Commencement is a time of unique festivity. The graduation exercises (you can watch a recording of the SCS Commencement ceremony) bring together the entire SCS learning community for a public event of immense joy. At this event, SCS welcomes into its community the friends and families of graduates as well as distinguished guests who spend a little time getting to know this unique school at Georgetown. This is not only a party, however, as the occasion of Commencement provides an invaluable opportunity to reflect on our shared purpose as a Georgetown community and to renew our commitment to serving the University’s mission. For the proud graduates, this invitation to deeper mission commitment will be realized through the activities of life post-SCS. For the faculty, staff, and continuing students, the Commencement serves as a springboard back to the continuous cycle of teaching, learning, and service.
Many details stand out from the week of Commencement. Recently, Mission in Motion shared a feature about this year’s SCS Spirit of Georgetown winner, Courtney Eury, who was honored at Tropaia (you can watch a recording of the SCS Tropaia ceremony). Courtney’s story of discovering personal and professional purpose through the experience of adversity and loss resurfaced in the messages that were communicated in the Commencement ceremony.
Jason Kander, who received an honorary degree during the ceremony, centered his commencement speech on the transformative possibilities of actively pursuing self-care, particularly when self-care means relying on the support of mental health professionals. A military veteran and accomplished politician, Kander surprised many observers when he decided to pause his political career in order to receive needed mental health treatment for the persisting symptoms of his post-traumatic stress disorder. He intentionally flipped the script in the speech by inviting graduates not to serve others but to serve their own needs first. Seemingly counterintuitive, this advice actually encourages more generous service in the world.
“I am not here today to inspire you to think of others. I’m actually here today to inspire you to think of yourself,” said Kander.“My message to you today is one that I learned the hard way: that there is nothing selfish about self-care, because if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t change the world. But if you do, you just might.”
For Kander, self-care is not selfish. This might seem like an obvious message, but the truth of it is so easily lost when social and economic pressures send a different message. Mission in Motion has previously reflected on the “long, loving, look at the real,” a stance of appreciation and gratitude that reflects this same idea. A stance of appreciation and love for one’s self, one’s entire reality as an authentic whole person, occasionally requires taking a contemplative pause and appreciating that life is about more than our activities. The temptation to measure ourselves by the objective standards of productivity and what we do can actually erode our healthiest sense of who we are. Our worth as human beings is unrelated to what we accomplish in the world but intimately connected to our status as people of inherent dignity worthy of love.
Georgetown University President, John J. DeGioia, picked up on this idea in his closing reflections as he reminded listeners of the University’s Jesuit heritage and tradition of education. The Jesuit tradition invites self-care through a felt experience of love. The bedrock experience of love is a love that flows within the self, between the self and others, and between the self and the immanent and transcendent Other. President DeGioia attempted to thread the last 50 years in Jesuit history to the present moment by relying on the wisdom of the much-honored Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., Superior General of the Jesuits during the tumultuous 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. President DeGioia selected from Fr. Arrupe’s famous (or infamous – depending on one’s perspective) 1973 speech to a group of Jesuit alumni in which he enforced the centrality of love and service in the Jesuit way of proceeding. For Arrupe, graduates of Jesuit schools are called to use their gifts of “conscience, intelligence, and powers” in order to “go out of” themselves and give themselves “In love,” which is the “all-embracing dimension,” which gives mean to all other dimensions. This reminder of the longer arc of Georgetown’s educational endeavor was a welcome message, especially considering how much a world in need of healing will be served generously by the graduates of SCS.