John Carroll Awards Weekend in Puerto Rico

Our time together this weekend has been a special opportunity to gather and celebrate the many gifts Georgetown receives from its community. Here at the Eucharist we have a privileged opportunity to celebrate God’s gifts to us. The readings of the Mass invite us to reflect more deeply on the meaning of what we do when we gather together.

In preparing for this Mass, I was drawn to the reading from the prophet Jeremiah because it spoke to me of the unique ways in which God is at work in the lives of each of us. In Jeremiah, the Lord says to His people,

“I will place my law within you, and write it upon your hearts.”

This is a wonderful mystery: that God speaks to each of us in the depths of our hearts. It is a mystery that was intimately explored by St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. In his Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, St. Ignatius provides detailed directions for learning how to attend to the interior movements of our own hearts so that we might more clearly discern the voice of God. Ignatius believed that God speaks to each individual directly and that we all need to honor this divine communication not only in ourselves but also in others.

At Georgetown we try to honor this teaching by the way we respect and cherish each student, each member of the faculty and the staff. We try to create a community with which there is a reverence for each person. What we have been celebrating this past week is our awareness that this sense of community extends beyond our time on the Hilltop. We have been celebrating the unique gift that our alumni have been to the life of our university community.

In concluding this John Carroll Weekend, I invite all of you to join with me in praying in thanksgiving for these generous souls who have given so much to the university community we all cherish. Let us also pray that God continue to bless them and bless all of us and most especially that he bless our world with the gift of His Peace.