Ignatian Educators as Pilgrims on the Way

Fr. Connell led delegates in a reflection on Jesuit educators as pilgrims on the way together: power, potential, and perils.  He began with an imagination exercise, ultimately inviting delegates to recall how we better know our own homeland, the function of familiarity and memory.  Cartographers who once needed to know the land they map but no longer in this age in the Google maps are less for this.  Is this the level of our appreciation of the Jesuit network?  If we simply read the map or follow the GPS navigation system without knowing the Jesuit road or network first hand, how will that send us amiss?  Fr. Connell's point:  if we are going to truly embrace the Jesuit global network, we need a first hand knowledge of its depths, not simply the superficiality of map or digital description.   After all, we have only recaptured the Spiritual Exercises as our principal inspiration in the past 25 years.  

Our challenge then, Fr. Connell offered, is for our school leaders share actively in this global Jesuit network.  And for this network to offer a common vision we can individually and collectively engage in, be inspired by, and be led by.  We, like the first companions, are having spiritual conversations here that will help us to better know our future, discern God's will, and strengthen our resolve to follow this will.

One way this will happen, Fr. Connell charged, is for the developing world Jesuit schools to be viewed as full partners with their developed peers: to have a place at the table, not simply a piece of the pie.  His school 15 km outside Dodoma,  Tanzania, for example, will require $50,000 US simply for Internet connectivity.  Growth in our Jesuit identity can't happen simply in individual persons or schools or provides by actively together.  This is not our heritage inspired in the Spiritual Exercises.

Fr. Connell closed with an example of this active participation in the global Jesuit network.  Last summer,  Jesuit educators from the Chicago-Detroit province high schools gathered with Jesuit educators from St. Peter Claver in Dodoma.  The fruit of common prayer, meals, worship, and friendship was the articulation of seven principals of Jesuit education.