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.
Cura personalis is one of the most popular and widely cited values in the Spirit of Georgetown. And this makes sense because this particular value points to the need for individualized attention and care in all relationships at the University, especially among teachers and students and between employees and managers. Caring for the whole person in this way, attending to the individual’s gifts and talents as well as their challenges and limitations, requires that we get to know each other at more than a surface level. By encountering each other’s unique stories and lived experiences, we begin a relationship of work or study from a place of meaningful context. The relationship is more meaningful when both parties involved are willing to listen attentively to each other’s needs out of a place of deeper personal recognition.
This week’s post is a reflection on Georgetown Staff Appreciation Day, relating the values of care for the person (cura personalis) and care for the work (cura apostolica). Pictured: SCS staff members enjoying the picnic lunch.
This week, Georgetown hosted a Staff Appreciation Day on the Hilltop campus and many members of the SCS team attended this festive event. With food, dancing, and the opportunity to enjoy each other’s company on a beautiful day in the late summer, the three-hour celebration was a welcome but rare occasion of bringing together the staff community from across Georgetown. The experience also invites deeper reflection about how the staff at SCS and across the University uniquely bring to life the Spirit of Georgetown in their daily work. To assist with this deeper reflection, I’d like to connect cura personalis to the value of cura apostolica, or care of the work.
Relating cura personalis to cura apostolica helps us appreciate in a more significant way how the staff at SCS and across Georgetown are instrumental to the realization of the University’s mission. Each member of the staff serves a unique role in the organization, manifesting a diversity of professional expertise and skill in all the daily tasks that need to be realized in order for Georgetown to function well. So much of this activity occurs outside of the view of students and faculty. Staff members care for the universal work of Georgetown’s mission with their particular contributions. Regardless of one’s specific job responsibility, however, staff members do more than just make the organization function and operate efficiently. They bring the mission to life in vital ways.
By paying attention both to the person and to the work for which they are responsible, the Spirit of Georgetown relates individual personal attention and collective purpose and mission. Care for the whole person is valuable for its own sake. But as an institution of higher education rooted in the Jesuit tradition, purposeful care and attention toward the individual ultimately serves the larger purpose of our educational goals. The Jesuits around the globe have noted that these two values are sometimes in tension but can fruitfully come together when co-workers collaborate “towards the service of the mission” but also recognize that they themselves are a “form of mission.” More than serving the mission, staff are themselves the mission. As Stephanie Russell puts it in an article entitled “Cura Apostolica Revisited:”
“Cura apostolica is the complement to cura personalis, but it is not an institutional counterweight that tempers our warm and fuzzy inclinations to provide personal care (that is, the Ignatian version of good cop, bad cop). Rather, through cura apostolica, the same intimate knowledge and compassion found in cura personalis is extended, beyond any single person, to encompass our shared personhood and mission. … We matter to each other; we matter together for the common good.”
Staff Appreciation Day was a reminder of how much individual staff members, however behind-the-scenes their work might be, serve our communal mission. Appreciating the staff in this way can sharpen an awareness about how the Georgetown educational experience is a shared endeavor.
At this year’s Mass of the Holy Spirit, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia offered reflections about the Spirit at work in obvious and less obvious ways. You can watch a recording of the Mass.
The fall semester is officially here! New Hoyas have been oriented to their programs and faculty and staff are busily working to help new students successfully begin their academic journeys. At Georgetown, the annual celebration of the Mass of the Holy Spirit (which Mission in Motionhas written about before) is one of the signature University-wide events that marks the start of a new academic year. This tradition has been a hallmark of Jesuit schools for nearly five centuries and provides a welcome opportunity to pause and reflect on the significance of our shared project in education.
Whether this is your first year at Georgetown or you are a long-time member of the community, the Mass of the Holy Spirit reminds us of the deeper mission and purpose of our educational endeavors. At this year’s Mass, President DeGioia offered an inspiring reflection about how the Spirit is always at work in this University community, in both obvious ways and ways that are subtler and require our closer attention in order to detect. Making direct connections to elements of the Jesuit tradition, including the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and relevant Jesuits like Pope Francis, President DeGioia invited us to consider how we might each find resources in the Spirit as we go about our work at Georgetown.
