On January 21 2003, the College held its 1st annual Winter Convocation, which explored the third of the four questions central to our College Mission Statement, “How shall we find meaning in history and in life?” The evening consisted of sacred and secular music, a series of small talks and a community dinner. Participants were encouraged to reflect on how they find meaning in their lives through their labor.
Read some of the personal stories and reflections that were shared during the Convocation.
Timothy Wickstrom ’80, Worcester lawyer
The Lord called to Samuel who answered, “Here I am.” Samuel ran to Eli and said, “Here I am. You called me.” “I did not call you”, Eli said. “Go back to sleep.” So he went back to sleep. Again the Lord called Samuel, who rose and went to Eli. “Here I am.” he said. “You called me.” But Eli answered, “I did not call you. Go back to sleep.”
At that time Samuel was not familiar with the Lord, because the Lord had not revealed anything to him as yet. The Lord called Samuel again. Getting up and going to Eli, he said, “Here I am. You called me.” Then Eli understood that the Lord was calling the youth. So he said to Samuel, “Go to sleep, and if you are called, reply, Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Fr. McFarland, Fr. Brooks, Fr. Gray, Rev. Fathers, Trustees, Distinguished Faculty and Administrators, wonderful speakers, students, College Hill neighbors and friends of Holy Cross one and all.
It is with equal measure of pride and appreciation that I stand before you as one voice in a chorus of alumni who have walked these hills and learned in these classrooms; a chorus who accepted the responsibility of the Cross, not when they gained admission to this great College, but only when they earned their baccalaureate; and a chorus who learned, more than anything else, that to whom much is given, much is expected.
I also stand before you as a man raised in the Catholic faith, educated and trained as a lawyer; and as a son, husband, father, thinker and dreamer. It is fitting that this convocation takes place today, one day after the observance of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his life for his work; and one day before the 30th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court decision that allows for the unspeakable destruction of life, life which is God’s greatest work. And though we mourn the passing of Dr. King and pray for those unborn, our call today is not just to mourn and pray, but to act and to remedy.
I was asked to share with you some thoughts and experiences as to how each of us may bring the mission of the College and the meaning of the Cross into our work lives. I ask each of you: How can we not?
For those of you more set in career and work, I’d simply ask that you find renewal in today’s challenges. For those of you not yet decided on which path to follow, I’d ask that you, like Samuel, listen and heed the calling. And fear not the applications, the interviews, the endless revision to resume and cover letter. Pursue excellence. Dare to dream. Cross the stream in one great leap. This is your time. This is your life. Do His Work.
For me, that call was to be a lawyer.
I was drawn to the legal profession first, by watching my father who is a lawyer and secondly by believing that, as a lawyer, I could be of service to clients and, at the same time, strive for what I believe are the highest ideals in a civilized society: peaceful resolution of conflicts, justice and charity to those less fortunate.
I firmly believe that the law is a profession. That means that we must serve clients and our communities with our specialized knowledge. Some lawyers forget this responsibility and instead turn the profession into an opportunity to maximize the amount of money they can earn. This practice led Louis Brandeis to criticize lawyers when he said:
“American lawyers have ceased to be moral leaders and instead have become prosperous spectators.”
This view, however, ignores the silent efforts of a vast number of lawyers who, in everyday practice, advocate against racial, religious and ethnic discrimination; who promote fair and just resolution to conflicts; and who serve those in need of legal representation either for a reduced fee or for no fee at all.
As I listened to the readings selected for today’s wonderful celebration of life and spirit at Holy Cross, I felt both moved and challenged. In the hymn that opened this Convocation, we heard that we share inventive powers with the Great Creator, who is and always will be creating. There are indeed worlds yet to be dreamed of; worlds of peace where neighbors are seen more for what they share than for what they don’t; worlds of justice where the poor and hopeless are lifted up by us and our work; worlds where life is respected; and worlds where to whom much is given, much is given back.
My dream is that one day my five little children will live in a world where people are judged by the nature of their acts and by the compassion in their souls. A world where they can, as the mission of Holy Cross challenges, make the best of their talents, work together, be sensitive to one another, serve others, and seek justice within and beyond their community. You can make that difference, and make the world a better place, whether in business, as an employer, a professional, a worker or employee or even as that street sweeper. Pursue excellence. Honor yourselves, your families and the great gift of Holy Cross.
You have been given much. We expect much of you.
When Samuel went back to sleep, the Lord came to him and revealed his presence, calling out as before “Samuel, Samuel!” Samuel answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Katie O’Keefe ’03
Before every basketball game of my past three and a half years here at Holy Cross, while the anthem is being sung and all are anticipating the thrill of the tip-off, I have said a very simple prayer. In this prayer, I do not pray for victory, but rather that my actions and attitudes during those forty minutes might honor and glorify God. Basketball is a game. It is fun and competitive, but it is also a labor, a responsibility, and it is an opportunity. An opportunity to do God’s work – to let His light shine out in my life. The words of that prayer, that my actions and attitudes might give glory to God and show His love through me, is how I find spiritual meaning in all my labors – whatever they may be.
