Category: Spiritual Life

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Welcome to the Spring Semester!

Preparing for Inclement Weather | Office of Emergency Management | Georgetown University
This week’s post invites a reflective pause at the beginning of a chilly and snowy spring semester. As you enter this new period, what are your desires for this semester? How are you taking time to pause and reflect?  

The spring semester is upon us! It is a funny time to enter a “spring” season when the weather in Washington, D.C. feels pretty far away from the delightful summer temperatures of May. As is customary in the life of an academic institution, however, the changing of the semester is an opportunity to reflectively transition from what came before to what comes next. The life of a university seems to stop between semesters but the world obviously does not. We enter a 2025, both filled with hope and possibility and mired in despair and suffering, evidenced by the devastating wildfires this week in California. Such an event reminds us of the mission of Georgetown for which we are all responsible and calls us to transform our education into a generous force for justice and the common good.

SCS is a dynamic and diverse learning community whose students operate within a range of program formats, meeting times, and modalities. However, every semester at SCS welcomes new members to our community. So whether you’re a new SCS student beginning your first semester, a continuing student, or a member of our faculty or staff, this opportunity to slow down, catch your breath, and prepare your mind, body, and spirit for the coming semester might be a welcome invitation. Here are three ideas for how to meaningfully enter into quiet before a new semester begins. 

Renew. As you prepare for a new Georgetown semester, take some time to get in touch with your motivation for being here. What drew you to Georgetown? What inspired you to take on your particular program? What are your desires for your experience at this University? As you begin to reflect on these questions of your “why,” it might help for you to familiarize yourself with the deeper purpose of Georgetown as an educational community. You can spend this time with this Mission in Motion post: New to SCS? An Introduction to Georgetown’s Mission and Values in Four Points. 

Review. Spending time renewing your commitment to your Georgetown education might lead you to consider your future and where you are heading. But it is also important to take stock of where you have been and how you arrived at this current moment. Reviewing your past for the sake of reflecting on how your prior lived experience might inform your present and future is at the heart of the Jesuit spirituality that animates the mission of Georgetown. New members of our community might benefit from better understanding how Georgetown lives out its Catholic and Jesuit mission by reading through the most recent Mission Priority Examen self-study report. One of the core practices arising from the Jesuit tradition that helps in this review process is the examen of consciousness. You might consider signing up for the SCS Daily Digital Meditation sessions, which include a weekly examen that occurs every Friday. In whatever ways you construct a practice of review, I invite you to explore how your present self reflects the authentic fullness of your entire journey of life. 

Recharge. Taking up “rest” as a meaningful practice of spiritual wellness is a challenge in a culture that values constant activity and valuing one’s life choices on the basis of utility or value maximation. Rabbi Rachel Gartner, SCS Senior Advisor for Pastoral Care, reminds us that the Jewish tradition of “Shabbat” requires that we “leave behind the regular flow of time and the productivity we imbed in it. We do this not in order to escape life, but in order to enter into it more deeply.” My hope is that you can find some intentional ways to truly rest in the time as this busy semester gets underway. Take lots of walks and try to transform your walks into spiritual experiences (you can even try out a Walking Examen!). Take time for silence. Truly enjoy the company of others. Give yourself some space to unplug from the daily distractions. Your soul will thank you! 

One of the great joys of working at Georgetown is welcoming new members into our community multiple times in the year. There is so much anticipation as a new semester begins. The anticipation at SCS is even greater in this new year as we plan for a move to 111 Massachusetts Avenue this summer and the creation of an ever more cohesive Capitol Campus. My hope is that you can savor these chilly days and arrive most fully in the early weeks of this new semester. 

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Former Georgetown President, Fr. Leo O’Donovan, S.J., Reflects on “Coming Home”

This week’s post reflects on the Sacred Lecture given by Fr. Leo O’Donovan, S.J., during Jesuit Heritage Month. 

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. 

A panoramic view of Dahlgren Chapel during this week’s Sacred Lecture. Dahlgren is the spiritual home of the University’s Catholic community. 

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?  

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Civic Examen Helps Georgetown Community Reflect on the Emotions of Election Season

This week’s post reflects on the range of emotions caused by election season. In the Ignatian tradition, the examen is an indispensable spiritual resource for navigating and discerning the movements and directions of our feelings. 