As I listened in from Gaston Hall, I felt called to consider the Spirit’s presence not just in big initiatives and major undertakings, but in the small, often quiet work of the everyday. Before too long, the fall semester can become overwhelmed with tasks, deadlines, and seemingly relentless pressures. I welcomed the time and space at the Mass of the Holy Spirit to take a deep breath before proceeding apace into the fall. You can watch a recording of the Mass and hear President DeGioia’s reflections at the 1 hour 25 minute mark.
This week at SCS, my excellent colleagues on the marketing team and I put together a short Instagram Takeover @GeorgetownSCS to help new community members understand better the available resources that arise out of Georgetown’s mission. This was a fun and creative project to introduce the various ways that Georgetown SCS strives to support students both within and outside of the classroom. I encourage you to check out the short clips and learn more about the work of mission integration at SCS and the larger Office of Mission and Ministry at Georgetown.
My invitation to you is to spend a little time in your day noticing both the obvious and the subtle evidence of the Spirit at work in your life. Growing in awareness of these movements in our personal and collective lives can bring us closer together as we journey further into this academic year.
Mission in Motion has spent over a year shining a light on the significance of the Ignatian Year, the 500th anniversary of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, undergoing his personal transformation that eventually led to the birth of a new religious order and a global network of schools, like Georgetown. A recent post describes a series of pilgrimage immersions in Spain that took place this summer for students, faculty, staff, and alumni who desired an even deeper engagement with the meaningfulness of St. Ignatius’ own sacred story and its relevance today.
This week, we hear directly from SCS alumna Karim Trueblood, who participated in Georgetown’s alumni pilgrimage to Spain. Mission in Motion has previously interviewed Karim about her reflections on Georgetown SCS, the relationship between Ignatian principles and her professional life, and how the Jesuit Values she experienced as a student in the Master of Professional Studies in Emergency & Disaster Management (EDM) program have shaped her vocation.
Having taught Karim in the SCS Jesuit Values in Professional Practice course, I can personally attest to how much she has appropriated the principles and characteristics of Jesuit education and spirituality in her life. It is fair to say that Karim’s life has been transformed by her Ignatian experiences, so much so that she is currently pursuing a doctorate in these topics. What I find so important about Karim’s reflection below is the way that she interprets the Ignatian holy sites in a way that respects both religious diversity and the integrity of the Jesuit tradition.
In this week’s Mission in Motion, SCS alumna Karim Trueblood (pictured second row, middle) reflects on her time in Spain as part of an Ignatian Year pilgrimage with Georgetown alumni. Credit: Javi Valdivieso
As part of the celebration of the Ignatian Year, I recently participated in a Shrines of Spain Pilgrimage following the Footsteps of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. This pilgrimage for Georgetown alums was guided by Jesuits Fr. Mark Bosco and Fr. Jerry Hayes. The trip took us to Spain, starting in Madrid and finishing in Barcelona while visiting influential places in the life of Saint Ignatius along the way. The meticulously curated itinerary provided an array of magnificent thought-provoking stops, delightful people, and delicious food.
To be transparent about my experience, this was my first time traveling with a group, and to say that I was hesitant is an understatement. Additionally, in our home we share our faith between Catholicism and Quakerism. I have found that the Society of Jesus and the Society of Friends share similar values and were eager to start the journey. I started this journey with 20 strangers and many questions and ended the journey with 20 friends and even more questions.
It was only after returning home, intentionally reflecting on the pilgrimage and reviewing my notes, that I understood the significance of this unique opportunity. In retrospect, this was a journey to deepen my relationship with God, myself, my husband, fellow pilgrims, and locals that graciously shared their country, customs, and history. Part of my commitment to increase awareness required me to limit the use of technology, so pictures are limited, but there are enough notes and journal entries to write a book.
In addition to deepening my relationship with God and others, I found the experience was closely related to the Jesuit values guiding Georgetown University. It was an opportunity for community building and to practice intentionality regardless of religious background. The visits to sites like the Loyola Castle, Saint Ignatius’ place of birth, or Pamplona, where Saint Ignatius was injured in battle leading to his spiritual conversion, were perfect for engaging our minds and hearts in imagination and contemplation.
