Fall 2011 Stories

Each fall I have the privilege of meeting students passionate about social justice and yearning for a real understanding of the world we share. They are students applying for the Jean Donovan Fellowship, sponsored by the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education at Santa Clara University.

Attracted by University support, a financial stipend, and a desire to engage in service, students begin by placing their dreams on paper: educating children in Tanzania; farming with migrants in Salinas; supporting homeless women in Boston; teaching dance in El Salvador; caring for the destitute of India; and the dreams continue, each one more inspirational than the next.

The Jean Donovan Fellowship began more than 10 years ago, and now there are 15 student fellows annually, spending their summers in solidarity with people of limited access to wealth, power, and privilege. Donovan Fellows seek to understand the reality of their communities, both globally and locally, and are often inspired in much the same way as the Fellowship’s namesake.

Jean Donovan was a young woman searching for meaning in a complex world. Born into a comfortable Connecticut suburb, her heart was first opened to global injustices while studying as a university student in Ireland. A growing restlessness led her away from a promising business career and into a community of like-minded, socially conscious peers. “Jean Donovan was twenty-six, and she was very much a child of her time. She was not a saint or a hero. She was idealistic and vulnerable, she had a great sense of fun, and she was hungry for life’s mysteries and opportunities.”(1)

Arriving in 1979 El Salvador, Jean found herself immersed in a civil war. Her “political” work, for which she was later killed, was nothing more than running a food program. Yet, her real calling was being present to her Salvadoran community in daily life: giving motorcycle rides, singing Irish ballads, and listening to their hopes, struggles, and fears. Jean “became aware that the very people she had come all this way to help—the illiterate farmworkers and their families, surviving from day to day in their bone-poor, uncluttered houses—had something that she wanted. What they had to teach her about life and suffering, about courage and human dignity, about friendship and solidarity, just might provide some answers to the mysterious, elusive calling that had brought her here.”(2)

As the violence escalated in El Salvador and it became clear that Jean’s life was in jeopardy, she was committed to remaining with the people of El Salvador. Such is the power of solidarity. “Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could except for the children, the poor bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.” (3)

Jean’s life has come to represent an authentic transformation rooted in humility, faith, and fellowship. It is increasingly important for today’s students to connect with the suffering in our world, and enable their own transformations. The Jean Donovan Fellowship allows students to create this opportunity, and the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education provides the guidance for critical reflection in a structured and nurturing environment.

In his keynote address from Mexico City, “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry,” Fr. Adolfo Nicolás offers a thought-provoking articulation of the “globalization of superficiality,” an alarming trend impacting our students and institutions, marked by a “superficiality of thought, visions, dreams, relationships, convictions,” and a failure to engage “the hard work of forming communities of dialogue in the search for meaning and truth.”(4) The obvious aftermath of such superficiality, according to Fr. Nicolás, can be an underdeveloped and dehumanized understanding of our most critical global issues, a shallow appreciation for the complexity of reality, and a difficulty in forming truly empathic and creative relationships. In essence, the globalization of superficiality can impede a contemplative, thoughtful, and profound engagement with “reality.” In his treatise for positive change, Fr. Nicolás calls our Jesuit institutions to “promote in creative new ways the depth of thought and imagination that are distinguishing marks of the Ignatian tradition.”10 A “real” understanding of ourselves and our neighbors within the globalized world can evoke the real passion and engagement required for transformation.

Through the Ignatian Center’s Donovan Fellowship, Fr. Nicolás’s “real” experience is available to students through solidarity with their communities. We enable students to follow their own passionate dreams and not the dreams of others. Their experiences invariably offer unforeseen hurdles, resulting in confusion, pain, and feelings of inadequacy, but this is exactly the goal of the experience. It is within these difficult moments that profound growth occurs. Ignatian Center advisors facilitate contemplation and reflection, helping students identify and process their experiences and growth. As Donovan Fellow Quentin Orem ’12 recently shared, “By entering into another reality, our own reality is deeply affected… our suffering neighbors call us to be real college students and graduates, actively engaging the real world.”(11)

At his talk in Mexico City, Fr. Nicolás shared his profound belief that “in all of our diversity we are in fact a single humanity.” (12) The Ignatian Center has at its core the same goal—the powerful notion of living in solidarity with our local and global families. If the fundamental question remains “to recreate the journey, and recreate the faith”(13) with the goal of shaping a more humane world, following the example set by Jean Donovan is a wonderful first step.

Notes

1 Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness: The Life and Calling of Jean Donovan (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1984), 8.
2 Ibid., 106
3 Ibid., 218
4 Adolfo Nicolás, S.J. “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today,” remarks for “Networking Jesuit Higher Education: Shaping the Future for a Human, Just, Sustainable Globe,” Mexico City (April 23, 2010).
5 Kristin Love Boscia, personal communication, November 2010.
6 Noelle Lopez, “Donovan Fellow Example Projects,” loc. cit.
7 Sheeva Sabati, “Donovan Fellow Example Projects,” loc. cit.
8 Jacob David, “Donovan Fellow Example Projects,” on the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education site at: https://www.scu.edu/ic/programs/student-leadership/jean-donovan-fellowship/fellows-and-projects/
9 “SCU alumnus wins elite George J. Mitchell Scholarship to study and continue playwriting in Ireland,” University Press Releases, SCU (November 24, 2008). Can be found at: http://www.scu.edu/news/releases/release.cfm?c=4844
10 Nicolás.
11 Quentin Orem and Mark Vetto, “Global and Local Neighborhoods: Who are our neighbors? How are we called to be in relationships with them?” Explore 14 (Fall 2010): 30.
12 Nicolás.
13 Ibid.