Friday, May 13 \u00a0\u2014 Gerard Manly Hopkins, sj \u00a0\u2014 \u00a0beauty & courage<\/p>\n
Today and tomorrow our university holds three commencements \u00a0(School of Dentistry at 9:30 today, \u00a0School of Law at 5:00 this afternoon, \u00a0the Main Campus \u00a01:30 tomorrow). \u00a0It\u2019s important to taste the courage within the excitement and wonder in people across many ages, dressed to the nines as they watch their graduate walk, and shake the President\u2019s hand, and receive their diploma from him. \u00a0 Gerard Manly Hopkins sj captured courage-beauty as well as any poet I know. \u00a0I\u2019m posting \u201cThe Windhover” this morning as an homage to years of bravery.<\/p>\n
Early this week I came across the notes I wrote when the university asked me to celebrate the McNichols Campus Baccalaureate Mass on Saturday morning May 10, 2014. \u00a0The words limp but they may remind us of what we do these two days.<\/p>\n
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john sj<\/p>\n
Baccalaureate Homily notes\u00a0\u00a0 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Some of my fellow graduates used to call it the years of fraud, as in \u201cPeople think I know some important things, that I am competent now that I have a PhD, but . . . they probably see through me and my degree and suspect what I suspect,\u00a0 that I am a fraud.\u00a0 Pretending to know things worth saying.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Little by little that goes away, the fear that I didn\u2019t really didn\u2019t learn anything at my university.<\/p>\n It is one of the strong emotions at commencement.\u00a0 It requires courage and perceptive remembering of what I did in that time of learning that my degree records.\u00a0 One set of allies are still there for me, my teachers who mentored me,\u00a0 kicked my butt when I wasn\u2019t meeting their standards, wasn\u2019t meeting mine either.\u00a0 And who kept mentoring and challenging and encouraging me to stretch, to not be overwhelmed by my fears of inadequacy.\u00a0 Who, finally, at the end of a semester, recorded a grade about my accomplishment and that grade is a public statement about me during that time of challenge and courage and stretching.\u00a0\u00a0 The grade sticks around as a marker of me and my mentor.\u00a0 Remembering all my challenges and all my mentors is remembering the beauty and courage of the process of learning.<\/p>\n St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits understood the need for remembering.\u00a0 In his great teaching about how to pray, The Spiritual Exercises<\/u>, he says we should approach our future by remembering our past with respect and affection.\u00a0 Affection for my consolations and my desolations, respect for my life as one whole human grace.\u00a0\u00a0 He suggests that I spend pieces of time paying attention to the specific life-events that led me to where I am now, and to trust them as worth my reverence and deep affection.<\/p>\n Catherine McAuley, the founder of the Sisters of Mercy, lived this same wisdom while leading an astonishingly brave group of women who risked joining her in taking on the brutal poverty of Ireland in the 1800s.\u00a0\u00a0 Deep poverty is always brutal, today and in the 1830s.\u00a0 Reading her new biography by Mary Sullivan I kept meeting Catherine at someone\u2019s death bed,\u00a0\u00a0 too young to die, heartbroken to let her people down by dying, recognizing that the one keeping her company was heartbroken too.\u00a0 Catherine\u2019s signature graces in the face of seemingly endless death and poverty, famously offered over and over at hard times?\u00a0 Playful jokes and strong tea.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Post \u00a0– \u00a0“<\/strong>The Windhover” \u00a0To Christ our Lord<\/p>\n I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here No wonder of it: \u00a0sh\u00e9er pl\u1ed1d makes plough down sillion <\/p>\n Gerard Manley Hopkins, sj<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friday, May 13 \u00a0\u2014 Gerard Manly Hopkins, sj \u00a0\u2014 \u00a0beauty & courage Today and tomorrow our university holds three commencements \u00a0(School of Dentistry at 9:30 today, \u00a0School of Law at 5:00 this afternoon, \u00a0the Main Campus \u00a01:30 tomorrow). \u00a0It\u2019s important … Continue reading
\ndom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
\nhis riding
\nOf the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
\nHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
\nIn his ecstasy! \u00a0then off, off forth on swing,
\nAs a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
\nand gliding
\nRebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
\nStirred for a bird,–the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!<\/p>\n
\nBuckle! \u00a0And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
\nTimes told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!<\/p>\n
\nShine, and blue-bleak embers, a my dear,
\nFall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.<\/p>\n