Montserrat, pictured here, is a sacred place in the life of St. Ignatius. Credit: Javi Valdivieso
The visit to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Arantzazu, nestled in nature and visited by Saint Ignatius on his way to Manresa, evoked tranquility while highlighting the importance of Caring for Our Common Home. It was important for the Franciscans there that people felt the impact of nature while in the basilica. From my perspective, the feeling of being connected with nature was undeniable, perhaps one of my favorite places during the pilgrimage. The visit also prompted questions about my role in advancing or hindering environmental justice due to everyday decisions.
The visit to Montserrat was spectacular and provided the perfect preamble to Manresa. In the Cove of Saint Ignatius in Manresa, where Saint Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises, I found a deeper understanding of the value of learning directly from these places that inspired Saint Ignatius, how a life in disorder and spiritual desolation was crucial to engaging in deep reflection to seek to conquer the self and discern our purpose.
The pilgrimage was not strictly about religion, but thinking about religion allowed me to reflect on the impact religion has on culture and individuals. The pilgrimage reminded me of the importance of community and how flawed individuals searching for unique answers can come together and become grounded in love. This opportunity was only possible because of Georgetown. I was reminded of the value of discovery and transformation.
In order to grow, it is imperative to experience new things, engage with different people, and visit new places. Georgetown University is a place with unlimited opportunities to engage in discovery and transformation. Seek more in the spirit of Magis and for the Greater Glory of God regardless of career path or religious background; you might surprise yourself, just like I continue to do even after graduation.
This is an exciting time of year at Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies. With the summer calendar coming to a close, our attentions turn to the beginning of the fall semester. While the academic programs at SCS tend to start for students on a rolling basis throughout the year, the inauguration of the fall semester has a special calendar significance at SCS. With new student, staff, and faculty orientations soon underway, this is a good opportunity to offer a brief introduction to our University’s distinctive mission and values and how they will influence your Georgetown experience.
This week’s post introduces the Spirit of Georgetown to new members of the SCS community.
There is a longer story here than a short blog post allows (If you’re a student and really curious about the deeper answer to this question, you might consider taking a special free elective offered at SCS called “Jesuit Values in Professional Practice.” Similar seminar opportunities are available for faculty and staff).
Here are four important ways that the University’s Jesuit mission and values will come to life in your time at Georgetown.
SCS is committed to sharing the Spirit of Georgetown, the 10 values distilled from five centuries of the Jesuit tradition of education, in an inclusive and invitational way that respects a plurality of religious and philosophical perspectives. This is why the University’s Office of Mission and Ministry houses a large multi-faith team of chaplains and staff that are available to spiritually accompany students, faculty, and staff across the campuses. The mission of Georgetown comes alive in a unique way for each individual person and no one will have the exact same experience as someone else.
Academic excellence is core to realizing Georgetown’s mission. This means that our rigorous and high-quality style of professional education is not by accident but an outgrowth of a living tradition that strives for the highest standards of teaching and learning as a way of reverencing the divine. At SCS, you’ll likely notice this commitment in the innovative and creative uses of technology to enhance the learning process.
A signature value of Jesuit education is a commitment to being People for Others. In this way, all learning, teaching, and working has a potential connection to supporting social justice and the common good. You will see this manifested in community service outside the classroom, course projects that focus on the needs of marginalized persons and groups, opportunities for social impact entrepreneurship, and the University’s public advocacy for justice.
Finally, you might find that “Cura Personalis,” or the value of Care for the Whole Person, is more than a superficial buzzword – it’s a deep-seated commitment to paying attention to all facets of the human person. Being a student at SCS is more than acquiring technical knowledge or skills; it is about attending to the emotional, spiritual, social, and physical aspects of developing as a well-rounded professional. A mission-committed faculty and staff are key to making this aspiration a reality. As a student, you can take advantage of this commitment through retreats, meditation, and other co-curricular experiences that animate Georgetown’s striving to form graduates who are generous life-long learners in the service of others.
The start of a new semester is always filled with a mix of emotions. Whether you’re feeling mostly excited or mostly nervous (or a mix of both) about this new experience, I hope you find some comfort in the mission-based resources that are here to accompany you along the way.
