The defining moment in my life that shifted the way I was thinking...and brought me to ubuntu.
Great question. Tough to answer.
In the sense of living and breathing and working and playing.
I am paraphrasing here and I hope sincerely that if Dean Brackley ever stumbles across this he would be flattered, not disapproving. I'm writing this here a) so that I remember how this passage affected me, b) when I say the word "poor" I also mean the impoverished in countries like Central America, the Asias or Africa for example and c) when he talks about students here, I am thinking also about everyday North American citizens.
The thing I love about this is that this University, where so much terror happened (see post above) is taking it and doing something productive with what happened...using it for an opportunity to affect many lives in a positive way. Sometimes things don't always happen for a reason, but often a reason comes out of them happening.
In most places, University students come from the middle class and reflect the distortions (and insights) of the dominant culture. While it is well and good to speak of compassion in-forming and focusing university study, in the real world (where students are interested in a job after college, among other things) justice-and-peace studies may not be the be-all-end-all for many students, nor has many students ever worked with the poor.
Articles and courses about the poor rarely do the trick. They are necessary but not sufficient. It is not enough to offer answers. As every good educator knows, the answers are worthless unless the learner has the questions. The questions that count come from experience, especially from that experience of the other who shakes my world to its foundation. We need to help students and the non-poor generally, to experience the life of the poor - and reflect on that experience. That can achieve that lectures and slide shows cannot.
Many colleges and universities now offer students the chance to engage in service among the poor and less fortunate..when students come to appreciate how complex and difficult social problems are, they should find at the university the resources needed to penetrate to the causes and to help find solutions.
Many exercises and class discussions revealed that any students pass through three early stages in their encounter with the poor. After getting over their initial fear, they are thrilled and surprised to find themselves useful (some say "for the first time"!) and delighted to find that people who may have appeared threatening in the past accepted them and turned out to be "regular folks," basically decent people who were nonetheless suffering injustice. Second, the bloom goes off that rose when the students encounter frustration, discovering, for example, that down-and-out people can harbor plenty of anger below the surface or that they can be con artists. The romance fades. Third, students eventually begin to ask about the nature and causes of problems they are facing - about homelessness, drug addiction, or the bureaucratic nightmares of foster-care children. They begin to tug on the string of their local situation and run up against the tangled complexity, the structural nature, and the enormity of the evil and injustice around them. This can overwhelm them and tempt them to bitterness or cynicism, or even to give up and drop out. If that happens, unfortunately the experience turns into simply an adornment for their resume rather than the occasion for enlightment and the start of a longer journey. But that need not happen if the students allow others' suffering to break their hearts.
When suburban college students work in the South Bronx (or when a delegation of gringos visit El Salvador), if they patiently work through their fears and frustrations, they will learn important lessons from people who struggle for life and against death everyday. This has been the daily reality for most of humanity throughout our history. For all its benefits, modern middle-class culture pulls us from this struggle for life - to the point that we experience a kind of low-grade disorientation about what's really important in life.
Appalling violence - sometimes the slow violence of backbreaking work and poor nutrition - threatens the poor with death before their time. If we listen attentively to their stories, we can begin to see our reflection in their eyes, hear our story in theirs, recognize our hidden struggle for life in their open struggle against death. In this way, we let these strangers break our hearts. Solidarity is born.
Of course, this can all seem threatening. It reveals to us that those whom we felt inferior, perhaps subconciously, are just like us. This may begin to rock the core of the world we've always lived in and shake up the world that we know...things fall apart, as Yeats says. It's all more than worth it; however, for what is really happening is a kind of falling in love. If we allow the suffering of the poor to sweep us off our feet nd out of control, we may begin to feel surprisingly at one with ourselves and find ourselves asking, Why are these people smiling? Where does their hope come from?
The rich countries enjoy abundant material goods. There we also find solid people with faith and love. What the wealthy societies lack is hope. In our heart of hearts, we know that things are much worse in the world than we usually admit. The poor bring that crashing home to us. Then something unexpected can happen: the realization that something is going on in the world that is much more wonderful than we suspected. Sin abounds, but grace abounds even more.
In the crisis years, the eyes of the world sometimes seemed turned towards Central America. I suspect this was because in these poor countries the secret drama of all our lives - the dying and the rising - was being played out in a stark way. "God" is working a revolution of love in the midst of suffering and death. But we only experience the rising when we allow the dying to turn our world upside down.
In conclusion: middle-class students need the poor to help them overcome original distortion. At the same time, the poor need educated allies who can help them address injustice at the local and international level. What do the following persons have in common: Mother Theresa, Simone Weil, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela? They were all university-educated, middle-or-upper class individuals who took up the cause of the poor or oppressed and made a difference in history. Part of our role as educators is to help students discover vocations like theirs and to prevent students from sliding from graduation into the inertial tide of getting and spending. Our job is not to help them join the rich and powerful, but to help them join the poor as competent agents of change. If the college or university community can midwife fruitful engagement with the poor, it can start students on a journey with the majority of humanity; a journey for which some parents may never forgive us, but for which our graduates will never forget us.
