Communications 2019

President Kevin O'Brien, S.J. delivered the opening address at Hekima University College in Nairobi, Kenya on August 17, 2019. 

I am delighted to be here with you at Hekima University College, asante sana for your warm welcome and for this opportunity to offer some thoughts and encouragement at the beginning of your academic year.

My particular thanks to Rev. Dr. John Okoria Ibhakewanlan, S.J. for his invitation and for his inspiring example of Ignatian leadership. J-O invited me a year ago, when I was serving as Dean of the Jesuit School of Theology, which is one of the six schools of Santa Clara University, where I now serve as President. As you know, Hekima and JST have enjoyed a long-standing relationship. Many of your graduates later study with us, and some of your esteemed faculty have JST degrees. Last year, J-O and I worked together on the establishment of the Global Theology Initiative, a collaboration of seven English speaking theology centers sponsored by the Jesuits. The initiative includes student and faculty exchanges, joint research projects, and shared virtual classes.

I’m personally delighted to return to East Africa. My first trip here, when I was working in Campus Ministry at Georgetown, made a deep impression on my mind and spirit, especially as I visited the works of the Jesuit Refugee Service here and at the Kakuma refugee camp. It’s truly a joy to see many old friends here. In this special corner of the earth, I feel right at home thanks to you.

Our topic, “Challenges and Opportunities of Jesuit Higher Education Today”, is well-suited to open your academic year here at Hekima, and next month, at Santa Clara. Admittedly, the topic is very broad, so I start by relying on Pope Francis and Father General Arturo Sosa, S.J. to help define the mission entrusted to us who study, teach, or work at Jesuit universities. Together, Francis and Sosa call for Jesuit universities to be agents of reconciliation marked by a pedagogy of mercy. Next, relying on the Ignatian technique of “composition of place”, we learn to see with hope-filled eyes how to address challenges in our specific contexts. To conclude, I offer some words of hope and encouragement for you as you approach this year with “prophetic audacity.”

The Jesuit University As a Source of Reconciliation
Whether here or at Santa Clara, we have the great privilege of building on nearly 500 years of Jesuit higher education. Throughout many innovations, over many different eras, in a vast range of contexts, the core mission of Jesuit universities has remained consistent. We form students in mind, body and spirit, demonstrating great concern not just for what students learn, but who they become as persons. We support the research of our faculty, with the inspiration of the Jesuit and Catholic intellectual tradition that “sees God in all things” and brings faith into vibrant dialogue with the sciences, arts, culture and the professions. Lastly, Jesuit universities place themselves at the service of the Church and the common good by promoting and advocating for a more just, gentle and sustainable world. These three functions - formation, scholarly inquiry, and service - are not separate, but are intricately linked, mutually reinforcing one another.
These functions, however core they are to Jesuit institutions of higher learning, are often present in secular universities too. Our Catholic and Jesuit traditions, however, offer a distinctive accent to our work as a university. In his March 2017 address at the University of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in Lima, Peru, Father General Arturo Sosa explained that Jesuit universities cannot just be places of learning and “intellectual depth”, but must represent the ideal of the Jesuit “intellectual apostolate”. He goes on to describe four aspects of an intellectual work that make it an apostolate, or ministry. First, the Jesuit university is a place of listening and openness to the world, “finding its meaning in people, themes and the problems of humanity, and consequently of the Church.” Second, it has an evangelical orientation, because it is “directed towards the construction of a world closer to the characteristics of the Kingdom of God: justice, peace and love”. Third, those at a Jesuit university collaborate with others and foster dialogue among different disciplines. Lastly, the Jesuit university is a place of “sending”, an institution that missions people out into the world, as opposed to a place that simply looks inward and focuses on itself.

Notice the extraversion or outward orientation of each of these characteristics. To use Sosa’s words, “intellectual work does not begin or end within the walls or programs of the university.” Speaking at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in January 2018, Pope Francis offered a similar observation: “Knowledge must always sense that it is at the service of life … hence, the educational community cannot be reduced to classrooms and libraries but must continually progress towards participation.” If an apostle is, in its classic definition, one who is sent, then Jesuit universities must engage the world around them for they too are sent.

The most recent General Congregation of the Jesuits in 2016 further specified the work of Jesuit universities as “intellectual apostolates”: to form men and women to be agents of reconciliation. This reconciliation exists on three levels: drawing closer to God, to one another, and to our natural world. In an address to Jesuits universities from around the world at Loyola in 2018, Fr. Sosa made the call explicit: the Jesuit university must be a “source of a reconciled life.” This is no easy task in a world so often divided by politics, religion, ideology, race and ethnicity. We experience similar divisions even within a university at times. But only if we dare to answer the summons to serve as agents of reconciliation, of people who build bridges, can we truly say, as we often advertise, that we educate for justice
But how exactly do we do that? How do we help people draw closer to God, whom we call by different names? How do we help people draw closer to one another, even with all of our differences, and with the natural world, our common home? Here, Francis shows us the way: the way of reconciliation is the way of mercy.

