3:00 p.m. ET on the School’s Instagram, I will sit down and talk with Karim Trueblood, SCS alum of the Class of 2019. Mission in Motion has featured Karim on the blog and explored her distinct ways that she made Jesuit values part of her curricular and co-curricular experience at SCS.
I am very excited about the Instagram live conversation because Karim’s story of personal discovery is an inspiration for anyone who wants to live out the University’s mission and values but may not know where to start. A graduate of the Master of Professional Studies in Emergency & Disaster Management, Karim models so well how every person has their own special sacred story and no one’s story is exactly like anyone else’s. The most compelling stories are so often filled with surprises and unexpected turns. Karim will help us understand how Georgetown SCS fits into her ongoing pilgrimage of life and work. Tune in and learn more about how Karim is helping set the world on fire!
This week’s post highlights an event hosted at SCS and convened by Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life: “What Is the Good Life Now? Work, Relationships, Faith, and Wholeness Today.” You can watch a recording of the event and reflect on the deep questions that were considered. Photo courtesy of the Initiative’s website.
Readers of this SCS Mission in Motion blog should be well aware that Georgetown does not shy away from asking big questions about the meaning of life. What distinguishes Georgetown’s approach is how these big questions are asked in a way that is not only about the conceptual and theoretical dimensions. Georgetown strives to encourage “the meaning of life” discussion and deliberation in a manner that stimulates practical responses and positive changes in the way that we individually and collectively live together in society. At SCS, our mission commitment is directly related to the transformation of professional and continuing education students who arrive at various points in the life cycle of their careers.
In light of the significant flux and social, economic, political, cultural, and religious disruptions of the last few years, there seem to be fewer bigger questions than this: “What is the good life now?” And this question was asked this week when SCS hosted Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life for its first in-person event at 640 Massachusetts Avenue in over three years. SCS has gratefully partnered with the Initiative in the past on these special events, which are offered as part of Salt and Light Gatherings for young faith-motivated leaders in the Washington, D.C., area who desire to explore the links between faith, moral traditions (especially the resources from Catholic social thought), and their own lives and work. The event took place in three phases: a welcoming happy hour, a panel discussion, and a reception that followed building on the conversation.
The event brought together young professionals in the D.C. area at the SCS Campus. Conversation and community-building preceded and followed the panel conversation.
I found the framing questions for the event to be thought-provoking and useful for generating deeper personal and communal reflection, so I want to share them here:
What does “the good life” look like for young leaders in Washington and the United States today? What contributes to the good life? What threatens it?
How can young people find meaning, participation, balance, and wholeness while dealing with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health challenges, political polarization, debates over human life and dignity, and economic, environmental, and racial justice issues?
How can faith and Catholic social thought inform and guide our choices, actions, and how we live our lives?
In the SCS auditorium as well as a live-streamed broadcast, panelists pondered philosophy, religion, politics, economics, technology, and social media.
The talented panel brought together faith-motivated leaders with different perspectives and life experience, including a Notre Dame philosophy professor, a Boston College psychology professor, an author and policy advocacy director, and a young professional who has worked on immigration issues. You can watch a recording and relive the lively discussion. You can also consult a helpful list of additional resources prepared for the event.
I listened in on the conversation and noted a creative tension as a theme: the need for balance between working out one’s own philosophy of life and needing to rely on the wisdom, support, care, and teachings of others in developing this personal vision. To respect a philosophical heritage that is over 2,000 years old does not mean that one’s definition of living a good life has to conform precisely to someone else’s. Instead, determining the meaning of a good life has to take into account all of the unique factors of one’s lived experience and social influences. It is not wise nor possible to enforce a single definition of what living the good life means. But we can benefit from sustained reflection on the meaning of the exemplar actions, teachings, writings, and thinking of the wisdom that we have inherited through the ages.
So much of the conversation came back to the fundamental need to develop healthy habits of interiority and discernment. Readers of the blog will recognize these as consistent themes expressed about the way to live out the Spirit of Georgetown. No one else can claim your own interior experience. Cultivating a deep inner life, regardless of the “what” that you profess to believe about the biggest, most ultimate questions, is a solid starting point for journeying in the direction of your good life.
This week, Mission in Motion considers contemplation as a response to an overly utilitarian approach to time. The upcoming graduate and professional retreat offers an opportunity for living out the Spirit of Georgetown value of “contemplation in action.”
