Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
FAITH FEEDS GUIDE ADAPTABILITY
Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3
Conversation Starters 6
• Standing in the Liminal by Robert Gregory 7 Conversation Starters 9
• A Guiding Compass by Eileen McLaughlin 10 Conversation Starters 12
• Making Sense of Interruptions by John Reyes 13 Conversation Starters 15
• Gathering Prayer 16
Faith Feeds is an initiative by Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Center (C21), which was founded in 2002 to serve as a catalyst and a resource for renewal of the Catholic Church in the United States. Faith Feeds was originally designed for individuals in Catholic parishes who are hungry for opportunities to talk about their faith with others who share it. Considering many Catholic schools are an extension of a parish, a customized set of guides has been developed for Catholic educators. C21 worked in partnership on this project with the Roche Center for Catholic Education, a center that forms Catholic educators to become agents of change who work to create excellent PreK-12 Catholic schools.
Educators in Catholic schools who strive for excellence embody the following virtues: adaptablility, joy, attentiveness, vision, and humility. St. Ignatius stated, “All the things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better, love him more surely, and serve him more faithfully. As a result, we ought to appreciate and use these gifts of God insofar as they help us toward our goal of loving service and union with God.” (The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola)
These Faith Feeds guides challenge Catholic educators to reflect on how they are living out their vocations in their everyday lives. Together, the C21 Center and the Roche Center hope to deepen the faith of educators and bring communities of people together through these Faith Feeds reflections and questions. All authors in these guides are committed Catholic educators who have a deep love for Catholic schools and strive daily in their vocations to love and serve God.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who should host a FAITH FEEDS?
Anyone who has a heart for facilitating conversations about faith is perfect to host a FAITH FEEDS.
Where do I host a FAITH FEEDS?
You can host a FAITH FEEDS in-person or virtually through video conference software. FAITH FEEDS conversations are meant for small groups of 10-12 people.
What is the host’s commitment?
The host is responsible for coordinating meeting times, sending out materials and video conference links, and facilitating conversation during the FAITH FEEDS.
What is the guest’s commitment?
Guests are asked to read the articles that will be discussed and be open to faith-filled conversation.
Still have more questions?
No problem! Email church21@bc.edu and we’ll help you get set up.
READY TO GET STARTED?
STEP ONE
Decide to host a FAITH FEEDS. Coordinate a date, time, location, and guest list. An hour is enough time to allocate for the virtual or in-person gathering.
STEP TWO
Interested participants are asked to RSVP directly to you, the host. Once you have your list of attendees, confirm with everyone via email. That would be the appropriate time to ask in-person guests to commit to bringing a potluck dish or drink to the gathering. For virtual FAITH FEEDS, send out your video conference link.
STEP THREE
Review the selected articles from your FAITH FEEDS Guide and the questions that will serve as a starter for your FAITH FEEDS discussion. Hosts should send their guests a link to the guide, which can be found on bc.edu/FAITHFEEDS.
STEP FOUR
Send out a confirmation email a week before the FAITH FEEDS gathering. Hosts should arrive early for in-person or virtual set up. Begin with the Gathering Prayer found on the last page of this guide. Hosts can open the discussion by using the suggested questions. The conversation should grow organically from there. Enjoy this gathering of new friends, knowing the Lord is with YOU!
STEP FIVE
Make plans for another FAITH FEEDS. We would love to hear about your FAITH FEEDS experience. You can find contact information on the last page of this guide.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Here are three articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. We suggest that you select two that will work best for your group, and if time permits, add in the third. In addition to the original article, you will find a relevant quotation, summary, and suggested questions for discussion. We offer these as tools for your use, but feel free to go where the Holy Spirit leads. Conversations should respect and ensure confidentiality between participants.