As the nation’s political capital, Washington, D.C. is uniquely focused on politics and policy. There are certainly other parts of the country where the daily chatter about the latest in political news is loud but no place comes close to the high volume in D.C. With voters besieged by television, streaming, and internet advertisements, with news coverage dominated by commentary about national, state, and local elections, and with polls continuously offering assessments of candidate races, it seems that conversation about the coming election is everywhere. At Georgetown, a university with a stated commitment to realizing justice and the common good, leveraging its D.C. location to support a range of curricular and co-curricular programs related to politics and policy, discourse, discussion, and activity related to election season is omnipresent. 

While there are many in our community who follow political events as part of their work and study and relish in this, many others find themselves overwhelmed by the frenetic pace–not only of political news but also the saturation of political chatter in seemingly every space of our lives. As Pope Francis reminds not only global Catholics but people of good will around the world, political participation is a virtue and a means to realizing the common good. Even if the frequency and volume at election season can feel like too much, it is important to remember that the democratic process demands active engagement. However fatigued we might become by them (especially as they seemingly start earlier and earlier every cycle), political elections are a healthy and necessary part of exercising our civic responsibilities. 

Just because elections are important, and our participation in them carries moral obligations, does not mean that we should not express our stress and overwhelmed feelings during election season. I have noticed in my work just how much the elections on November 5 are bearing down on members of our community. At times like this, we are reminded that reflection resources are critically important whenever we find ourselves needing to take a critical distance from whatever is pressing in on our daily lives. Thankfully, Georgetown is in a position to offer spaces and resources to its community that encourage us to pause, reflect, discern, and then return back to the pressing actions of our personal and professional activities at election time. 

Last week, as part of a university-wide menu of Election Care programs, I offered “A Civic Examen: Spiritual Grounding in the Ignatian Tradition at Election Time.” Modeled on the adapted examen created by the national organization, Ignatian Solidarity Network, this civic examen brought together the university community desiring a reflective and quiet space to journey together the tumult of feelings at election time. Ignatian spirituality, animated by a practical desire to help busy and civically-engaged people discern the inner movements of God in the midst of engaged lives for the purpose of more loving and mission-energized actions in the world, is well-suited to this kind of reflection. And the Ignatian charism, oriented as it is by a commitment to discerning personal and collective actions that serve the needs of the oppressed and marginalized, has a lot to say about why political activity is necessary. 

I would like to offer a few of the reflective prompts from the civic examen. I hope these open-ended invitations from the Ignatian Solidarity Network to deeper prayer and meditation open up the inner space needed to slow down the loudest and most challenging feelings that you are experiencing on the eve of election time: 

  • Consider the current realities of our country – for what and for whom are you most grateful? 
  • As you reflect on the United States and your participation in it, what energizes you or brings you closer to God? What distracts you or makes you feel farther away from God? 
  • What communities, groups, or aspects of creation in the United States need healing and reconciliation? 
  • Consider one or two of the strongest desires or feelings evoked by your prayer and reflection about the United States and your civic participation in it and bring these directly to God. 
  • Regardless of the outcomes of next week’s elections, how will you promote the common good in your personal actions? 
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Fall 2024 Graduate, Law, and Professional Student Retreat Emphasizes Listening to the Voice Within

This year’s Graduate, Law, and Professional Retreat attracted nearly 40 students from across Georgetown’s campuses. 

A now established annual tradition is an overnight fall weekend retreat at the Calcagnini Contemplative Center that brings together graduate, law, and professional students from across Georgetown’s campuses. This milestone will become even more important as the Capitol Campus grows and the population of graduate students becomes more spatially concentrated downtown. Georgetown’s graduate students represent such a diverse portfolio of academic and professional disciplines that building community spaces for this dispersed population is important. Developing a greater sense of communal culture and identity at the graduate level can yield fruitful outcomes, including partnerships and inter-disciplinary connections that lead to new research and new applied projects. 

This year’s retreat took place on the weekend of October 19-20, attracting nearly 40 students from all of Georgetown’s graduate, law, and professional programs. The cross-campus collaborative spirit among the students was also matched by the retreat leadership team, which included both student leaders, as well as Mission and Ministry staff and chaplains from the John Main Center for Meditation and Interreligious Dialogue, the Law Center, and the Capitol Campus. 

