New Director Introduction, Fall 2007
From the Director, LIMExpress, Winter 2008
Hurricane Gustav Reflections, Summer 2008
New Director Introduction
Fall 2007
I am pleased to introduce myself as the new Director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry (LIM). This position represents a return home for my wife and me (and our three daughters)—we grew up in New Orleans, and I've taught as adjunct for LIM. It is good to be back for personal reasons but also because Loyola and LIM represent important resources for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Yet LIM's reach extends beyond the city. In my brief time here, I have met and heard from so many of our graduates around the country and around the world who are responding to their baptismal call to ministry. This has indeed been gratifying.
You can learn more about my background by clicking here. But by way of introduction, I'd like to say something about my approach to teaching and scholarship. Most of my studies and teaching have been in Catholic schools and have focused on the Bible and Church history. Because of the primarily Catholic context of my studies, they have been informed by love for God, the Church, neighbor, and God's gift of creation.
In my teaching, I've found that the Catholic biblical and historical heritage can strike unprepared students as odd and disconcerting; it's found in different languages and hails from different historical and cultural contexts. However, study informed by love for God, Church, neighbor and God's gift of creation can result in a certain sharpness of vision that enables students to uncover past riches with important implications for today. In fact, study of the past results in critical perspectives. It reveals the oddness of our own time and the truth about its sometimes astonishing disregard for human life and creation.
Based on Jesus' invitation in Matthew 25 to seek him in surprising places, the acuity we gain through study has other ramifications. Combined with the classic insight that nothing that exists can be entirely evil (and so whatever is must be good in some way), it provides for that critical optimism so characteristic of Catholicism (Remember Pope John Paul II's constant admonition; "Be not afraid!"). It allows us to discern goodness in other faiths, philosophies, cultures and institutions.
With its location in the Church, its grounding in tradition, its attentiveness to context, and its concern for adult pedagogies, LIM provides me a welcome home. With the Apostles at the Transfiguration, I would say it is good to be here.
Please keep in touch and let us know how LIM has benefited you or could improve and what successes you've met with. Also, please see the links above for updating your contact information and watch for updates about our exciting spring and summer programs.
Thank you!
From the Director
LIMExpress, Winter 2008
In his three-volume Time and Narrative, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wonders about stories. Why are they so prevalent across culture and history? At the risk of vast oversimplification, he says that they render time meaningful. Without stories to organize time, it would be just one meaningless thing after another.
Since returning to New Orleans to become director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry (LIM), I’ve been immersed in stories, often, not surprisingly, involving Katrina and its aftermath. Many are elicited by the one-word question, “How’djado?” (which, translated, means “how did you, your, family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances do during and after Katrina?”)
What does surprise me is how a New Orleans day seems to have more time in it than those elsewhere. I made this discovery as I witnessed how willing New Orleanians are not only to tell stories but also to listen patiently as others relate their own experiences and also, as in my case, others’ experiences at second and third hand.
The other category of stories I’ve heard since moving here includes those about LIM. Having taken LIM courses as a student, taught on campus and graded extension papers as an adjunct, I thought I knew much of what there was to know, but I was mistaken. I’ve learned that we were founded forty years ago as the Catechetical Institute of New Orleans at the Archdiocese’s Notre Dame Seminary. Thirty years ago, we moved to Loyola as its Institute for Ministry. Twenty-five years ago, we started our extension program.
The main thread that runs through LIM stories has been its transformative character. It has affected believers ranging from the traditional to the progressive in jobs from the most obviously ministerial to those much less obviously so. It has led people to leave jobs they found to be incompatible with their faith and to start new ones, often at reduced pay. It has enriched the life of the Church in New Orleans, around the country, and around the world.
In fact, several years ago, the Archdiocese of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, held a three-day celebration to honor its LIM graduates, the first Catholic university graduates in that country since the time of the sixteenth-century Reformation.
Overall, I’ve found LIM, its faculty, staff, and graduates to be even more inspiring than I expected. It is a gift for me to work here.
To return to my opening thoughts, stories aren’t just descriptive. They have power to impart meaning. Sometimes they do so for the worse and, thus, lead to despair, as suggested in myth. For example, the one thing left imprisoned in Pandora’s Box was hope, and this after all the world’s ills had escaped. A more contemporary example is how some (mis)interpret the Book of Revelation as pinpointing the approaching, inevitable, and catastrophic destruction of the earth. In doing so, such stories devalue creation and obscure God’s loving intentions (that we sometimes thwart nonetheless).
Yet stories can also convey the theme that Pope John Paul II stressed throughout his papacy—“Be not afraid!” To be sure, he recognized that God’s love does not hold sway everywhere and
in all hearts. But the stories that he told, indeed the great stories of our faith about the
liberation of the Israelites from slavery, about Jesus’ saving death and resurrection, and about
God’s mysterious presence in the most surprising corners of creation, assure us that God’s
love will ultimately win out.