This guide’s theme is: Adaptability
STANDING IN THE LIMINAL
Robert Gregory
One of the great joys of teaching high school seniors is having the opportunity to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in the liminal space between everything they’ve always known on one side and the rest of their lives on the other. Writing their college recommendation letters and reading their personal statements, I am always overwhelmed by the diverse gifts and talents they possess that will lead them to lives of purpose and fulfillment. The process of college searching fills me with excitement for them. And yet, I can’t help but notice that they don’t seem to share this excitement for the process. Why not?
In these fall months, I often ask my seniors, “what will you do if you don’t get into your dream school?” The answers are predictably and consistently bleak.
“Give up.”
“Drop out.”
“No idea.”
“Cry.”
“Live in my basement for the rest of my life.”
Though I do believe that deep down my students are more creative, dynamic, and flexible thinkers than those responses betray, the truth of their responses lies in the fact that their capacity for adaptability is woefully underdeveloped. Unlike Francis Xavier (our
school’s patron saint, only somewhat ironically), my seniors are not yet ready to “live with one foot raised,” unless of course, they know that they’ll be putting it down at a U.S. News & World Report Top 50-Ranked College. And after all, who has time for the curiosity of the early Jesuits when your parent tells you that you have to major in finance, the kid you’ve been competing with since seventh grade already told you he’s going pre-med, and TikTok showed you that it’s possible to make six figures, pay off your debt, and achieve perfect happiness by age twenty-five? In this way, paralyzing unfreedoms make the college process appear to my students to be utterly binary: Get in and succeed. Get rejected and fail at life, forever. There is no room for adaptability when any middle ground is entirely unacknowledged.
As Catholic educators, we’d be missing an opportunity of our own if we failed to take stock of how our own attachments can hinder the practice of adaptability in our work. I would venture a guess that very few of us pull up to our schools in the morning like Francis Xavier on his way to Goa. We’re probably a lot more like my seniors. If this desired outcome is realized, then it will be a good day. When we think this way, our capacity for flexibility, resilience, and creative thinking crumples.
Personally, there are days when a loose Dunkin’ lid is enough to make me want to turn the car around.
Rather than living with one foot raised, we attempt to wrestle control of the Spirit and stifle the virtue of adaptability in our work when we charge hard to our own desired outcomes, put off difficult conversations with colleagues, and fail to trust the creative power of teamwork. In the classroom, a lack of adaptability has even more dire consequences, manifesting itself any time we are tempted to define a “good class” by the ability to get through the lesson precisely how we scripted it (without disruption!) rather than by whether or not students were empowered to construct their own learning and, in so doing, cultivate curiosity, flexibility, resilience, and ultimately, adaptability.
And so we find ourselves in need of God’s grace, that we may open ourselves to the movements of God’s curious and adaptable Spirit. Hopefully then, like Francis Xavier, we’ll be able to stand in the liminal space between our former attachments and the rest of our lives with the courage to say: Here I am, Lord, send me.
Robert Gregory is the Chairperson of the Theology Department at Malden Catholic High School. He is also a member of the Roche Center’s Catholic Leadership Cohort (CLC).
STANDING IN THE LIMINAL
“The future is in your hearts and in your hands. God is entrusting to you the task, at once difficult and uplifting, of working with Him in the building of the civilization of love.”
- St. Pope John Paul II
Summary
Robert Gregory discusses the importance of adaptability in his role as a teacher for high school students, particularly seniors who are applying to colleges, the next steps in their “lives of purpose and fulfillment.” He notices his students face various pressures and factors that promote a narrow binary, in which students will either succeed tremendously or fail permanently. This lack of acknowledgement of a middle ground leaves no room for adaptability. Catholic educators may influence this mindset in their students with their own lack of adaptability in the classroom, in which students may not feel empowered to “construct their own learning.” Robert Gregory emphasizes the importance of opening ourselves up to “the movements of God’s curious and adaptable Spirit” to face our lives with courage.