The retreat theme, “Rest, Recharge, and Renew,” provided opportunities for individual and group reflection as well as time to enjoy the majestic fall weekend at the Calcagnini Retreat Center. 

The retreat, themed again as “Rest, Recharge, Renew,” featured a mixture of short presentations led by the retreat team, structured small and large group reflections, unstructured time for individual reflections, as well as lots of time for fellowship and socializing. The autumn sun was resplendent and provided an inspiring background for the retreat’s meals, solo and group hikes, and general rest and relaxation. While the experience is fundamentally about students taking a break from their busy personal and academic lives, the retreat does present meaningful opportunities to more deeply explore the resources within and across spiritual traditions represented at Georgetown. 

Students took advantage of the opportunity to rest during the annual Graduate, Law, and Professional Student Retreat. 

One common theme in all of the talks and personal reflections from retreat guides was the need for active listening skills. So often, we assume that active listening is only about how we listen to other people. Certainly, developing the internal capacity to listen patiently with a desire for understanding others is greatly needed in a society and culture that does not always value true dialogue and intentional interpersonal communication. But there is also a need to actively listen to oneself, including the small voice inside of us that animates and expresses our truest selves. The ancient Greek axiom, “know thyself,” cannot happen without cultivating these methods of growing in interior awareness to the direction of one’s inner compass. 

Doing this consistently and regularly means committing to certain practices of rest, recharge, and renew. Michael Goldman, Jewish Chaplain for the Law Center, pointed out in his talk that we all need to take time for a kind of Sabbath or rest each week. Sonia Robledo, Program Coordinator for the Law Center, emphasized that we need to cultivate mindfulness about when our human batteries need recharging with rest, fun, healthy food, and prayer. Lisa Directo Davis, Program Director for the John Main Center, noted that regular somatic reflection about the state of our bodies is foundational to healthy contemplation and meditation. And I offered up the Ignatian examen of consciousness as a routine way for busy adults to take needed daily rest. Such moments offer an opportunity to contemplate the subtle emotional movements that move in us and ultimately lead us to spiritually-grounded discernment that our adult vocations call us to.

The hope is that students left this weekend experience with a small taste of retreat, so that they return to their active lives with a living memory of what is possible when we actively integrate rest, recharge, and renew into our daily lives.

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Another Election Season Resource: The Ignatian Presupposition

This week’s post explores the Ignatian “presupposition” of good intentions as an additional resource for the challenging debates and disagreements that arise during election season. 

In recent weeks, Mission in Motion has considered the many ways that Georgetown’s mission, values, and spiritual traditions can be animated during this political season. At the root of this encouragement is a recognition that active participation in civic life is a core virtue and part of the University’s ethos as a Jesuit university located in the nation’s capital. Contributing to the common good through public service is a defining feature of Georgetown’s educational legacy. But active participation in civic life also comes with significant costs. 

In this nation and throughout the world there is a persistent challenge in how to maintain and nurture the basic mechanisms of democratic practices and norms. To fully invest in the project of civic democracy is to recognize that active engagement requires some essential virtues related to managing conflict that arises in the course of vigorous debate and disagreement. How to disagree without being disagreeable? How to enter into policy decisions and political choices that do not go the way you wanted them to go without losing faith in the process or faith in fellow human beings? How to locate hope during times of crisis and hopelessness? 

All of these questions require meaningful reflection and some sustained introspection. Thankfully, the Jesuit traditions of education and organizational strategy provide some resources for this task. In particular, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s insistence on a generous interpretation of another’s words and actions, referred to as the “presupposition,” can be an asset for this ongoing project. The “presupposition” derives from Annotation 22 in the Spiritual Exercises, the Ignatian manual of prayer that has been practiced for 500 years: 

“We ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it. Further, if we cannot interpret it favorably one should ask the other how the other means it. If that meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love: and if that is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved.”

A recent article on the website of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities about work happening at Loyola University Chicago on political disagreement using the “presupposition” resource helps make the connection. In “Seeking the Common Good with Ignatian Civil Discourse at Loyola Chicago,” we learn about the “leaps of faith” that are necessary in order to engage in meaningful dialogue that embraces civic virtues, like the right to participate in the public square equally and ensuring that human dignity is preserved in the process. The article is reflective about what needs to change for us if we are to engage in this spirit of “presupposition.” Some suggestions include reframing how we define winning in the civic participation process, how we strive for compromise that charts mutually acceptable possibilities in a pluralistic society, and remembering “how” we engage in the process is often more important than “what” we say.

