Monday, January 21st

1 pm: Service Project - Gather in the Massman Gallery 

• Cookie baking with AYS youth for St. James Place = Cookie baking with youth from Associated Youth Services for St. James Place soup kitchen
• Hugs blanket making for Gillis Center
• Toiletry Kit assembly for Holy Family House
• Hot chocolate giveaway at Troost Max Bus Stops
• Troostwood Memorial clean-up project (weather permitting)
   

This Wednesday, eleven Rockhurst students and one staff member will embark on a pilgrimage to Washington D.C. for Friday's March for Life.  Please keep them in your prayers.  Please also pray for a greater reverence for all life: the unborn, the sick, the poor, the marginalized and the stigmatized, the uneducated, the abused, the abusers, the lonely, those confined by life's circumstances, the imprisoned, the elderly, those near death and all of us in a position to affect positive change in others' lives, in our society and in our world.  May we strive to love all of God's creation as God loves. 

This year's core value encourages us to reflect on our lives and to discern how we may use our gifts and talents in the service of others. As you do so, do you feel called to apply your gifts in a leadership capacity? The application to serve as a Resident Assistant, Orientation Leader, Social Mentor, Homecoming Coordinator and Family Weekend Coordinator is now available. Click here to apply. The deadline is January 23rd, so apply today!  

You may also consider participating in the Leadership Path Seminar, an opportunity to more fully discern how to apply your gifts. This evening workshop is an opportunity to learn more about your strengths, discuss leadership opportunities and how to prepare for leadership roles around campus. Sign up in Massman 1.

Are you potentially interested in going on an Ignatian Pilgrimage? Slated for January 14-28, 2013, this two-week pilgrimage is organized by the Ignatian Camino office of the Spanish Jesuits. It will combine guided visits to prominent Ignatian sites (Loyola, Arantzazu, Montserrat, Manresa) AND six days of trekking along the newly developed Camino Ignaciano, where walkers trace the route of Ignatius' own famous 1522 pilgrimage. The pilgrimage is offered for the exceptionally reasonable price (Euro 800, approximately $1050, not including transport to/from Spain).

Here is a Q and A and a one-pager that offer more information. For general information about the Camino itself, see: www.caminoIgnaciano.org/en. 

If you are considering this opportunity, contact Cindy Schmersal to indicate your interest.

  Hello Hawks and Happy New Year! I write to you from the warm and breezy Belize City, where I am currently working for two years as a Jesuit Volunteer through the international program of JVC. It is an honor to be able to share some of my experience with you today, and I hope that this reflection finds you all well and excited to start a new semester at the Nest. I myself am approaching a milestone in my time here, as the next week or so will mark the end of my first six months in Belize. At this moment I am feeling both amazed that the months have flown by so quickly and incredibly grateful for both the joys and challenges that have shaped this first part of my JV experience. To tell you a little more about my life here, I shall start with my job...

            I work as a social worker for the Building for Change program of Hand in Hand Ministries, an international not-for-profit social services organization. Building for Change, the main program that Hand in Hand runs out of Belize, is very similar to Habitat for Humanity in that we build simple houses for low income families in Belize City. My role as the JV social worker is fairly diverse, but the primary focus of my job is accompanying the families for which we build. I serve as a member of the selection committee-meaning I help interview and assess the families who come in to apply for a house-and I also help plan and facilitate the monthly life skills classes that we host for our house recipients. But my favorite part of my job as a social worker is forming friendships with families we've built for through follow-up and home visits. And, as I've recently gotten my motorcycle driver's license in Belize, I just started getting into this part of my job more by zipping around the city on a lee red motorbike. Some home visit highlights so far have included: getting tours of the new houses of the families who just moved in, listening to a 10-minute harmonica serenade by one of our more musically inclined recipients, and attending a full-on housewarming rager at the house we built a couple weeks ago. It may have been a tad premature seeing as the family hadn't had the chance to install electricity yet, and the party was happening in the evening. We all stood around in their unfurnished home, eating our chicken and rice and beans in substantial darkness, but it was still quite rich.