The upcoming graduate and professional student retreat, “Rest, Recharge, Renew,” is being offered as an opportunity for busy students to take some time away from the pressures of work and school and enjoy each other’s company in a beautiful, natural setting. The motivation for organizing the retreat is as simple as the tagline: rest, recharge, and renew. Graduate and professional students are accustomed to daily and weekly routines that require rigorous time management in order to fulfill their obligations as students balancing lives outside of the classroom. Making the time and space for this kind of structured experience of relaxation in the company of other students is well worth the effort. Making space for retreat, a temporary interruption and dislocation from daily routines, is a healthy and fulfilling use of time.
The retreat has me reflecting on the nature of time and how graduate and professional students relate to time. If we take seriously the Spirit of Georgetown value of “contemplation in action,” which is the value that motivates retreat programs across the University, how do we make sense of the tension between these ideas? How does the seeming paradox of “contemplation” and “action” relate to the life of a graduate student at Georgetown? What from the many spiritual traditions represented at Georgetown can help us answer these fundamental questions?
Despite the disciplinary diversity of graduate and professional programs, I think a common trait of these students is the limited amount of time for activities that might be considered non-essential. The weekly calendar quickly fills up when school, work, home, and social activities are added. Economists tend to make a distinction between “leisure” and “work,” but this simple distinction does not seem to capture well the in-between range of activities. Perhaps unlike traditional residential undergraduate students taking four years to earn a degree, graduate students have a more utilitarian relationship to time. The stakes seem to be higher for older adult students with more responsibilities and the discernments about how to use their non-essential time for activity require lots of negotiation and planning. As someone with a full family and work schedule, I can appreciate these tensions.
But even busy adults who have important tasks to accomplish everyday can develop an unhealthy relationship to time. The theater critic Walter Kerr in the book The Decline of Pleasure captures the tendency to equate virtue with constant activity: “Only useful time is valuable, meaningful, moral. Activity that is not clearly, concretely useful to oneself or others is worthless, meaningless, immoral.” This utilitarian interpretation of the meaning of how we use our time has some negative consequences. For the purpose of this reflection, I think a concerning outcome of this mentality is that if time becomes a possession that we acquire, then it becomes more difficult to pause and make meaning of our lives in the midst of our activity. The questions that should be orienting our work and activity can be pushed aside if we don’t intentionally make time to ask our core questions: Who am I as a person? What matters to me? What is the “why” of my life? And what path do I need to travel in order to realize my deeper purpose?
This is where the value of contemplation comes in and can relate harmoniously with the life of action. It is important to note that there is not a single, universal way of naming and understanding a vast concept like “contemplation.” Various philosophical, religious, spiritual, and humanistic traditions have different understandings of this term and its implication for practices. I’ll be relying on an invitational and inclusive understanding of contemplation taken from the Jesuit tradition of education and spirituality. The Jesuit Walter Burghardt describes contemplation as a “long loving look at the real.” This is a way of considering contemplation and the practices it inspires as “experiential awareness of reality” and a “way of entering into communion with reality.” But what do the pieces of this definition mean for graduate and professional students? Let’s take each of these components.
Real: This is the stuff of your life that cannot be reduced to abstract concepts. The real is people, things, nature, objects, etc. Reality is living and pulsing, concrete and singular. Look: This is not analysis or interpretation, but communion with the stuff of our reality by noticing and engaging reality with all of our senses. For Burghardt, to look is to feel and to experience in our senses the fact of our whole person gazing at reality. To contemplate is to be aware that we are physical bodies in a world of other bodies. Long: This is not a recipe for length of time in contemplation, but an invitation to be unhurried about it. Burghardt describes the long nature of contemplation as rest: “[T]o rest in the real, not lifelessly or languidly, not sluggishly or inertly.” These long looks can happen on a walk, on a train ride to work, in the office or classroom, picking up our kids from school, etc. The point is that our contemplative gazing is “whole person enraptured” with full senses. And finally, loving: Contemplation is not always delightful or comforting and sometimes it surfaces the wounds and hurts of our lives. By lovingly entering into contemplation, we make it more likely that our response will be more generous and more compassionate toward others. Contemplation is not actually individualistic or indulgent navel gazing.
There is no monolithic way to translate this understanding of contemplation into meaningful practices. The “how” of contemplation depends on the individual person and their full context of life. Burghardt’s suggestions for how to do this are reflected in the upcoming graduate and professional retreat. He recommends that we can develop the capacity for long, loving looks at the real by 1) interrupting our ordinary patterns of life (by going on retreat!); 2) developing a feeling for festivity; 3) building habits of play and wonder; 4) learning not to expect profit from our contemplation or possession of our objects of delight; and 5) finding guides and mentors to accompany us along the way.
