Tag: Spiritual Life

It is hard to believe that we have been continuously offering the SCS Daily Digital Meditation for over three years! What began as an immediate spiritual care response to the stress and anxiety experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has persisted and become a stable and durable virtual community of meditators from across the SCS community. In this post, I would like to remind all members of SCS about this daily resource (sign up here!) and offer some encouragement about the benefits of participating. 

As a reminder, the SCS Daily Digital Meditation takes place each day of the workweek at 12 pm ET. The sessions all occur on Zoom (registrants receive the link and instructions for joining via email) and last around 15 minutes. From Monday through Thursday, the session is organized as a mindfulness meditation that consists of a short body scan, intentional breathing, and then a period of silent, centering meditation with a melodic piano track playing in the background. The Friday meditation is reserved for an inclusively presented Examen meditation, modeled on the reflective practice arising from the Ignatian tradition of spirituality. The Examen consists of five reflective prompts that invite participants to notice with sacred awareness the significant events of their past week, exploring in more reflective detail times of gratitude, consolation, desolation, and hope for the week ahead. I lead these daily sessions and am typically joined by a handful of SCS students, staff, and faculty members. Some participants are regular, daily attendees while others come more sporadically. How often you come is entirely up to you! 

Over the last few years, Mission in Motion has reflected on the importance of such a mindfulness habit by making connections with the Spirit of Georgetown value Contemplation in Action. Here are some helpful posts that might give you more insight about the considerable benefits of joining this meditative practice: 

• Curious About the SCS Daily Digital Meditations? Some Frequently Asked Questions
• The Value of Inner Silence: Participants Reflect on the Benefits of SCS Daily Digital Meditations
• Digitally Caring for the Whole Person at SCS in a Time of COVID-19

Just this week, a member of the SCS meditation community reached out and expressed gratitude for the offering, saying this ongoing experience “has made a big difference in my life.” I have heard similar input over the years from a range of participants and the Georgetown Faculty & Staff Assistance Program has recommended the SCS meditations to their clients. Others have noted how the meditations provide “deeper inner strength,” “help center and relieve frustrations,” and give the sense that “none of us are alone.” There are many other spiritual, physical, and emotional supports I could name about developing a regular habit of mindfulness meditation and reflection. But I hope you will come check it out for yourself! 

If you have any questions about the SCS Digital Daily Meditation, please reach out to me, Jamie Kralovec, SCS Associate Director for Mission Integration, at pjk34@georgetown.edu. 

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare so many social realities that had remained below the surface for so many observers. The fragility of our society, already experienced by so many people marginalized and excluded by oppressive social and economic structures, was exposed in profound ways for all to see. Communities across the country and throughout the world suffered immeasurable loss of life and livelihood as a result of a public health event that felt at some point like it would continue indefinitely. Georgetown was no stranger to this suffering, as many in our community of students, faculty, staff, community partners, and alumni endured significant losses during this period and continue to recover the broken pieces. 

The Mission in Motion blog has attempted over time to tell the story for readers about how Georgetown SCS lives out the University’s Jesuit mission and values. What is it about the Spirit of Georgetown, the 10 values taken from our Jesuit heritage and lived out in our multi-faith and interreligious way of proceeding, that brings this diverse, multi-campus community together? So often telling this story brings to the surface instances of great joy and celebration, whether they be student achievements, faculty innovations, university-wide ceremonies like Commencement and Tropaia, or promising examples of being People for Others through community engagement, service, and social justice. But sometimes, the most poignant expressions of mission and values are actualized during times of adversity and loss within the community.  

This week featured such an expression when SCS students, faculty, and staff from Mission and Ministry came together to process as a group the profound feelings, memories, and hopes following the passing of a student. In moments like this, words alone are not sufficient to help a community move through its feelings of grief. It is critically important to create nurturing and supportive shared spaces in which community members can be together in their grief. The bonds that tie a group together depend on mutual trust, reciprocity, and kinship. 

This week’s circle event demonstrated that there is something deeper and bigger, even transcendent, that animates this community of learners. The community circle that gathered did not erase the grief or cease the difficult feelings of loss. But the effort did help the healing process, one that so often takes a very long time. Theological traditions offer insights and resources for how to understand death, but, ultimately, this human experience is such a confounding mystery. In the face of this truth, we might feel consolation in the invitation to confront this reality of loss as a community. 

At Georgetown, students should reach out to Counseling and Psychiatric Service (CAPS) and faculty and staff should reach out to the Faculty & Staff Assistance Program for support in a grieving process. You might also visit the University’s Human Resources website on grief in general. 

This week, members of the SCS staff and faculty community made their way out to Georgetown’s Calcagnini Contemplative Center for a day retreat. Nestled between the gratitude themes of Thanksgiving and the joyful anticipation themes of the coming holidays, the day-long retreat offered a welcome bit of pause from the demands of daily work.

I co-led the retreat with Rabbi Rachel Gartner, SCS Senior Advisor for Pastoral Care, and we began the day by inviting the group to open themselves up to the experience. While the day retreat might feel like a limited window for meaningful reflection, we encouraged everyone to allow themselves to fully experience the transformative potential of a few short hours away from campus. 

In a circle, retreatants reflected on the meaning of work in their lives and how that meaning has potentially shifted over the years of pandemic, transition, and return. Offering wisdom from the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Rachel invited the group to consider the joys, the challenges, and the so-so of work life. 

Rabbi Rachel’s series of questions invited deeper reflection on each person’s “why” at work. This open-ended question led to a final question about the possibility of making a 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. The group grew in its understanding, empathy, and kinship by listening to what individuals anonymously named as their own thoughts and feelings. Within an hour of arriving, the group had already begun to develop some significant communal bonds. 

