Message for October 3, 2024
Tomorrow is the feast of one of the most engaging of saints, Francis of Assisi. In his love of animals and indeed all of creation, he teaches us to see life whole! Such wholeness needs constantly be reborn in a fallen world, as we break through our self-involvement.
Sometimes people see only their own needs, think just of themselves. Our Grad Student Dinners with Young Professionals and Postdocs are a chance for us to break out of our own little bubble and let life in and let others in. It is a crucial stage in maturation.
By way of example, the residential colleges at Harvard were gifted by Mr. Harkness with common dining areas where students of different classes, subjects, assumptions and interests would meet each other and grow in the process. Despite that, some stand apart by spending all three years with only their blocking group. Is such a wise policy? I leave that to your meditations, but do include the much-shared anecdote that some students never met the others, their classmates, or those of other years there, because they stayed stuck in a small exclusive coterie.
Of course even they usually meet everyone in their class during Senior Week when they let down their guard and say hello to everyone and a finally meet their House. But that backing into things was foreclosed for them when COVID hit and campus was emptied in less than a week and the possible last-minute encounters of Senior Week evanesced.
Of course all of us have one bent or another and that’s fine. I find one-on-one delightful and groups more of a stretch, but try to accommodate to each as any person would. “Half of us are shy. The other half of us have much to be shy about”. When you come to our programs, be yourself, assemble in groups small or large as you need or prefer.
But let us all, having praised God during our 6pm to 7pm Adoration in the church, then make room for others in all their sizes and shapes, abilities and crosses, advantages and hard-fought successes. As Sts. Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal used to advise their first sisters of The Visitation Order, recreation is much more fruitful when we go to recreate The Other, more fulfilling to us to as we discover more sides to ourselves.
I include, for the feast of St. Francis of Assisi one of our more famed HBS conversationalists, Beef Wellington.