My hope is that the invitation to bring together “contemplation” and “action” sparks something for you. Find a retreat, spiritual companion, leadership coach, affirming community of peers, etc. And next time you feel yourself judging yourself for any empty pockets on your schedule, I invite you to reconsider your relationship with time. We can slow life down even in a few free moments with a long, loving look at the real.
This post relies on Walter Burghardt’s article, “Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real,” as reproduced in An Ignatian Spirituality Reader, edited by George Traub (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2008).
This week’s Mission in Motion shines a light on the October 22 BellRinger Ride to end cancer by funding research at Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. SCS has come together to support BellRinger as a community, including by donating to Team SCS
Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Washington’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, does critically important research that translates into clinical practice. The accelerated search for a cure to this disease and more effective treatments are supported by Lombardi’s invaluable work. Framed around the Spirit of Georgetown value cura personalis (or care of the whole person), the Lombardi Center, as part of the Georgetown University Medical Center, brings the University’s mission and values to life through its life-saving care and research. Almost everyone has a deeply personal experience with cancer, so the work of Lombardi and other comprehensive cancer centers is urgent for many.
A year-round grassroots effort to end cancer by supporting the Lombardi Center has led to BellRinger, an inaugural bike ride taking place October 22-23, 2022. BellRinger is a promising community movement fueled by riders raising funds for cancer research. There are many ways to contribute and you can participate as a physical rider, a virtual rider, a volunteer, or by donating funds to the cause. What is energizing about BellRinger is the way that this inaugural ride weekend presents an important mission commitment. SCS has responded to this invitation to animate Georgetown’s mission by inviting its students, alumni, staff, and faculty to come together and make the BellRinger ride an enriching community bonding experience.
It is not too late to join Team SCS and participate in the BellRinger Weekend. You can donate to Team SCS and you can still register for the big ride as part of SCS. A virtual kick-off for SCS is taking place on Friday, October 14 from 12:00 to 12:30 p.m. ET. SCS community members can register for the kick-off meeting and learn helpful tips from BellRinger representatives about preparing for October 22. I invite you to check out SCS Dean Kelly Otter’s Instagram story extending an invitation to consider joining this important effort. BellRinger is truly a mission-grounded opportunity to share in helping end cancer and enjoy each other’s company along the ride!
This week’s post is about a new welcome video shared with SCS students that invites reflection and meaning-making during the early stages of a new semester. You can watch the video and then explore the Spirit of Georgetown.
What does it feel like to begin something new? When you start a new experience for the first time, what are you paying attention to? What grabs your awareness? How do you transition from the beginning to the next stages of a new thing?
These are the kinds of questions that all students at SCS ask when a new semester starts. Whether you’re a continuing student steadily or quickly making progress in your degree or non-degree program, or just starting out at the School, every student grapples with big questions in the first few days and weeks of a new semester. So often, in my experience, new students are navigating a mix of emotions related to a range of the student experience. There might be nerves about logistics and work-life balance, such as: How can I make this academic program fit into my daily life? Others might be uncertain about their course selections and eager to better understand what their faculty members are like. And other concerns might be about the social aspect of the learning experience: Will I fit in here? Do I belong?
One of my favorite lines from the author T.S. Eliot is that “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.” The lesson that we can take from Eliot, I believe, is that a new semester is as good a time as any to consider the deeper meaning of our time at Georgetown. The crunch of early semester business might not seem like an opportune time for deeper reflection, but I believe that the first weeks of a new experience provide the best opportunity to get in touch with the bigger picture of our lives as we navigate the details of the day-to-day.
Luckily at Georgetown, we have a set of resources and tools for students to do the work of meaning-making about their learning experiences. The Spirit of Georgetown, 10 values distilled from five centuries of Jesuit history and educational innovation, facilitate this kind of deeper exploration.
So as the dust settles on the first few weeks of the semester, the SCS Mission and Ministry team offers a new welcome message to help students consider the deeper meaning of their student experience.
We hope students will receive the message at a fruitful time in the life of the semester, perhaps at a time that students are more eager to pursue some of their bigger questions than they were in week one. Some of these questions might be: How is my coursework informing my reflection about what kind of professional I want to become? What are my unique gifts and talents and how can I apply them in class assignments and extra-curricular opportunities? What is there about being a Georgetown student that goes beyond what happens in my classes?
SCS students are supported through various programs and events to seek greater meaning, purpose, and belonging. Retreats are great (like this upcoming Graduate and Professional Student retreat) for this kind of structured reflection. And there are other ways that SCS accompanies the spiritual life of its students. New experiences, like starting a graduate program after years in the workforce or transitioning into an entirely new career path, can be filled with uncertainty and worry. But these experiences can also serve as invaluable opportunities to discern how we are called to seek something greater in our daily lives.