The meaning I find in my endeavors was found within the journey of my life thus far. This journey begins with my family and faith background. I was baptized and received my first communion in the Catholic Church, but shortly after, my family made a move to a church with a different style of worship. This Congregational Church was a community with a real sense of God’s presence and a passion for worship. Here, our family found the community of faith with the answer to many of the needs in our lives.
Growing up, my Mom and Dad made God an important part of their lives and our life as a family. My Mom, originally a teacher, became involved in many church organizations and local volunteer enrichment programs. It was easy to see the joy it brought my Mom to give of herself and share God’s love. My Dad, a civil engineer, has loyally served a New Hampshire company for many years, and has always conducted himself, despite obstacles, with integrity and an unshakable trust that God would provide for our family. My parents give of themselves with God’s love in their hearts. They give to others faithfully and joyfully and in doing so, they serve God honorably. With that joy in their hearts and the way they approach the labors of their lives, I asked myself, why would I attempt the labors of my own life in any other way?
My journey taught me from any early age that I had a passion for working with people. As a kid, I always loved visiting the elderly in nursing homes with my Girl Scout troop and Catechism classes. In high school, I volunteered at a local homeless shelter in which I did odd jobs around the facility, and babysat for the parents at the home who often had no escape from the craziness of their lives. I have always loved giving of myself and my own joy – the joy that loving others through my daily actions inspires.
Next my journey brought me here, to Holy Cross. Junior year, I began to apply to colleges. What I found is that there are few institutions out there with a mission statement as challenging to a young person, and fitting to the woman I wanted to become as that of Holy Cross. The experience at Holy Cross, beginning with the admissions essay I would write, would oblige me to ask such questions as:
“How do we find meaning in life and history? What are our obligations to one another? What is our special responsibility to the world’s poor and powerless?”
To become a “woman for others” was a hands-down decision for me, (this aside from the fact that my other option was to attend the University of Richmond and become a RICHMOND SPIDER! )
My journey directed me immediately to sociology for its nature as a discipline in which we are seeking to understand ourselves as part of a greater whole – as men and women inevitably with an impact, and therefore a responsibility, upon this earth. This past spring, I accepted a summer internship through Lilly Endowment and S.P.U.D. here at Holy Cross. The program was created in the interest of exploring vocation among Holy Cross students while giving to the Worcester community. I saw immediately an opportunity to explore where God is calling me to give of myself and, in doing so, glorify Him. I worked with the Worcester Youth Center, a facility in the heart of Worcester where kids from the underprivileged area can come to participate in structured programs, recreational activities, service projects, or to just escape the everyday of their lives. During my summer at the Worcester Youth Center, I organized an all-day summer kick-off picnic for the kids, assisted in weekly service projects, supervised day trips, served lunches, and most of all, acted as a mentor to the children. I learned the difficulties the kids in this tough area of Worcester face everyday and I developed relationships with many incredible youth.
At the end of each week, I was able to sit down and reflect on how God was speaking to me through my daily experiences at the Center. This is where I was most significantly molded and changed by the experience. I saw the rewards of persistent kindness, smiles and caring pay off in the fruits of the kids’ respect and trust. I persisted in sharing God’s love with them each day through my actions and attitudes and they, in turn, taught me lessons and gave me gifts of which they will probably never know. Last summer, I believe that I became connected more deeply within our community. When I arrived at the Worcester Youth Center in May, I was an outsider, but when I left in August, I knew that my patience and my unwavering kindness had made a difference in the lives of a few people, and they had changed me as well – they had reinforced the meaning I find in the labors of my life. To make a difference in the life of one person – to share the joy and the love I have inside my heart is to give a gift of God’s love to another person. What more meaning could you ask for than to have loved another and known that you have honored God’s name in doing so?
I have only lived 21 years of my life – my journey has really just begun. I do not yet have a career or an adult agenda – but I do have the everyday labors of my life: I have studies; I have basketball; I have service commitments; and I have summer jobs. Whatever the labor may be, I have meaning in that labor because I have God’s love to give to others – God’s name to glorify in the way I conduct myself.
Jacob is a ten year old who I had the opportunity to work with this summer at the Youth Center. He struggles with attention deficit disorders and has a temper that could snap in an instant. He really challenged me, and at times frustrated me, but when Jacob smiled when I came in the door in the morning, I knew that my persistent tough love and his slowly forming trust in me had formed a bond of friendship. That smile has helped me find meaning in life and labor. In such little things as a child’s smile, I know I have shared God’s love – honored His name – and in the labors of my life – in my journey – in doing this, I find profound meaning.
