The Provincial's Page

Welcome to the web page of Provincial Timothy B. Brown, SJ. Here you will find articles, book recommendations and reflections written by Father Brown. Check back often because the content will change regularly.

In the "Contemplation of the Incarnation" in the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius asks that we try to place ourselves with the Trinity, as they look down on the earth and behold persons in such great diversity in dress and manner of acting.

I carry that image of attentiveness around with me as a way to put a perspective on service and learning in higher education. As Jesuit institutions, our task is to give students the skills they need for distinguished professional performance but also to teach them to be leaders who are sensitive to justice and service and who can exercise their power with competence and compassion.

In 1989, Jesuit Superior General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, wrote: "The service of faith through the promotion of justice ... which is profoundly linked with our preferential option for the poor must be operative in our lives and our institutions." To be faithful to this vision, college students and universities themselves must find creative ways to embrace the mandate of "preferential option for the poor" and the people who are materially poor that it necessarily entails.

Education in service of the materially disadvantaged may, to some, seem quite radical. But, in many ways, it follows a long standing tradition in at least Jesuit history, based on a pedagogy that distinguishes education from training. We go to school not for knowledge alone so much as to develop good habits: the habit of expression, the habit of attention, even the habit of being. Developing these habits of virtue requires an integrated effort that involves linking service experience with rigorous classroom study. It takes practice and even concentration. Most fundamentally it is about the practice of paying attention. In Waiting for God, Simone Weil develops this theme of attentiveness in an essay entitled "Reflections on the Right School Studies with a View of the Love of God." In it she speaks of studies from the perspective of being pursued with a view to the love of God with the sole interest and real object being to develop the faculty of attention. She views attention as a kind of waiting, watching and suspended thought. The point of all this is to be open to receive truth. She is interested in developing an attitude, a habit of paying attention, which I see as absolutely essential for students engaged in service learning. It is this habit of contemplative attentiveness that empowers students to reimagine the world we live in.

Paying attention requires extraordinary discipline and concentration. Weil stresses attention because, for her, prayer consists of just that -- attention. Weil's point is that, no matter what we are learning and for whatever purpose, the time and effort spent working is not wasted because the result will one day be discovered in prayer. But that is not all. She adds that "Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor which we know to be the same love, is made of the same substance". The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer (to someone in need) is very rare and difficult -- almost a miracle and nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. To give this kind of attention means being able to say to our neighbor: "What are you going through". To be able to pay attention to another in a community service setting challenges a student to pay attention to another and ask "What are you about?" (Waiting for God, p. 115).

In a speech upon acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Toni Morrison wrote:

She goes on to tell a story which, I believe, clarifies the challenge we face as service learning educators in our attempt to develop this habit of attention so necessary for the work of community service to succeed. She writes:

In similar fashion, our students come to us in need of developing the habit of critically reflective attentiveness that is essential if they are to acquire the ability to reimagine our world in ways that reflect the values of the Gospel that give life to our mission.

The experience of service is rooted in Gospel values of fidelity, gratitude, compassion, self-giving, love, reconciliation, hospitality, simplicity of life, inclusiveness and respect for the dignity of each human person. We are challenged to make it possible for each person to seek the mark of God in all creation. We are called to make a case not only for functional literacy but for moral literacy as well. To create and foster some moral energy, moral passion, moral intelligence which says that we all can be larger than ourselves and to be able to ask the questions that are so crucial for these times.

Among new issues and ethical problems, certain situations call for special attention. In 1989, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, re-issued a challenge to the leaders of our Jesuit schools. In his address he said: "We want graduates who will be leaders concerned about the society and the world in which they live, desirous of eliminating hunger and conflict in the world, sensitive to the need for more equitable distribution of God's bounty, seeking to end sexual and social discrimination, eager to share their faith and their love with others. In short, we want our graduates to be leaders in service."

In a recent General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, attention was brought to the whole Society of Jesus of the need to research and direct efforts in such areas as:

Our work in service-learning calls for the authentic development of the spiritual as well as the moral and intellectual values of our students. The need to respect the transcendent values of each and every person must be the grounding for all the curriculum development, course work, and reflection in the service learning tracks.

Respectful attentiveness to the transcendent values revealed in our encounters and relationships with others in service can spark the critical development of one's imagination.

Parker Palmer wrote recently: "Many of us live one-eyed lives. We rely largely on the eye of the mind. Now, today, more and more of us are opening the other eye - the eye of the heart, looking for realities to which the mind's eye is blind." For that we need to exercise our moral imagination. If we are to grow in our ability to imagine new possibilities for constituting good lives and good communities, it is essential that we attentively enter into relationships and conversations together in which we can encounter the lived realities and imaginative visions of others.

In the Jesuit approach to higher education -- exercising that moral imagination -developing the faculty of attention requires development of the contemplative side of the person. Developing one's moral imagination goes hand in hand with the development of the ability to pay attention--to make good decisions--to find meaning in what one does. The gift of imagination allows us to see the things that we sometime miss because of our limited attention span. Through the service learning initiatives, many students have begun to develop a particular vision of how the world could possibly be re-imagined. The vision -the paying attention --the "seeing as" is very much an exercise of imagination. To reformulate the vision, many students have had to let go of pre-conceived notions of how people think, and act and live out their lives. Through service learning, I have seen scores of students forced to suspend past notions and impressions of people they are working with and have come to a deeper seeing of the world. I have seen students return to campus challenged by serious social problems. They often return stunned, sometimes confused, often times without the words to express their frustrations. With stories, metaphors, vision, prayerful and contemplative reflection on service, imagination can offer another kind of resource--a moral resource.

In Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize winning novel, Beloved, there is a character, Baby Suggs who most powerfully expresses the power of paying attention and the power of the imagination to heal souls. She prays over the community of ex-slaves seeking shelter in Ohio after the Civil War, and she says:

Jesuit education, at its best, forms students who are able to engage in just that sort of creative re-imaging of their experiences and the world in which they live and act. And service learning plays a crucial role in this education of the moral imagination. Through service learning, all of us--students, faculty and members of the communities in which service takes place-- are "invited into new worlds, the world of others in their otherness, in the concreteness of their diverse experience," and, in their way, we grow in our ability to re-imagine the world we share. We "are freed to go out of ourselves and live with others in friendship," a friendship that compels us to strive to create communities that reverence the dignity of all people.