Remember Meaning at Year's End

What is it with life on the Hilltop? How is it possible that this is the last week of classes? I swear it was a week and a half ago that I was standing with one of my Jesuit brothers in a sea of friendly folks under a Jumbotron on the Mall, happily watching Barack Obama take the oath of office. And yet just yesterday, I had to bid a heart-aching farewell to the students I have been blessed to accompany through THEO-073 this semester. It was wonderful, but it felt about 10 days long. How is that possible?

The answer, of course, is hidden somewhere in the middle of the mystery that is the Georgetown experience. Life is different here. Faster, yes, but more than that — fuller (even jammed), more “charged,” distinctively graced — at least if you know how to look and you’re paying attention.

Learning how to pay attention and how to look for glimpses of what’s really real is one of Georgetown’s dearest, deepest goals. At Jesuit schools, we live as the inheritors of a tradition telling us that the very purpose of education is to help young people become what they were created to be: men and women who can look at themselves, their world and the whole of human history and recognize in all three the abiding presence and purposeful action of God.

We hope you will discover that presence and action and we pray that in discovering them you will realize that you are invited to fuse the project of your life to the project of Creation. We’re about serious, life-shaping stuff here. Week after week, my students reminded me of that this semester as we explored the assumptions and aims of Jesuit education.

Early in the semester, we read a bicentennial meditation on Georgetown written in 1989 by Fr. Timothy Healy, S.J., who was then president of the university. He noted that “Undergraduate teaching, with its dream of making citizens for the City of Man and the City of God, has always been first in Georgetown’s time and heart. For two centuries on this good ground the faculty has labored to help young men, and for the last 30 years young women, to achieve themselves as citizens, husbands and wives, parents and as friends. Liberal education has always had those aims and only those.” A remarkable statement.

As we discussed Healy’s take on things, one of the students in the class — a pre-med biology major who is not afraid to wrestle with a poem — raised his hand. He asked, “Did you notice that all of those things are relational, that they’re all, in one way or another, about how you end up relating to other people?” I hadn’t thought of it that way, but he was right. His comments ignited a class conversation; before long, we were reflecting on the fact that it’s not really surprising that a university rooted in a tradition that believes God to be best understood in terms of a relationship — the mystery of the Trinity — would define its success in terms of the relational quality of its alumni’s lives. I left that class grateful for the chance to be a part of our living experiment in learning how to pay attention and how to look. I loved that day.

That was in January. You know, last week. The classes between then and now have been, for me anyway, a season of grace — downpours of grace, class after class. On the outside this semester, I have been the black-suited, Roman-collared professor drawing crazy diagrams on the chalkboard, calling on raised hands and assigning homework. On the inside, I have been a little kid, joyfully stomping in puddles of grace in the good company of a classroom full of Hoyas I have come to love.

In a few short weeks, we will once again celebrate the bittersweet ceremonies of graduation. I have a great job that day. Seniors in the College will carry an index card with them as they approach the stage to receive congratulations from President DeGioia and Dean Gillis. On the card is the student’s name along with any pronunciation guides the student wants to provide the faculty member who will announce his or her name. Just before walking across the stage, each student hands his or her card to me so I can pass it on to the announcers’ podium.

I love that card-collecting moment. It gives me a face-to-face chance to pray, one final time, for each of our graduates in the closing seconds of his or her undergraduate career. My prayer for them is simple: that they continue to pay attention to their lives, to look for what’s really real, and to discover in their own way, in God’s good time, what it means that in the end three things last — faith, hope and love — and that the greatest of these is love.

Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., is an assistant dean for Georgetown College. He can be reached at rjm27@georgetown.edu. This is the semester’s final installment of As This Jesuit Sees It …

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