            I was reading some of the reflections from last semester and saw that my Hawk classmates have already done an excellent job of describing some basics of the JV experience-living in community, working for social justice, leading a simple lifestyle, and practicing spirituality. However, I thought I'd offer a small taste of what JVC's four lived values have looked like thus far in my experience in Belize.

Living Simply: As you might expect, we JVs are asked to be intentional and frugal about our household expenses, and we receive a small monthly stipend which we can use for personal items and the like. However, in Belize City, the living simply component manifests itself not only in how we live, but also where we live. Our house is located in the southern part of the city, which is home to many of Belize's poorest neighborhoods. While we are well cared for by our neighbors, friends, and the JVC staff, we are also inherently closer to some of the instability and violence that characterize many impoverished areas. Our location not only reminds us of the deep disparity between the rich and the poor in Belize, but it also allows us to be present to and better understand the realities of many of the people we serve and work with in our jobs.

Building Community: As such, we also experience a rich and diverse sense of community-in the neighborhood and in the home-because of how and where we live. This year my JV community consists of myself and five other JVs who are all in their second year in Belize. While I've learned a ton about myself by living intentionally with others, I think one of the most important things I've learned is this idea of never dismissing another person. I've come to realize that building community happens most when we continue to return to those relationships we find most difficult-community members who we struggle to get along with, co-workers who are arrogant or like to complain, neighbors who continually ask us for food and money, government officials who don't seem to care about the well-being of Belizeans-and remember that no one is outside of God's love. And just as God continues to meet us where we are and love us just as we are, we are called to reflect that love and find the good in each person before us, whether we find that task easy or not. Though I will never do this perfectly, I've found that this process is where I experience true communion with others in Belize.

Doing Justice (that's what's up!): When I first decided to apply to JVC, this was the component that I felt most ready and excited for(thank you, VOICES for JUSTICE). However, as I've settled into life and work as a JV, I've found that this lived value is sometimes the most difficult to detect in my daily rhythm. As a foreigner and therefore always a guest in this country, there is little I can do to work for change in the systems that keep people poor in Belize. There is also a long history of racial and cultural oppression, and this reality continues to manifest itself in the lives of Belizeans in more ways than I can even begin to understand. But while I recognize my limitations as a human and a JV, I can also see where my actions start to reflect this component of doing justice: in visiting with people, in playing with neighborhood kids, in advocating for families at work, in standing up for people who are poor and marginalized, in treating people kindly in my home, in prayer and reflection. It is certainly less than glorious, but I'm pretty sure that forming relationships and learning to love others is where all justice begins.

Witnessing Faith: Beyond the commitment to pray together and have regular spirituality nights as a community, the practice of witnessing faith in our everyday lives calls us to live from a deep knowledge of God's love for us and for all of creation. In my own process of adjusting to culture shock and getting to know myself in Belize, I've often felt frustrated by how long it's taken me to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing at work, how to stay in touch with the people I love back home, how to taak di kriol, how to live in an intentional community, etc. But the good news is that I am slowly learning how to have patience and love for myself along the way. This journey of self-discovery in Belize has been both uncertain and beautiful, but what holds it together for me is the faith that God is guiding me through it and loving me in all my confused and bumbling glory. I'm beginning to trust that it all belongs, and I am grateful for the strength God gives me to be able to plunge into the difficult and joyful reality that is life in Belize.

Thomas Merton says: The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. I think that one sentence might describe my experience thus far as a Jesuit Volunteer better than all of this reflection. For me, these last six months have been about hope-not in what I might accomplish or contribute to during my time here-but in God, who continues to move through us all in new and surprising ways. Thanks for reading, Hawks, and have a great semester!

P.S. - If you're reading this and you go to Rockhurst, you should encourage administration to add an undergraduate program in social work. It is a wonderful and challenging and necessary field of work...and very much grounded in our values as a Jesuit institution. :)