In the afternoon, I offered a short presentation on the examen of consciousness and then led the group in the practice. By taking stock of each component of the “long, loving, look at the real,” we can appreciate that taking time for pause and quiet in our day, reflecting on the meaning of our daily experience, is possible even without a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains. A daily examen can happen anywhere and its practicality reflects the Spirit of Georgetown value of Contemplation in Action.

Like the retreat offered for SCS students last spring, this was the first in-person retreat of its kind for SCS faculty and staff in over three years. The desire to be reconnected to one another in person, in a community-building setting, was evident throughout the experience. I noticed the joys that are possible when colleagues, some who did not know each other, come together in a relaxed and reverential setting with the explicit purpose of slowing down and savoring the particular details of our daily lives. I noticed myself feeling deep joy overhearing laughter and energized conversation at lunch. I also noticed the formation of deeper relationships between co-workers and a deeper appreciation of the possibilities of living out the Spirit of Georgetown. 

We left Calcagnini with a renewed sense of how we can serve Georgetown’s mission as individuals and as a community. And we left the retreat with an energy about the need to pause every day to notice and savor the world around us and the world within us. 

Rabbi Rachel ended the morning session with Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House,” which is a fitting affirmation of the need for retreats like this one. 
​

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

I am delighted to be writing for this wonderful blog, and even more so that Jamie’s last post, along with the occasion of this last weekend’s graduate student “Rest, Recharge, Renew” retreat give me such a powerful entry point.

During my last 11 years on the hilltop, it has been a consistent joy to discover aspects of Ignatian spirituality that resonate with aspects of Jewish tradition and the other traditions represented on campus. My hope in interfaith engagement is always that different traditions can provide new angles, food for further thought, and sometimes even deeper illumination into the places where they connect. All this, without needing to connect in every place!

Jamie’s last blog post explored one such area of connection and resonance. One of my favorites, quite frankly.

In the last blog post Jamie sagely reminded us of the potential spiritual and emotional pitfalls of an overcommitted lifestyle, warning: “[E]ven busy adults who have important tasks to accomplish everyday can develop an unhealthy relationship to time.” One of the dangers of a utilitarian relationship with time so prevalent for so many of us these days is that it can make time into a possession that we need to use productively, and using time to contemplate doesn’t fit into our notion of productivity and therefore is a waste of our possession.

Indeed. In a context in which we don’t see contemplation as productive, it can be really hard to make the case for it. My experience in multifaith settings over the last two decades tells me that making the case for contemplation has become one of the central roles for contemporary clergy of any background, precisely because it has become so profoundly challenging and precisely because we believe so profoundly in it.

Thankfully, for me, it’s easy to make the case. Enter the Torah.

Jews like to joke that, through Torah, we brought the world the concept of the weekend; in the form of Shabbat. During Shabbat, Jews construct what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called a cathedral in time:

“Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.”

As the sun sets on the eve of Shabbat, we light our plain white candles – one for everyone in the household – raise a glass of wine or juice, break simple bread, and step into that sanctuary in time. There, 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. We step outside of ordinary life so we can then turn toward it contemplatively and “see and taste” (Psalm 34) the goodness of all of life.

If Shabbat were a person, she would high-five, fist-bump, or elbow-bump the Jesuit Walter Burghardt for naming and affirming contemplation as a “long loving look at the real” which inspires as “experiential awareness of reality” and a “way of entering into communion with reality.”

Judaism, in particular the mystical strain of Judaism, teaches that all of reality is a manifestation of the Divine. That God not merely permeates reality, but reality is an expression or embodiment of the essence of God. Seeking metaphors to describe this hard-to-grasp concept, Jewish mystics often refer to reality as a garment of God. This garment is woven of aspects of God’s very being – so it is itself ultimately Divine in both origin and nature. Jewish mystics teach that our spiritual goal is to attain the awareness that this is the true nature of all of life. We do this through what they call devekut  (lit. cleaving). Devekut is essentially a communion with the Divine (through, in part, our experiential awareness of reality) that allows us to see and sense the godliness hidden within every single aspect of the material world. Through devekut we come to know intellectually,  as well as to sense in our very being, the ultimate truth that all of reality is sacred, all of reality is One.

Through rest, reflection, song, prayer, communal conversation, and Torah study, Shabbat becomes a weekly, extended, and communal contemplative pursuit of – and ideally the attainment of – devekut.

We conclude Shabbat the way we begin it. In a ritual called havdallah (lit. distinction) we light candles, we drink wine or juice, and in place of eating sweet challah, we smell aromatic spices – a symbolic last whiff of the extra-soulfulness we are granted on Shabbat. Unlike the singular and white Shabbat candle, the havdallah candle contains many wicks and strands of wax composed of a rainbow of colors. The multifaceted candle invites us to weave our singular Shabbat consciousness into the glorious multifaceted activities of the week ahead. This idea is affirmed in some communities by actually placing a drop of havdallah wine or juice on our eyelids, as an invitation to see the rest of the week through Shabbat eyes. Or, as Burghardt, S.J., might express it, to turn to all of reality with a long and loving look that invites communion with it.

In Judaism, devekut is a highly valued end in and of itself. Its reward is deep joy. Through it, we find greater meaning and satisfaction in all that we do in life. And at the same time, there is a desired (even commanded) outcome of equal importance – namely, to live with greater intention, righteousness, kindness, and integrity as a result of our loving encounter with the real.

Contemplation, Shabbat, devekut are meant to lead to living in a way that honors what we come to know through them – that everything and everyone is ultimately divine in origin and nature. It’s our joyful and sacred obligation to live according to that awareness and to become maximally productive in the things that matter most: what we bring to this world and how we treat one another in it. 

May it be so.

Please consider joining me and Jamie for upcoming retreats as they are announced. We’d love to see you at them.