This week featured an annual highlight in the life of the institution: Georgetown Staff Appreciation Day. Converted to an indoor celebration because of the heat wave, the multi-hour event included lots of food, games, raffles, and even massages. Coming together as members of the staff community, arriving from a diversity of offices and campuses across Georgetown, is a welcome opportunity to enjoy each other’s company and reflect on the purpose of our shared commitment.
This may come as a surprise, but I believe that this yearly event provides a rich platform to explore core concepts of Jesuit mission. In particular, the gathering of staff for the purposes of honoring their individual and collective contribution to the University brings out two Jesuit ideas that are fundamental to Georgetown’s mission and values. These are: Cura Personalis (care of the person) and Cura Apostolica (care of the work). You can read Jesuit Superior General Fr. Arturo Sosa’s much more detailed account of these terms in this universal letter issued to Jesuits across the world a few years ago. In short, care of the person in a Jesuit context is to always pay individualized attention to the needs, desires, strengths, and weaknesses of the individual when discerning how best to realize their potential. This commitment is realized at the University not only in the teacher-student relationship but also in the relationship amongst staff and between staff and faculty.
Where Cura Personalis is about the person, Cura Apostolica is about the work. In a Jesuit institution, this means that the individuals responsible for the work or the shared project need to pay attention to ensuring the flourishing of the organization as a whole. To care for the work is to discern choices on the basis of what ultimately serves the needs of the collective enterprise. Often, these two commitments are in alignment, but there are occasionally times of tension between the two. In some instances, commitment to the ultimate purpose of the work might result in less care of the person (and vice versa). According to Fr. Sosa, this tension is sometimes unavoidable but can be navigated in a way that ultimately serves shared mission:
“However, Ignatius’ experience shows that care, deeply rooted in his spiritual experience and his mystical journey, offers the true dimension of the unity cura apostolica-cura personalis, dimensions of one single cura, that is, care for mission. The single cura has as its focus persons, communities and works, which are the service of mission. It is mission, therefore, that must be the fundamental criterion that unites cura apostolica and cura personalis. Our mission includes and implies inseparably our way of living and relating to each other, of caring for people and communities. This care for our way of living and relating is also a mission in itself.”
The unity of these two communities – personal and collective – is possible through discernment about mission. This point affirms the need at Georgetown and other Jesuit institutions to share about the mission of Jesuit education and what this five centuries’ heritage and tradition mean for today. I hope that one of the takeaways of this reflection is to find time and space to more deeply reflect on how you are in relationship to the mission of Georgetown. How are you attentive to the needs of individuals in your work? How are you advancing the work overall? How are you relying on the resources of the mission to find unity when these two conflict?
Staff Appreciation Day helps focus our attention on the various ways that day-in and day-out the members of the Georgetown staff community realize the University mission by caring for people and the work to which they have been entrusted.