It would be a mistake to confuse this approach with simply accepting ideas and policies one disagrees with in a passive way without any contestation or challenge. But this reframing of the “presupposition” invites us to reconsider our own humanity and the humanity of others whenever we challenge particular ideas or structural realities in need of reform. The Ignatian tradition can help all of us sustain our continued activity in the public square with hopefully more generosity and mutual understanding. 

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Election Season Puts Reflective Resources into Action at Georgetown

This week’s post explores the election season upon us from the perspective of Georgetown’s mission and values. The University is offering resources for navigating election time in a spirit of reflection. 

With less than two months to go until Election Day, Georgetown students, faculty, and staff have already made some plans about how they will spend this politically significant semester. In the last few weeks, the Georgetown community has received several communications about various resources on the campuses that support the democratic process and encourage civic participation. At the heart of the social teaching of the Catholic and Jesuit tradition is a belief that voting and other forms of political leadership can support the common good. At the same time, there is a widespread recognition that the turbulence of American political life can take a mental toll on our community. The temptation can be overwhelming to simply get stuck in an endless cycle of paralysis by reading and viewing news and scrolling for the latest updates. 

The occasion of election season is another reason for gratitude for Georgetown’s mission and values and the reflective practices that they encourage. To be Contemplative in Action, as our Spirit of Georgetown calls us to be, is to enter into a life of engaged activity, sometimes stress-inducing and difficult, in a spirit of generous reflection. St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, believed that a person’s contemplative grounding need not be compromised by an active and busy life with many commitments. Translating such an idea to this fall semester, I think Ignatius would remind us that the hectic pace of national affairs caused by the election does not necessarily mean that we should become so absorbed as to lose touch with our own need to pause, reflect, and make meaning of what we’re experiencing in current events. 

Thankfully there are many ways at Georgetown to engage in reflective pauses in a season of election. Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice, in partnership with Student Affairs, for example, has created a resource page of Election Reflection programs. Reading this list is a vivid reminder of the many different ways our university community, leveraging the many gifts and contributions from across the campuses, is capable of coming together at important times. I am pleased to add to the offerings with “A Civic Examen: Spiritual Grounding in the Ignatian Tradition at Election Time,” on October 24 at 2 p.m. ET on Zoom (Register at this page). The Examen has been a central focus of Mission in Motion and is incredibly adaptive as a spiritual resource for mindful reflection about one’s inner movements. I was partly inspired to contribute to this season’s programming because of this article in America Magazine by Tim Muldoon, “Election Season Is the Perfect Time to Pray the Examen.” Muldoon explains that the Examen is a suitable companion for reflecting during tumultuous times because of its emphasis on locating emotional balance and authentic purpose in the midst of conflicting emotions. 

Georgetown’s proximity to the national government and the symbols of American democracy adds to the University’s capacity for meaningful impact on the common good. The political life of the country is a feature of Georgetown’s programs, professional development, and extra-curricular life. I hope that you can find ways to engage this election season by seeking out the community resources that Georgetown is making available. 

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Capitol Campus Mass of the Holy Spirit Encourages Openness to the New (and Old)

This week’s post reflects on the Capitol Campus Mass of the Holy Spirit. Seen here are students leaving the Mass at Holy Rosary Church and proceeding to the Law Center for a reception. 

Mission in Motion recently reflected on the Mass of the Holy Spirit that took place on the Hilltop Campus and now, thanks to dedicated efforts to build Georgetown’s Mission and Ministry presence in the downtown, can reflect on last weekend’s Mass of the Holy Spirit on the Capitol Campus. 

In recent years, the Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) Mission and Ministry team has worked hard to build a neighborhood partnership with Holy Rosary Church on Third Street NW where the Catholic community celebrates weekly Mass. Today, the opportunity for the Catholic community to worship together has expanded beyond GULC to include students, faculty, and staff from SCS and the other units that make up the Capitol Campus. 