That is the challenge left to us by the six Jesuits of the UCA who mixed their blood with that of Celina and Julia Elba - and thousands of poor, nameless Salvadorans. They died for truth, for the poor, and to inspire us to live better.
Powerful.
The thing I love about this is that this University, where so much terror happened (see post above) is taking it and doing something productive with what happened...using it for an opportunity to affect many lives in a positive way. Sometimes things don't always happen for a reason, but often a reason comes out of them happening.
In most places, University students come from the middle class and reflect the distortions (and insights) of the dominant culture. While it is well and good to speak of compassion in-forming and focusing university study, in the real world (where students are interested in a job after college, among other things) justice-and-peace studies may not be the be-all-end-all for many students, nor has many students ever worked with the poor.
Articles and courses about the poor rarely do the trick. They are necessary but not sufficient. It is not enough to offer answers. As every good educator knows, the answers are worthless unless the learner has the questions. The questions that count come from experience, especially from that experience of the other who shakes my world to its foundation. We need to help students and the non-poor generally, to experience the life of the poor - and reflect on that experience. That can achieve that lectures and slide shows cannot.
Many colleges and universities now offer students the chance to engage in service among the poor and less fortunate..when students come to appreciate how complex and difficult social problems are, they should find at the university the resources needed to penetrate to the causes and to help find solutions.
Many exercises and class discussions revealed that any students pass through three early stages in their encounter with the poor. After getting over their initial fear, they are thrilled and surprised to find themselves useful (some say "for the first time"!) and delighted to find that people who may have appeared threatening in the past accepted them and turned out to be "regular folks," basically decent people who were nonetheless suffering injustice. Second, the bloom goes off that rose when the students encounter frustration, discovering, for example, that down-and-out people can harbor plenty of anger below the surface or that they can be con artists. The romance fades. Third, students eventually begin to ask about the nature and causes of problems they are facing - about homelessness, drug addiction, or the bureaucratic nightmares of foster-care children. They begin to tug on the string of their local situation and run up against the tangled complexity, the structural nature, and the enormity of the evil and injustice around them. This can overwhelm them and tempt them to bitterness or cynicism, or even to give up and drop out. If that happens, unfortunately the experience turns into simply an adornment for their resume rather than the occasion for enlightment and the start of a longer journey. But that need not happen if the students allow others' suffering to break their hearts.
When suburban college students work in the South Bronx (or when a delegation of gringos visit El Salvador), if they patiently work through their fears and frustrations, they will learn important lessons from people who struggle for life and against death everyday. This has been the daily reality for most of humanity throughout our history. For all its benefits, modern middle-class culture pulls us from this struggle for life - to the point that we experience a kind of low-grade disorientation about what's really important in life.
Appalling violence - sometimes the slow violence of backbreaking work and poor nutrition - threatens the poor with death before their time. If we listen attentively to their stories, we can begin to see our reflection in their eyes, hear our story in theirs, recognize our hidden struggle for life in their open struggle against death. In this way, we let these strangers break our hearts. Solidarity is born.
Of course, this can all seem threatening. It reveals to us that those whom we felt inferior, perhaps subconciously, are just like us. This may begin to rock the core of the world we've always lived in and shake up the world that we know...things fall apart, as Yeats says. It's all more than worth it; however, for what is really happening is a kind of falling in love. If we allow the suffering of the poor to sweep us off our feet nd out of control, we may begin to feel surprisingly at one with ourselves and find ourselves asking, Why are these people smiling? Where does their hope come from?
The rich countries enjoy abundant material goods. There we also find solid people with faith and love. What the wealthy societies lack is hope. In our heart of hearts, we know that things are much worse in the world than we usually admit. The poor bring that crashing home to us. Then something unexpected can happen: the realization that something is going on in the world that is much more wonderful than we suspected. Sin abounds, but grace abounds even more.
In the crisis years, the eyes of the world sometimes seemed turned towards Central America. I suspect this was because in these poor countries the secret drama of all our lives - the dying and the rising - was being played out in a stark way. "God" is working a revolution of love in the midst of suffering and death. But we only experience the rising when we allow the dying to turn our world upside down.
In conclusion: middle-class students need the poor to help them overcome original distortion. At the same time, the poor need educated allies who can help them address injustice at the local and international level. What do the following persons have in common: Mother Theresa, Simone Weil, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela? They were all university-educated, middle-or-upper class individuals who took up the cause of the poor or oppressed and made a difference in history. Part of our role as educators is to help students discover vocations like theirs and to prevent students from sliding from graduation into the inertial tide of getting and spending. Our job is not to help them join the rich and powerful, but to help them join the poor as competent agents of change. If the college or university community can midwife fruitful engagement with the poor, it can start students on a journey with the majority of humanity; a journey for which some parents may never forgive us, but for which our graduates will never forget us.
That is the challenge left to us by the six Jesuits of the UCA who mixed their blood with that of Celina and Julia Elba - and thousands of poor, nameless Salvadorans. They died for truth, for the poor, and to inspire us to live better.
Powerful.
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