The Pedagogy of Mercy
Mercy has been central to his papacy. Repeatedly, in words and actions, in encyclicals and news conferences, he reminds us that the mercy of God so freely offered to each of us – personally and unconditionally – ought to overflow into our loving service to others, especially those most in need of God’s love. Mercy is not a saccharine, purely emotive, greeting card sentimentality. While mercy is something we feel, sometimes deep down, we experience and live mercy in the gritty reality of our beautiful and broken world.
Love expressed as mercy gets close. As Francis described early in his papacy in Evangelii Gaudium (2013), we are called to accompany another, walking with them, listening to them, encouraging them along the way. Theologians and academics, like all ministers in the Church, must “run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy that infects us in our close and continuous interaction”. Francis puts it plainly, “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

Imagine a university as willing to be bruised, hurting and dirty because we dare to get close to people who summon questions in us, who fuel our inquiry, who both need us and challenge us. We are not used to associating universities with mercy, which is more easily done with hospitals and humanitarian aid organizations. But if we take seriously Fr. Sosa’s call for universities to be sources of a reconciled life, then we dare to make this leap. J-O asks a question that any leader of a Jesuit university should be asking. In a recent advertisement for Hekima’s programs, J-O describes Hekima’s education in this way: “To be Jesuit-educated is to be attuned to the world, with its human incompleteness and failures, and to see it as the place where we are called upon to co-create with a God at work in peoples and their struggles. Do you wish to join such an academic community engaged in both the challenges and opportunities of a world of complex motivations?”

Pope Francis would like this question. Writing to the Theological College of the Catholic University of Argentina in 2015, he encouraged the students and faculty to study how the various academic disciplines may reflect the centrality of mercy. He wrote, “Without mercy, our theology, our law, our pastoral care run the risk of collapsing into bureaucratic narrow-mindedness or ideology, which by their nature seeks to domesticate the mystery [of God].” He continues, “Teaching and studying theology means living on a frontier, one in which the Gospel meets the needs of the people to whom it should be proclaimed in an understandable and meaningful way. We must guard against a theology that is exhausted in academic dispute or one that looks at humanity from a glass castle. You learn so as to live: theology and holiness are inseparable.”

You learn so as to live. You learn not just theology but biology, psychology, history, business, and engineering because each in its own way draws us closer to the Author or Artist of all that is true and beautiful, and each helps us discover the what is most meaningful and good in our world. The college or university is our path to holiness, our fulfillment as human beings. This path does not end in chapels but runs through classrooms and libraries, theatres and playing fields. From these settings, we are sent to be agents of reconciliation, servants of others, laborers for a more just and gentle world.

This is why Jesuit universities must be places of encounter, another of Francis’ favorite words: eager to leave our comfort zones, eager to engage the culture of which we are a part, eager to immerse ourselves in the wonderful complexity of human living and loving. Love gets close and specific. When faced with complexity and human suffering, with unfamiliar terrain and novel questions, it is tempting to generalize: to love humanity, not this person; to love this grand idea but not test it in the crucible of experience. That is why the practice of “composition of place” in the Spiritual Exercises is so important. It grounds us, as much as God became grounded with us, in the person of Jesus Christ.

In the Spiritual Exercises, to enter more deeply into a meditation, Ignatius invites us to situate ourselves in a specific context, with the help of our imagination – whether it is a scene from our life or the life of Jesus portrayed in the Gospel, see and hear the people, imagine the physical space, look at what people are doing. Get specific. In the same way, compose the place of your study and inquiry. Reflect on your particular context, discerning the divine presence in our daily work and the people God sends our way and in your studies. God is at work. See also that which is opposed to God’s plan or desire for us; see the wages of sin, which is anything that separates us from God, one another, and our natural world. Imagine the frontiers of this place, the communities that surround you. We compose this place, our place, and ask: how can we be a source of reconciliation and reconciled life? How can we be agents of mercy?

Proceeding with “Prophetic Audacity”
In our composition of place, we see joy and strife, beauty and brokenness. There is much to enliven us – deep friendships, the vibrancy of this city, the allure of subjects that we are passionate about, advances in science and technology that enrich our lives, the stunning beauty of the savannahs not far from here. Yet, there are also painful challenges that confront us. The overwhelming numbers of migrants and refugees yearning for the simple safety of a home and future for their children. The intensifying impacts of climate change and scars on our environment. The tensions among peoples of different faiths and ethnicities, stirred to violence by those seeking power. Even challenges within the Church and the Society, as we recognize our own divisions and struggles and reckon with violence against children and women.

A painful reckoning indeed. But St. Ignatius did not invite us to contemplate so as to become fearful or discouraged in the face of challenge and uncertainty; he invited us to contemplate in order to be audacious – to be as bold as Jesus’ summons of the reign of God: to build a reign of justice, peace and love. We “contemplatives in action,” so firmly rooted in reality, can discern how God’s grace breaks through the toughest of challenges and the gravest of sins.

In his address to the 36th General Congregation, Pope Francis reminded us of this noble commission. Speaking to the Congregation, Francis offered the following exhortation: “Courage is constitutive of all apostolic action. And today, more than ever, we need courage and prophetic audacity. We need … the prophetic audacity of having no fear.” As we enter into this new academic year, striving for the holiness often hidden in our academic pursuits, we ask for the grace to learn, think, write, ask, serve and dream with “prophetic audacity,” unafraid to ask the next “dangerous question” (to use Metz), unafraid to ask questions others may not dare, unafraid to go to the margins, to seek Christ where He is often overlooked, even unafraid to leave comfortable ways of living, praying and thinking to go to the next frontier where our Lord awaits, only to surprise us.

In doing so, we create a sacred space, whether in a chapel or classroom, or well beyond. In his 2018 Loyola address, Fr. Sosa urged us to create “a space in which the message of liberation of the Good News of the Gospel can contribute to finding better ways to generate life in the midst of difficulties and uncertainty, which seem to overwhelm the daily lives of most men and women, opening a space for hope to enter.” Perhaps that is the clearest sign that we have created a university as a source of reconciled life marked by mercy: on our paths, we leave a trail of hope.

May God bless you and guide you as you seek God’s greater glory and the good of humanity, here in Nairobi, East Africa, and beyond.