Keynote Address: Rev. Howard J. Gray, S.J., honorary degree recipient
Michael Frayn opens his novel of childhood during World War II London with a poignant adult reverie.
The third week of June and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything’s before me-all the frightening half-understood promise of life (Spies, p. 5).
Childhood memories caught in adult life and history attract Frayn as they do so many of our storytellers in novels and films because childhood memories give them artistic permission to make dreams an adult occupation. Much of education is also about storytelling and making images-the narratives of scientific breakthroughs, the images that dramatize the meaning of mathematics, the characters from literature who become as intimate to us as our friends from daily life, the sweep of history that makes us part of epochs centuries before us, the wrestling with great questions and their fragile resolutions that characterize the myths within philosophy and theology. The efforts to give urgency to our mission as a school return us to the narratives that explain our foundation and catch our inspired moments. We need our institutional visions that ask us anew: Where did we come from? What do we wish to become? These days we are called to remember and to honor the power of vision. “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King proclaimed. In 1963 the country heard that dream and shared its vision, “When we allow freedom to ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, free at last.'” We remembered then as we remember now that without vision, the people perish. This is an afternoon about vision, the finding of meaning in history and life. There are three realities in every wholesome vision. First, the vision is about me. Second, the vision is about you. Third, the vision is about us.
The vision has to touch me – my ambitions and my talents, my heart’s desires and my limitations. The vision has to challenge me not to grind me down. If the vision grinds me down, then it is a nightmare or a hallucination, not a vision because visions give life to reality. In describing what we mean by vocation, a sense of personal call, Frederick Buechner focuses on the essentials, “where my deepest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” Notice the emphasis is on joy, not hilarity, not facile happiness, but the self-awareness of what brings me the peace of knowing and accepting myself before the Lord and finding his challenge in the needs of my world.
The Lilly Endowment Project on Vocation invites faculty, staff, and students together to read their own heart’s desires and to treasure these desires as sacred ground, a privileged place where God calls me to know and to cherish who I am. Education calls me similarly to the labor of self-discovery: to know my talents, to be realistic about my limitations so that I know when and where to ask for help, to honor my imaginative explorations and to learn how to test these against the reality of life, against those explorations of other people and cultures. Every vision is first a labor of accepting myself, of knowing who I am.
But vision also involves a you. We live in a world of human contacts, friendships, and partnerships. The people who have been part of my history and who now form part of my life have a purchase on my time, my energy, my presence, and my heart. Every vision includes the intimacy of a you. This openness to another makes conversation happen, invites the surrender of love and the trust of friendship, and brings a partnering in something greater than oneself. In the efforts we took in the initial stages of the Boston College implementation of the Lilly grant, we asked students to name the defining relationships that gave identity to their past and direction to their future. Who were the[people who believed in you, trusted you, rejoiced in your gifts but who also reminded you that you were part of their lives but not their obsession? Every vision has to leave room, like the Samaritan of Luke’s parable, to transform the stranger on the road into the neighbor, into the companion of my journey. Who are the people who have made life’s detours for me? Who are the people who challenged me to compassion and care? Who were my Good Samaritans and who allowed me to become a Good Samaritan?
Third, every authentic vision, as the drive to find meaning in history and in life, has to be about us. Beyond me and beyond honored relationships of family and friends, colleagues and partners, there is a world that engages and enlarges my vision. The Samaritan had to resume his ordinary life, to continue to his destination, to complete his own journey. But before he left behind the neighbor he had created out of compassion, he created yet another wondrous relationship. The Samaritan created an us, calling on the least auspicious of partners, the innkeeper, to continue the compassionate work that he had begun. Every vision must include the community that will be its environment and its support.
This convocation symbolizes the embrace that must be part of the Holy Cross vision. It is a vision that enfolds a neighborhood, a city, a country, a world. None of these will become a place of peace and justice, of environmental responsibility, of human solidarity unless they become part of our vision as a people and as a school. The professional life I lead, the family I nourish, the Church I will rebuild-all these must have room in your vision-but so, too, must the world we share or there will be world.
But there is a caveat in this vision. Christ promised that in his Father’s dwelling place there were many mansions. The world I embrace is not one I make from scratch. The vision I share will come in many languages and from many cultures. This vision will be filtered through a variety of colors and shapes. It will call the God I worship by many names. But it will still be the world I am called to serve. My vision has to be big enough and generous enough to hold all the treasures of history and life.
