Over the course of this academic year, Mission in Motion has aspired to provide insight and inspiration to enhance your experience in the classroom, energize you in your work, and empower and uplift you in your life.
As the year began, we invited you to consider making time — in what we knew would be a very busy year ahead — for contemplation, or what Jesuit Walter Burghardt calls “taking a long loving look at the real,” and to consider what it might mean for you to live in greater alignment with what you see.
As December arrived, we invited a deepening of the joy of the winter holiday season, through poet Joan Stephen’s call to “sing with fun in the winter,” and to reflect on what in your life is worthy of your greater praise.
At that season we also shared insights from the Prisons and Justice Initiative winter retreat where we reflected that the candles at Hanukkah, and lights on a Christmas tree teach: that there is warmth and radiance even when days are at their shortest and nights at their coldest; that it’s important not only to pursue a perfected world but also to affirm all the perfect moments in life along the way; and, that there’s tremendous value in hearing the little harmonies that arise amidst life’s cacophony and seeing the many sparks of light amidst life’s darker times.
In a post on Teach the Speech, we took lessons from Dr. King’s spectacular speech, The Drum Major’s Instinct, in which he told us how he wanted to be remembered: “I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.” We reflected on the fact that in his words are an implicit teaching for us: “A life of professional significance should be assessed on the basis of how one shares their gifts with others and helps realize a more just and inclusive community … and [serve] a higher purpose in life.”
In the spring, we encouraged you to consider, as we did on the student retreat, the “why” of your work, and what it might look like to make a slight 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.
Now, as the summer arrives, and time opens and slows, perhaps you too might slow down and open up. We wonder whether returning to some of these ideas might help you do so. We humbly and prayerfully hope they might. We wonder too how summer might color the lens through which you read these questions.
- What are the particular gifts of summer that might be worthy of your greater praise?
- What does it mean to live in alignment with the aspects of your life that summer shows you?
- How might you bring the light and joys of summer to those in our communities struggling through dark winter nights?
- What insights into the “why” of your work and of your life does summer uniquely offer up to you?
May taking a long loving look at the summer days ahead yield you many meaningful insights that carry you through all the seasons, that strengthen the work of your hearts and hands, and that ultimately bring benefit and blessing to all.