It is for this reason that many of my fellow New Orleanians tell Katrina stories. They relate
suffering and misery, yet most also convey hope even against so much evidence to the
contrary.
It is for this reason also, I believe, that people become LIM students. They want to learn more deeply about faith’s stories that speak of liberation from sin and its effects and of God’s transformative love for creation. And they want to learn how to tell such stories more persuasively in their many and varied ministerial contexts. Indeed, LIM has been a gift to me, but for the past four decades it has also been a gift to the Church and the world. Spread the good news!
Hurricane Gustav Reflections
During Hurricane Gustav, colleagues and friends of the Institute were so kind in their inquiries into our safety and their offers of prayer and help. In grateful response, here are some reflections on my own experience, and I frame them in terms of two biblical passages.
I’ve always been moved by the depiction of God in 1 Kings 19:11-12 and haven’t given much thought to the portrait that the Book of Job paints.
In 1 Kings, God instructs Elijah to wait for God whom Elijah finds in neither a “strong and heavy wind,” nor in an earthquake or fire. “After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound” that Elijah recognized as conveying God’s presence.
In Job, things are different. God remains aloof, even absent, as Job and God’s supposed defenders argue about the cause of Job’s suffering. As if declaring an end to the argument, “The Lord addressed Job out of the storm and said, ‘Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins…. I will question you, and you tell me the answers’” (Job 39:1-2).
The “tiny whispering sound” that Elijah hears seems like a polite invitation to discern God in unlikely people and places. Not so the God of Job whose four chapters of abrupt questions demand a response that Job is unable to give except to say, “‘I have dealt with great things that I do not understand’” (Job 42:1).
In Hurricane Gustav, we encountered a storm similar to Job’s. Like most of the rest of the citizens of South Louisiana, my family and I obediently evacuated; we retreated to the hospitality of relatives in Baton Rouge. We brought with us what we would need—for days, weeks or months we didn’t know—and what we could not live without if we could not return.
In Baton Rouge, the wind had only just begun blowing when we lost electricity. So, the children had to make do with old-fashioned games and the adults with old-fashioned conversation.
We were also spectators. We watched Gustav’s 90mph winds and torrential rains from a south-facing window and porch. We heard limbs and whole trees cracking and felt the thud as they hit the ground.
We also imagined what a storm twice this strong would have been like—especially near the coast or in developing countries. Likely, much less would have remained standing.
Then we waited.
For us, the hurricane was a source of awe at what was happening, boredom at what was not happening, terror at what could happen, and sadness at what had happened to those who lost possessions and even lives.
It was also a reality check, akin to what I’ve experienced when looking at a National Geographic map of the universe. As a credentialed faculty member at a Jesuit university and a Director to boot, I sometimes feel important, a sense of gravitas. Yet, in comparison to the universe or a hurricane, my significance pales.
Returning to the Bible, God commends Job and censures his friends, “You have not spoken well of me as has my servant Job” (Job 42:7). Job’s questioning stemmed from ignorance to be sure, yet he grew in understanding as a result.
And so a storm can be more than a brute display; indeed, it was the occasion of Job’s progress. For us, it can be a “thin place,” a place where the veil between heaven and earth grows exceedingly thin, where the divine can shed new light and offer new insight into the ordinary.
To switch metaphors from the visual to the aural, a storm also poses questions—some difficult—to those with ears to hear. Who am I in comparison to God? Do I really recognize how utterly dependent I am on God’s grace and mercy? Why was my life spared; why was our roof not gored with a tree when our neighbor’s was? How much of our stuff do we really need; could I live like so much of the rest of humanity—with (much) less stuff? Could I be as hospitable as my relatives in Baton Rouge; could I be as prayerful as all those who have been praying for us; to whom else can I pass along these works of mercy? What contribution do humans make to what seem to be stronger and more frequent hurricanes? What kind of stewards have we been of God’s gift of creation? Can Louisiana’s coastline ever be restored?
Like Job, I can’t answer all these questions, but they do challenge me in my reflection—and action! They also challenge our faculty, staff, students and friends. What are the implications of these questions and their responses for our Church, ministries, faith, spirituality and LIM/LIMEX programs?
In conclusion, thank you again for your thoughts and prayers! Keep in touch, and please keep LIMEX colleagues in the Houma/Thibodeaux, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, and Shreveport Dioceses in your prayers. They have all been affected by Gustav.
UPDATE: The Loyola campus opened on Sunday 9/7 for returning students (and others). On-campus classes commenced Monday 9/8. As of Thursday 9/4, large parts of the city remained without power and few businesses, except bars, had re-opened. By Monday 9/8, much power had been restored. New Orleans was not the worst hit diocese in the state. Baton Rouge, to which we evacuated, seemed heavier hit, and I’m sure Houma-Thibodeaux and Lafayette were as well.