In working toward its mission to “deliver a world-class, values-based education to a diverse array of communities and individuals throughout their academic and professional careers,” Georgetown SCS offers a range of degree and non-degree learning experiences. Professional Bootcamps are dynamic six- to 12-week programs filled with knowledge, skills, and critical and strategic thinking intended to help boost the career prospects of professional learners. And other SCS programs, Professional Bootcamps strive to integrate Georgetown values into their intensive courses.
One such example of intentional integration of mission and values is the featured bootcamp course “Thinking to Thrive,” designed to help students make better decisions. Taught by Stewart Brown, a management consultant with over 40 years of experience as a planner on the tactical, operational, and strategic levels in both government and civilian commercial enterprises, “Thinking to Thrive” operates from the assumption that a new set of leadership skills is needed for junior managers and senior executives in the 21st century. The course prepares emerging professional leaders to become “flexible, adaptable, multidisciplinary problem-solvers and change makers” through an exploration of how biases and fallacies cause errors in judgment and choice. Along the way, students assess a range of models for decision processes and tools, articulating each framework’s strengths as well as its limitations.
“Thinking to Thrive” features a dedicated module on the role of ethics in decision-making. And like the ethics curricula in other SCS courses, this module introduces students to the resources and toolkits of ethical choice-making in the Jesuit tradition of discernment. This session is set up as a rich space for open-ended conversation as students engage difficult questions about how to bring to life ethical principles in ethically challenging work settings and situations. As a professional education program focused on the needs of adult learners, the objective of this module is not reflection for its own sake. Instead, students are challenged to make direct connections to their own professional development by articulating the ethical meaning of their own professional experiences.
One of the course materials in this module that explicitly connects the discussion of ethics in decision-making to the Spirit of Georgetown is an article by Kirk Hanson, senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Hanson offers five themes that differentiate the distinctiveness of learning ethics for managers and executives in a Jesuit school:
The development of the moral and spiritual character of the manager;
The responsibility to use one’s managerial skills for the benefit of ‘others’;
A concern for the welfare of employees in the manager’s organization;
A focus on the social impact of business and organizational decisions; and
A special concern for the poor and marginalized frequently left out of the economy.
By the end of the session on ethics in “Thinking to Thrive,” students have spent intentional time engaging with the Jesuit tradition of education. The discussion always surfaces new insights about the relevance of the Jesuit framework of ethical decision-making. A course that presents models of critical and reflective thinking as a necessary skill set for today’s aspiring managers and executives helps SCS bring its mission and values to life by meeting the interdisciplinary challenges of the 21st century.
With the fall semester approaching as summer courses enter into their final phase, faculty are reviewing and preparing their syllabi for next semester. One of the exciting parts of teaching at SCS is the ongoing opportunity to evaluate teaching strategies and make changes for the better. Teaching professionally applicable content and skills at SCS, which are dependent on ever-evolving trends in society and the marketplace, demands this kind of regular review. Through student feedback and other means, faculty are encouraged to continuously refine their pedagogical methods in pursuit of Academic Excellence, one of the core values in the Spirit of Georgetown. Regular evaluation that informs reflective action is also an essential component of Jesuit Pedagogy, a framework for teaching and learning inspired by the dynamics of Ignatian spirituality.
This week’s post examines “Interreligious Understanding,” one of the Spirit of Georgetown values, by reflecting on a recent podcast on the topic put together by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.
SCS has made considerable efforts in recent years to support its faculty with guidance and resources about how to incorporate the University’s defining mission and values into online and on-ground courses. The SCS “Strategies to Integrate Georgetown Values into Online and On-Campus Courses” takes each of the Spirit of Georgetown values and offers ideas about how to operationalize these values into practical learning activities. The value of “Interreligious Understanding,” which we hold dear at Georgetown given our long-standing commitment to honoring a pluralism of religious and spiritual traditions, deserves a closer look. In my experience, many faculty are uncertain about how to make this particular value animated in coursework or might be inclined to avoid it altogether because of the potential for conflict or misunderstanding about a sensitive topic like religious difference.
