Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Thanksgiving Meditation for Partners and Colleagues


Note:  This is a meditation I sent out to our partners and colleagues around the world, but it's just as true here at home and in our various efforts through Rotary.

Tomorrow we celebrate American Thanksgiving which traces back to a feast that occurred in the fall of 1621 in which British Puritans and Native Americans gathered to celebrate and give thanks for the survival of the colonists through that first winter in North America.  While the events of that day are clouded in history and myth, we know that it was a moment where peoples came together and shared in a moment of thanksgiving for the gifts and blessings they has received.

Living only about three hours away from that spot, here in Fairfield and working at Fairfield University, gratitude is something that we strive to observe every day, in keeping with our founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola who placed gratitude at the center of the Jesuit philosophy.  Beginning in 1538 in Italy, Jesuit schools and institutions of higher learning have circled the globe and earned renown in educating generations of students to be leaders and achievers, who approach the world from a position of gratitude and who respond by going forth to, as St. Ignatius says, “set the world ablaze.”

That educational project, which began in gratitude so many years ago, has always been a joint venture of the Jesuits, lay colleagues, parents, students, families and donors.  So as we look tomorrow to the celebration of Thanksgiving I wanted to express my thanks and appreciation for all that you do for our students each and every day.  While we only celebrate Thanksgiving one day a year, I am thankful each day for the privilege of the wonderful and important work that we do and for the tremendous people that we do it with.

Happy Thanksgiving,
Chris

Monday, November 10, 2014

Veterans Day Prayer for Fairfield Rotary



Today I was asked to give the prayer at my Rotary club, which was a great honor.  Several members of my club asked me after the meeting to share the text, so to that end I'm posting it below.  Given the great sacrifices of our veterans and their families, it was especially important to me to put names and faces to the prayer.  Its a tad personal perhaps, but in a day when the burdens of serving are borne by a shrinking number, its essential that we never lose sight of the women and men, sons and daughters who put on the uniform in our name.
 
Veterans Day Prayer

Tuesday is Veterans Day and today we pray for the veterans of the past, the present and the future.  Today’s prayer comes from Mark Roberts via the Interweb. 
 
As we pray, please join me by holding in your hearts those veterans near and dear to us like Edwin, my paternal grandfather who survived the USS Arizona, Jerry, brother to Michelle, who was shot down and lost for so many years in Vietnam and Adriaen my oldest friend who I met in Kuwait in 1971 and who went back to serve as a Marine in Desert Storm.

Please also lift up and honor those Rotarians of the Fairfield Rotary club who wore the uniform of our armed forces. 
 
For them and all those we cherish, Please join me in entering a spirit of prayer.

Lord of the Goodness and Light,

"We thank You for all who have served in the armed forces of this country.

We thank You for the freedom their sacrifice has earned and guarded for us. Help us to prize this freedom and use it well.


We ask You to bless all living veterans in a special way today, as well as the families of all veterans.


Comfort those who grieve for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.


Strengthen those who bear physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds.


Stand with those who provide care to them.


Move us to reach out to sisters and brothers who are veterans, or relatives of veterans, or who currently serve in the military.


We pray for the day when no one needs to serve in the military.


Help us to live now in anticipation of that day, as people who long for peace, who pray for peace, and who seek to be peacemakers in this world."

This we pray in your name and together, we wish it to be so by joining together to say;
Amen.


Adapted from "A Prayer for Veterans Day" by Mark Roberts

http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/archives/2006archives/06.10-06.12.htm#nov1006 

We remember...
Memorial Day, Arlington National Cemetery 2008

Charles Jerome "Jerry" Hunneycutt










Sunday, May 11, 2014

Complacency and Apathy are the Real Enemies

Sometimes the new, the novel, the innovative can bring out opposite reactions of fear and anticipation. This titanic push-pull tension seems ever present in our contemporary social discourse.

I'm reminded by Alexis de Tocqueville that progress has always been a messy struggle to seek our best selves as a people. His fear, then as now, that complacency and a comfortable self-satisfaction are the greatest dangers.


"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right."



Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French social philosopher. Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 3, ch. 21 (1840).  
  
http://quotes.dictionary.com/I_cannot_help_fearing_that_men_may_reach#blDfE5TCVQ8kcjb9.99

Friday, May 9, 2014

The world is big and vast but not necessarily scary



Danger Abroad! -- Our concerns Are Often Another Display of Our Xenophobia
 
Written by the late Mike Reddin, Former Senior tutor to the General Course at the London School of Economics.  In the field of International Education Mike was legendary for his quick wit, as well as his provocative and insightful commentary.  His message of having a sense of perspective about the real dangers of the world is still timely.  Essay courtesy of Michael Simons, Scranton University and reprinted with the permission of the author.

The headline "Small Earthquake in Peru: Not Many Dead," written by bored sub-editors on a London paper, suggests in its understatement something that is nonetheless true; to those of us so unused to them, earthquakes sound horrendous, while those born and brought up along the San Bernadino Fault are positively blasé about them.  Millions of tourists flock each year to what Dave Barry describes as "the most heavily armed place on earth" -- Miami.  Most return alive.

It is reasonable to be concerned about danger--but not to over-anticipate its occurrence.  It is unreasonable to assume that it's more dangerous "over there" than it is "here" (wherever your here is). New Yorkers who are murdered mainly get murdered in New York, most within or near their own homes and mostly by acquaintances.  The same is true for Londoners in London: it's just that the odds for the Londoner are substantially less.  In short, concern about the danger of foreign travel, study or work, is all too often little more than another display of our xenophobia--a sure sign that we need to get out and about.

Unfamiliar places are commonly assumed to be inherently dangerous.  Some of this distorted perception may have to do with home-trained media (including those, like CNN, which look international but are better described as "national media abroad") which reports ordinary events (political disputes, strikes, grief) as if they were universally significant.

Truth is, the overwhelming majority of travelers will encounter nothing more dangerous than a burger that has passed it sell-by date.  It depends on whom you are, where you are, and what you're doing. Northern Ireland, after 25 years of civil unrest, has chalked up fewer violent deaths than most major U.S. cities in one year.

Moreover, some dangers (like blizzards) are indiscriminate, most dangers are reserved for particular groups--women, whites, blacks, the elderly, BMW drivers, or the small and frightened.  In going abroad, you may be moving away from your regular persecutors and into a world where you're not on the regular list of victims.  The bizarre truth is that almost anything is less dangerous than staying at home.  The act of travel itself is relatively safe.  Few of us will disappear in transit between Amherst and Wimbledon.

Further, it may also be worthwhile to think of yourself as potential danger.  Space travelers are cocooned in sterile suits not just for atmospheric convenience, but to protect the new environment with which they will be in contact.  When you go to country X you may risk disease Y, but you may be bringing your hosts disease Z.  Sometimes the deal is a bad one for all parties.  Indeed, in the new sensitivities of eco-tourism being there at all may be a guilt-laden experience: you and your lifestyle may be the environmental hazard.

So, it's worth putting danger in context and looking at it from more than one perspective.  In what capacity to you plan to visit--student, tourist, imperialist, job seeker, a bearer of gifts, or a predator?  In what capacity did your predecessors visit--friends or foes, allies or enemies?  Did last year's trip by your college choir result in friends for life or the local bar being razed to the ground?

It takes the advice of friends or experience to learn that most communities have a right and a wrong side of the tracks.  But even a fully funded USIA is not going to put out sufficient advisories to cover all eventualities.  Again, the visitor is less likely than the resident to experience danger.  In many places it is a matter of local and national pride that you as a stranger are better served, and better protected, than the natives.  So, what gratuitous advice would I offer to the prospective traveler seeking to minimize danger?

Well, avoid major wars and countries where the airport is entirely staffed by armed men wearing Ray-Bans.  Don't go to Bangladesh in the rainy season unless your program is above flood level; get malaria shots if malaria is prevalent--but if it isn't, don't.

Finally, remembering that it was one of Britain's great naval heroes, Admiral Lord Nelson, who, when faced with the overwhelming might of the French navy, raised his telescope to his blind eye and asked, "Ships?  I see no ships."  And he was certainly victorious.  I do not suggest we close our eyes to danger, but it might be worth recognizing that not everybody else in the world is gunning for us (literally or metaphorically) and that there are usually considerably fewer threats to our health beyond the horizon than just around the corner.  So passports ready, go for it. And think, what am I getting away from? 

One would be in less danger
From the wiles of a stranger
If one's own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with. (Ogden Nash, 1902-71)