A sign of this effective partnership was the robust attendance by over 75 students, faculty, and staff at the Capitol Campus Mass of the Holy Spirit, which was presided over by Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J., Ph.D., Vice President for Mission and Ministry, and co-celebrated by several Jesuits from the nearby Gonzaga Jesuit community. On a beautiful Sunday evening, this religious gathering convened a diverse group of participants seeking spiritual consolation and greater community connection. All of it took place on the developing Capitol Campus (for more, read “Reflecting on Georgetown’s Composition of Place in the Downtown”) with the service occurring at Holy Rosary and a post-Mass reception taking place outside the GULC Campus Ministry suite in McDonough Hall. The short walk from the church to the campus contextualized the reality that Georgetown’s downtown presence is accelerating, marked by the opening this fall of the McCourt School of Public Policy at 125 E Street (pictured above as the building on the far right) and continuing construction of the 111 Massachusetts Avenue building (pictured below) that will house SCS and other schools and units starting next fall. 

111 Massachusetts Avenue, which is under construction and will be home to SCS and other units in 2025, is another sign of Georgetown’s accelerating presence in the downtown. 

Fr. Bosco’s homily pointed to themes of openness to both continuity and change by deeply exploring the meaning from Mark’s Gospel of being “opened.” The Aramaic line from Chapter 7 in Mark, “Ephphatha,” which means “Be opened!” is in the context of Jesus healing a deaf person. For Fr. Mark, this presented a point of departure for more consideration of what this openness might mean for us at Georgetown in 2024. In particular, Fr. Bosco called for us to pay more attention to the small details of our everyday lives. So many of us, obligated by the press of constant tasks and activities, forget to find beauty and goodness in the details of life. 

The need for prolonged attentiveness for the potential of deeper mystery and insight to emerge from reflecting on the objects of our sensory experience can be especially realized, Fr. Bosco noted, in the pondering one does of great art and literature. A patient and unhurried stroll through a museum presents an obvious opportunity for this delighted gazing. But so does the intentional commitment to opening ourselves up to new ideas, new people, and new perspectives as part of our learning at Georgetown. Openness as a spiritual and moral theme can then move from the personal or individual to the communal. 

As our learning at Georgetown does not take place in individualized silos, we are invited to consider what it means to learn together. Common experience suggests that life in community, however motivated we are by an aspirational shared mission, can be difficult. And these challenges become harder when division and conflict surround every part of our lives and spill over into the context of our education. We live in such a moment today. The temptation is to close off from ideas and views different from our own. Fr. Bosco’s homily encouraged the opposite: Part of the task before us this year is to expand the horizons of our perspectives by meeting old and new ideas with openness. No matter the discipline of our formal study at Georgetown, everyone engaged in this common project can grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually.

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Reflecting on Georgetown’s Composition of Place in the Downtown

graphic of the buildings around the capitol campus
This week’s post is an invitation to consider the geospatial reality of Georgetown’s downtown location. What meaning can we gain by entering more fully into the physical context of our campus and its surroundings?

St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and patron of Jesuit schools around the world like Georgetown, possessed an impressive awareness of spatial dynamics. What do I mean by this? The Jesuit founder thought carefully about how the physical location of things influences our spiritual lives and how we go about realizing the mission of our work. In this way, the 16th Century saint was ahead of his time in his geospatial consciousness. The Jesuits were unique among religious orders of the period, for example, because of Ignatius’ insistence that locating Jesuit institutions in urban cores would bring about more mission advancement. Serving the needs of the human (people) and physical (places and spaces) city has been a hallmark of Jesuits for the last five centuries. This is one of the many reasons that most Jesuit schools around the globe are located within cities. 

But Ignatian emphasis on the mission opportunities in the city is about more than administration. In the Spiritual Exercises, the guided, developmental retreat that the Jesuit founder created, Ignatius insists that prayer experiences need to be rooted in a “composition of place.” Here is the original text from the Exercises: “It should be noted here that for contemplation of meditation about visible things … the ‘composition’ will consist in seeing through the gaze of the imagination the material place where the object I want to contemplate is situated…” (Spiritual Exercises, 47). Here we see that Ignatius is inviting the one engaged in prayer and meditation to get concrete and material about the details of their imagination. This prioritization of real description of actual objects of contemplation suggests that fruitful prayer and meditation is not a flight into fantasy but a deep engagement with the reality of one’s experiences. A very basic way of putting this is that context matters. 