Recently, Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) took up this teaching challenge by hosting a podcast, “Religious and Spiritual Diversity in the Classroom.” In a packed 30 minutes of insightful conversation, religious leaders at Georgetown representing Jewish, Muslim, and Dharmic communities offered insights about the concerns that arise for students when religious identity is marginalized or ignored. There are several important takeaways from the conversation that I would like to highlight as best practices for faculty who want to discern how to activate religious diversity as a valuable component of the learning process.
Rabbi Rachel Gartner (most recently Director for Jewish Life), Imam Yahya Hendi (Director for Muslim Life), Brahmachari Sharan (Director for Dharmic Life), and David Ebenbach (Professor of the Practice at CNDLS and the Center for Jewish Civilization) point to the need for faculty to express humility and a willingness to listen and learn about religious traditions with which they are unfamiliar.
First, false assumptions about religious traditions can be perpetuated unless the classroom fosters an open-ended atmosphere in which individual students are invited to educate the class about their religious or spiritual identities. Having book knowledge about a cultural or religious tradition is not the same thing as having felt knowledge based on a relationship of trust with someone belonging to that specific tradition. While sharing openly about religious identity might not be comfortable for everyone, it is good practice to provide the opportunity (either in a group setting or individually) for students to express this part of themselves during a class.
Second, learning is inhibited when students feel like aspects of their religious identity are not properly respected or valued. This often comes up when seemingly harmless comments are made about religious practices related to wardrobe and eating. Faculty can encourage respectful engagement about such cultural differences by establishing a set of shared community agreements at the start of the course and then regularly reinforcing their importance during moments of conflict that come up along the way.
Finally, learning is an opportunity for growth. In today’s increasingly globalized workplaces, there is an ever-greater need for interreligious literacy and understanding. By actively listening to the experiences of religiously and spiritually motivated students, especially those belonging to non-dominant traditions, classrooms can become a place where religious difference is more than merely tolerated. These learning experiences have the potential to be transformative for all involved.
This week’s post describes the Jesuit reflection sessions experienced by the 2022 cohort of the Summer College Immersion Program (SCIP). This was the first in-person version of the reflection instruction offered since the pandemic began.
In his book, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, contemplative and academic Martin Laird makes the case for contemplative practices. To advance his argument early in the book, Laird brings together two unlikely thought partners: the post-modernist author David Foster Wallace and the contemporary Christian mystic Thomas Merton.
“Composed over fifty years ago, ‘Contemplation in a World of Action’ remains one of Merton’s most important essays. Wallace acknowledges our need to have sufficient skills of interiority in order to become aware of our own self-centered patterns of thinking and behaving. He likewise realizes that we can actually choose what we give our attention to. In choosing to give our attention to something other than the monologues going on in our heads, we meet the possibility of becoming less self-centered and more compassionate people. Merton would have no problem with Wallace on this point, but Merton would say that we have to go yet deeper – journey much deeper into our own uncharted lands.”
Over the last three weeks, students in Georgetown’s Summer College Immersion Program (previously discussed by Mission in Motionhere, here, and here) have had the opportunity to develop the skills of interiority through four reflection sessions that I’ve led. The purpose of these four sessions is to introduce the rising high school seniors, who come to Georgetown for three intensive weeks from KIPP, Cristo Rey, and other similar schools around the country, to the critical importance of developing habits of self-reflection. While four sessions are not enough to go as deep as our “uncharted lands” as Merton would prefer, there is no doubt that students leave the experience with a clearer impression that Georgetown strives to live out its commitment to educating the whole person by embodying contemplation in action.
The sessions are structured as a movement in four stages. The first session is a broad introduction to the mission and values of Georgetown with a special emphasis on the University’s interreligious character and principle of inclusive spiritual life. Students learn early about the Examen of Consciousness, a uniquely Jesuit approach to reflecting on daily experience.
The second session explores different strands in the historical development of spiritual practice. Students learn about different ways of praying and meditating, appreciating the distinction between image-less models (called apophatic) of prayer and models that rely on concepts, ideas, and texts (called kataphatic). These ideas are applied through a practice of silent meditation that resembles the tradition of Centering Prayer.