Questions for Conversation
1. What strategies do you employ in your work or ministry to overcome ways of binary thinking or feeling?
2. How or where in your life are you being called to think or act with greater curiosity? With greater flexibility?
3. What is your vision of an adaptable educator or learner?
A GUIDING COMPASS
By Eileen McLaughlin
A colleague once shared, “We plan, not to live those plans out explicitly, but rather to identify our values and priorities.” What she didn’t explicitly articulate, but what I heard was, “We plan in order to protect our values and priorities.” It was the fall of 2019 and we were working with a group of aspiring prin-
cipals who were developing entry plans for jobs that they did not yet have. There was natural inclination to delay the planning until there was more certainty about where they would be working. None of us had any sense of just how much uncertainty these new leaders would be facing as they took on leadership
roles that would begin in the summer of 2020.
We are inclined to want to know everything we can about a certain situation before we plan our response. But in reality, it is impossible for any of us to know everything about a circumstance. What is possible is for us to know our values and priorities. In my first years as a school leader at Mount Alvernia High School in Newton, I quickly realized the wide variety of challenges that I had to navigate and the many stakeholders who were looking to me to respond to their needs. While this is true of a school leader, it is not all that different from the lives that any of us lead. We have to navigate life’s challenges and respond to the needs of others. I had spent a dozen years in the classroom and thought that my new role as school leader would require change on my part. What I discovered early on was that I needed to ground my decisions, my adaptations, in what I had come to know as my moral imperative. In my role as school leader, based on my own experience as a classroom teacher, I believed that all of my students were capable of learning at high levels. It came to be the compass by which decisions were made and the language by which we were able to build a culture of achievement. This belief was grounded in Mount Alvernia High School’s academic traditions and also the guidepost that would help us move forward.
To be adaptable is to be able to adjust to new conditions. This change however needs to be anchored in something or else we risk losing some of ourselves as we adjust to the needs of a changing situation. While the circumstances those new principals faced in the 2020-21 school year were certainly unprecedented, we all encounter uncertainties that we must contend with in our own lives. My colleague’s encouragement to plan, in the midst of uncertainty, as a means of naming our values and priorities so that those values and priorities could be protected as circumstances change is applicable to our lives as well. Ignatian spirituality calls us to grow in discernment of our own attachments, our own ‘unfreedoms’, and operate with adaptability and dynamism. In discerning our own attachments we are also invited to understand the root of those attachments. What I have found is that when that attachment is grounded in a consolation, something that calls me closer to God, it is a value that I want to use to guide me as I adapt to changing circumstances.
Eileen McLaughlin is a Leadership Coach for the Lynch Leadership Academy.
A GUIDING COMPASS
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”
- Ecclesiastes 3:1
Summary
Eileen McLaughlin describes her meeting with aspiring principals in Fall 2019 as they developed ideas for entry jobs, highlighting how the new leaders’ plans were impacted by the sense of uncertainty regarding their new roles, which would eventually be heightened during the pandemic in 2020. She applies the experiences and challenges of school leaders to the universal experiences of all people’s lives, as we navigate challenges and respond to the needs of others. She defines adaptability as adjusting to new conditions and emphasizes how in the midst of uncertainty and adjusting to the needs of changing circumstances, we all must protect our values and priorities. Ignatian spirituality calls us to discern our own attachments, grounded in consolations, which call us closer to God as we adapt.
Questions for Conversation
1. What are the values and priorities that you are seeking to protect?
2. What is the anchor you use to ground your decision making?
3. How do you recognize and respond to consolations?
MAKING SENSE OF THE INTERRUPTIONS
By John Reyes
It seems paradoxical that the work of a Catholic school educator is at once dependent on how well we plan lessons, units, school events, and meetings but equally demanding of our ability to be adaptable in the midst of inevitable interruptions. A well-structured class has to coexist with the flurry of school assemblies and announcements; efficient passing periods must sometimes give way to addressing behavior issues; shared collaboration time with teachers are sometimes pushed aside for an urgent meeting with families. There is an old Yiddish proverb that says “We plan, God laughs.” In some days and seasons of our lives, it feels like God is looking in our direction and laughing quite a bit.