The vision that gives meaning to our history and life can frighten us. We may feel that we are not capable of such labor. We may feel not strong enough, not clever enough, and, maybe, just not good enough. Martin Luther King knew these feelings too. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I am a sinner like all God’s children. But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, ‘I take you in and I bless you because you tried.'”
Convocation means “to call together.” The vision we share belongs to all of us. We lean on one another’s courage and goodness and intelligence. Holy Cross is a community working out its shared mission. Therefore, let’s call together that we can live with our personal visions and our shared vision. Let’s call together that we might be women and men, courageous enough and humble enough to have tried to labor to make the vision come to life. Then we, too, will know the blessing of having tried. And having tried, we will also be a blessing.
Mary Cerasuolo, philosophy department
How did I come to be on this program? Simple. I answered an ad 21 years ago for a secretary for the religious studies department at Holy Cross. The phrase that most caught my eye was “academic year” – 45 weeks of work. Summers off! It sounded like the dream job. It was a teacher’s schedule without the 10-year-olds. I’d take the job while our children were young, have summers free, and look for something else when they were older.
I was already familiar with the College having attended many athletic events, way back when the basketball team played at the Worcester Auditorium and the football team was still competing against Boston College. I quickly learned that Holy Cross is so much more than its athletic programs.
Initially, I was rather intimidated working with highly educated Ph.D.s teaching classes with such mysterious titles as Biblical Hermeneutics, Theravada Buddhism, and Hindu-Muslim Mystics and implied this one day to Fr. John Paris. He immediately got out his copy of Jesuit philosopher Teilhard’s, Divine Milieu, instructing me to read and I quote “Our work appears to us, in the main, as a way of earning our daily bread. But its essential virtue is on a higher level: through it we complete in ourselves the subject of the divine union …Right from the hands that knead the dough, to those that consecrate it, the great and universal Host should be prepared and handled in a spirit of adoration. Hence whatever our role may be, whether we are artist, worker or scholar, we can, if we are God’s people, speed toward the object of our work as though towards an opening on the supreme fulfilment of our beings.” End quote. For me, working here has not only been a way to earn my daily bread, it has also been an opportunity for personal growth spiritually and intellectually. I could have worked for a widget company but would have missed the chance to meet and work with a work force that sees itself as an integral part of educating the young men and women who spend four years with us on Mt. St. James.
Whether it’s Shirley and Jean dispensing tea and sympathy to an overburdened student (or faculty member), Phil hanging a shelf; Kate in Dining Services insuring that the event we are holding is a success, Lois in Housekeeping creating a more welcoming environment, or George and his crew beautifying the grounds every spring, I believe all of us work together to make Holy Cross work and, in our own way, are finding that God is attainable in all of our tasks whether it be typing, mulching or lecturing on Kant.
Because of the entire community, I have been exposed to a wide range of thoughts and ideas that has, I hope, made me a more tolerant person and one more open to the differences among us. What better way to spend one’s working hours than to be afforded the opportunity to attend beautiful liturgies with thoughtful homilies, see and hear first class artists perform, be exposed to every kind of political idea, all the while surrounded by the energy, intelligence and enthusiasm of a great student body.
In the course of my time here, I have had many work-study students in the office as “assistants”. Among these I can count a partner at Ropes and Gray, a physician, participants in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a congressional aide in D.C., teachers, committed parents, social workers, all contributing members of society. I believe that these students are representative of our Holy Cross graduates, and it has been a joy to be associated with them.
On a personal note, let me thank the organizers of today’s Convocation for inviting me to represent the Holy Cross staff. It is a great honor to be here in that capacity since my co-workers are a fine, hard-working group of people whom I have called friends for many years. That fact was brought home to me a few years ago when I experienced an illness and was not able to work for a number of months. During that time I was literally inundated with prayers and good wishes from every segment at Holy Cross. At one point my husband remarked, on his return from the mail box, that I must be getting better because the daily stream of cards and notes from “the Cross” had begun to wane. I have seen this same care and concern extended to so many staff members over the years – giving vacation days to a co-worker, donating blood platelets to a spouse undergoing chemotherapy, organizing a clothing drive for the homeless. The examples are many. Where does this generosity of spirit come from? I believe that the atmosphere which permeates Holy Cross comes from both the Jesuit tradition of the College and the character of the people who are attracted to work, study and teach here.
Do staff members ever grouse about their jobs? That’s a definite yes. Is Holy Cross perfect? Of course not. However, I can’t think of any secretarial position I could have had that would have been more gratifying and often just plain fun than working at this College on the Hill.
What began as a short-term job has given me a lifetime of good memories, wonderful friends, with a special nod to my luncheon partners and the members of the philosophy department, and the certainty that all of us on staff are contributing to the education of young men and women who, each in his or her own way, will surely make this world a better place, and that is much more satisfying than turning out the perfect widget.