Session three introduces the Jesuit concept of discernment and demonstrates its inherent practicality and applicability to personal and professional life. Students learn about what ingredients are necessary for an authentic discernment and are invited to begin considering their own discernments. With the college decision process animating their lives, the SCIP students especially appreciate this opportunity to further reflect on what they are deeply seeking from the college admissions process.
And finally, the fourth session brings the reflection sessions to a close with a focused look at the Ignatian decision-making framework. Students have the opportunity to listen to each other and share advice about how to approach their biggest decisions in the coming year. Almost everyone raises similar questions about the college search process. During the mock interview process at the end of the final week in which the students are paired with Georgetown staff and faculty acting as interviewers, I had the opportunity to ask students to share more about their desires and goals for their college search. I could tell in these interviews that the techniques of Jesuit discernment introduced in the reflection sessions had begun to take hold.
The SCIP program is truly one of the most mission-aligned efforts led by Georgetown SCS. The opportunity to introduce such promising young people to the invitational and inclusive style of Jesuit reflection practiced at Georgetown is a joy. In a way that would likely satisfy Laird, Merton, and Wallace, students learn firsthand how to practice inner reflection in a way that encourages them to be even more generous and other-centered in a noisy world.
This week’s Mission in Motion reflects on a recent podcast by Georgetown’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. Listen to the podcast.
Of the many deeply mission-aligned programs at SCS, the Institute for Transformational Leadership (ITL) is one of the most obvious. Mission in Motionhas previously reflected on the deep connections between Georgetown’s mission and values and the work of ITL. Recently, ITL, through its podcast, hosted an important discussion about the relationship between body intelligence and transformational leadership. ITL academic director Bill Pullen interviewed Marcia Feola, a master certified coach and faculty member in ITL.
What resonated strongly is an opportunity in the conversation to make more explicit the relationship between leadership coaching and a diversity of religious and spiritual wisdom teachings about the body. Bill and Marcia use the language of “whole person” to describe an approach to embodied leadership development, which links up nicely with the commitment in the Spirit of Georgetown to “Educating the Whole Person.” This value encourages all of our endeavors at Georgetown SCS to integrate the holistic development of the human person’s many facets – intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual – in the learning experience.
The podcast helped me appreciate how much good leaders need to attend to knowledge of their own bodies in the work of exercising transformational leadership with and for others. It is common to speak of the need for emotional intelligence, a reflective self-awareness of how affective sensations influence one’s thoughts and behavior. But body intelligence is no less important. And this focus on the body is manifested in different religious and spiritual traditions.
Ignatian spirituality, which gives rise to the Spirit of Georgetown, emphasizes the body as a location for encountering God. St. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Spiritual Exercises, invites the retreatant to experience the mystery and love of the Divine by encountering God in one’s own body and in the body of Christ. God’s desire to be in relationship with human beings does not occur in the abstract but through the fleshy, incarnational reality of the human body. The Australian Jesuits offer further insights about this connection between the body and the Spiritual Exercises in this piece: “Ignatian Spirituality and the Wisdom of the Body.”
Other faith traditions also speak to the central importance of the body in the quest for spiritual insight and knowledge. The Jewish tradition describes the need for healthy living with particular emphasis on caring for the body. So many of the teachings and laws of the Hebrew Bible focus on care for the physical self. The Islamic tradition similarly draws attention to this connection between a sound body and a healthy spiritual life. For Muslims, the human body is a gift from God and humans are responsible for being good stewards of this gift.
Practicing care for the body happens in many ways. A mindfulness meditation practice, like the one offered in the SCS Daily Digital Meditations (sign up here), typically begins with a body scan exercise that relaxes the body and makes one more present and aware of their physical sensations. The body communicates its status with all sorts of sensations, but making sense of these signals requires paying mindful attention to them. Reflective awareness of our emotions, another key feature of mindful meditation, depends on our achieving some sort of grounded centeredness in our physical bodies. In these SCS mindfulness meditations, one enters into greater emotional awareness through conscious breathing exercises. The body, the mind, and the spirit all co-exist in an interdependent and interrelated relationship.
I encourage you to listen to the ITL podcast on body intelligence and reflect on how you might grow in deeper awareness of how your body affects – in both positive and negative ways – how you lead in the world.