Thankfully, in the person and the life of Jesus Christ, we have a model for how we respond to interruptions. Jesus’s ministry is marked with interruptions - Zacchaeus climbing a tree to get Jesus’s attention, Bartimaeus desperately crying for Jesus’s healing, the hemorrhaging woman - and as people of faith (and people who can empathize with experienc-
ing interruptions), we have much we can learn from the graces that are present in the interruptions. Those stories also allow us to commiserate with how being interrupted on the way to something else can disrupt us or throw us off balance, especially when the thing we are on the way to is something we have planned, longed for, or anticipated.
In those interruptible moments in Jesus’s ministry, there is undeniable grace, healing, and peace that comes out of an embrace of not only the moment of interruption, but the persons at the center of those interruptions. We also see that being interruptible does not come without emotional cost - it is naive to suggest that the grace, healing, and peace that comes from interruptible moments mitigates what is lost. We see that interruptions tend to be indiscriminate of our emotions and circumstance. Jesus’s attempt to retreat from the crowds to grieve the death of John the Baptist was cut short when he came back ashore to see a crowd gathered to hear and learn from him. Just as Jesus had to do in that moment, interruptions can
sometimes ask of us to momentarily set aside the pain and suffering we might be shouldering in order to be fully present to the interruption.
Embracing the grace of interruptions also means that we embrace the crosses of loss and separation from what it is we may have planned, longed for, or anticipated - but as in all things in our pilgrim journey toward heaven, we have a God who shares deeply in that suffering and pain. We not only become witnesses to the miraculous; we become Christ’s hands and feet that are instrumental in the transformative power of grace-filled interruptions.
How, then, do we better be receptive to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the interruptions of the day-to-day? One possibility, in the tradition of the Examen prayer, is to strengthen our capacity to regularly reflect on the extent to which God is present in our day, both in the planned and the unplanned moments. In particular, we might be moved to situate that reflection in a community setting, especially when trying to making sense of what is lost or what we are separated from when interruptions happen. The apostles were not merely witnesses and subordinates as Jesus ministered, prayed, and taught, but companions on the journey with Jesus, who in his humanity had to wrestle with embracing a ministry of interruptions and what might have been lost or set aside in the process. Just as Jesus may have been able to find comfort and solace from the apostles that empathized with the cost of embracing a ministry of interruptions, there may yet be hope that can be cultivated when we are able to share in the joys and lift up the challenges of dealing with interruptions with our colleagues in our schools and communities.
John Reyes is the Director of Research, Program Evaluation and Innovation at the Roche Center for Catholic Education.
MAKING SENSE OF INTERRUPTIONS
““The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life - the life God is sending one day by day.”
- C.S. Lewis
Summary
John Reyes recounts the experience of a teacher’s daily disruptions - in and between classes, with students and their families, at school events and endless meetings - citing the old Yiddish proverb, “We plan, God laughs.” In responding to these interruptions, Reyes presents Jesus as a model, finding grace, peace, and healing in the interruptions to Jesus’ ministry, such as in his interactions with Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, and the hemorrhaging woman. Reyes also speaks of the inevitable emotional cost to any interruption, which Jesus also experienced when he was asked to preach immediately following his hearing of John the Baptist’s death. Reyes suggests using these moments of interruption, following Jesus’ example, as moments of reflection in the Examen tradition, emphasizing the communal aspect of interruptions as not only a source of loss but also hope.
Questions for Conversation
1. Where in your life do you find yourself most open to interruptions? Where do you find yourself least open to interruptions?
2. How do you typically respond to interruptions? What might that reveal about your ability to seek God in all things?
3. Reflect on a time that stands out in your memory where you were “interrupted by grace.” In what ways was God present? What was lost or set aside in the process of being present to that interruption?
GATHERING PRAYER
Personal Prayer of Pedro Arrupe
Pedro Arrupe, S.J. (1907-1991)
Grant me, O Lord, to see everything now with new eyes, to discern and test the spirits, that help me read the signs of the times, to relish the things that are yours, and to communicate them to others. Give me the clarity of understanding that you gave Ignatius.