Context is intentionally the first stage of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (described here by Mission in Motion) because of this Ignatian composition of place. The idea is that any meaningful learning activity must first be situated within the material place of learning and the persons and things that comprise that place. In this way and inspired by St. Ignatius, I invite us to journey into this semester of learning at SCS by coming to better understand the composition of place for our campus. What does it mean that our study and work are based in the physical place of downtown Washington, D.C.? How can the urban context and environment of our learning inspire the ways that we engage with the tasks of education this semester? 

All of these questions about context are especially appropriate for us at Georgetown as the movement toward a unified Capitol Campus continues. In a year’s time, the SCS campus at 640 Massachusetts Avenue will migrate to 111 Massachusetts Avenue and become co-located with other schools and units that comprise a comprehensive Georgetown anchor of graduate and professional education in the downtown. The meaning and implications of our geo-location will take on more importance as SCS shifts locations in the neighborhood and additional consideration is given to the School’s urban surroundings. 

For the time being, I invite the SCS community to continue to take seriously the place-based reality of the current campus situation at 640. One way to engage deeply with this embeddedness is by understanding the place. You might consider learning about this neighborhood through reported data about the composition of place via the U.S. Census. You might also consider spending time getting to know the people and places that comprise our neighborhood. Are there opportunities this semester to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing the persons, places, and spaces of this particular neighborhood? How can our learning pursuits serve these needs? 

In all things at Georgetown, we are encouraged to seek out the resources of our Jesuit heritage and traditions in ways that inspire our present endeavors. As we continue our SCS operations in the downtown and contemplate our future operations in a more coherent Capitol Campus, I invite all of us to more deeply reflect on the significance of our spatial reality.

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Mass of the Holy Spirit on the Hilltop Invites Community to Rediscover Our Shared Purpose as Academic Year Begins

May be an image of 3 people, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and text
This year’s Mass of the Holy Spirit, an annual tradition at Jesuit institutions that dates back five centuries, emphasized the spiritual gifts needed to flourish as an academic community. 

The annual tradition of the Mass of the Holy Spirit, a practice celebrated across the global network of Jesuit institutions since the religious order first founded schools five centuries ago, presents a welcome opportunity to consider the meaning of a Georgetown education. Each year, the Mass presents both the same and new reflections at the dawning of a new academic year. The readings from Scripture all point to the need for greater reliance on the Holy Spirit as a giver of spiritual gifts that we most need to realize our mission. Of special importance at an institution of higher learning are the gifts related to knowledge, inquiry, communication, and discernment. While a traditional Catholic religious ritual, I think emphasizing the universe of spiritual gifts needed to sustain the academic enterprise of Georgetown can resonate with people of all faith traditions and those with no tradition at all. 

The homilist for this year, Fr. Bill Campbell, S.J., the new Superior of Georgetown’s Jesuit Community, focused his reflections on the historical analogy between the founding of the Society of Jesus (or the Jesuits) by college students attending the University of Paris in the 16th Century and our contemporary experience at Georgetown. The similarities in these situations are striking: Both Paris and Washington, D.C., have prominent rivers that their prominent universities abut; both the founding Jesuits and today’s Georgetown students come from homes around the world; and both of these student populations knew how to have a good time after working hard in their courses. 

The urban experience of these educations presented many opportunities for both reverie and reverence, a reminder to us today that our experience at Georgetown is enlivened by our embeddedness in a global capital city. 

But Fr. Campbell’s main point was not just about the urban similarities in this comparison. He ended his reflection about the early Jesuits by noting that we still remember the names of the seven early companions (Faber, Xavier, Laynez, Ignatius, Rodriguez, Salmeron, and Bobadilla) because they wrote history with their lives. By professing in faith their vows to a new religious order, at a time of great challenge and resistance to such a formation, these Jesuits chose to use their higher education in the service of a noble purpose that still benefits the world today. 

The question to us in 2024 at Georgetown: How will we use our Georgetown experience in service of a larger, more noble purpose than our own personal aims or professional goals? To what do we owe our faith in the transformative possibilities of a university education rooted in the Jesuit tradition of academic excellence?  

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Reflecting on Georgetown’s Mission as a Resource for the New Academic Year

This week’s post is a reflection about the nervousness of starting a new academic year. Can we turn our jitters into joys by leaning more into the resources of Georgetown’s mission? 

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:

  1. 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. 
  1. 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. 
  1. 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.