Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
FAITH FEEDS GUIDE ADAPTABLE
Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3
Conversation Starters 6
• A Student’s Worth by Michele Benetti 7 Conversation Starters 9
• Adapting in Crisis by Andrew Miller 10 Conversation Starters 12
• When the Path Changes by Kerry Cronin 13 Conversation Starters 14
• Gathering Prayer 15
Faith Feeds is an initiative by Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Program (C21), a Center that serves as a catalyst and 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, in partnership 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, a customized set of guides have been developed for Catholic educators.
Educators who strive for this excellence embody the following five virtues that allow them to transform Catholic schools: adaptable, joyful, attentive, visionary, and humble. 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 development of Faith Feeds guides around these five gifts or virtues, challenges Catholic educators to reflect on how they are living out being adaptable, joyful, attentive, visionary, and humble in their everyday life. Together, C21 and the Roche Center hope to deepen one’s faith and bring communities of people together, especially during this time of social isolation, through these Faith Feeds reflections and questions. All authors in these special Catholic educator editions are committed Catholic educators who have a deep love for Catholic schools. Some authors currently serve as leaders in Catholic schools, others teach Catholic educators at the university level. Drawing voices from the United States and Ireland, all authors are connected by their 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, education, and leadership 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 karen.kiefer@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 a 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.
This guide’s theme is: Adaptable
A STUDENT’S WORTH
By Michele Benetti
A few years ago, while teaching at Bishop O’Connell High in Virginia, the administration started a new program, called “Expanded Services,” to welcome students with severe disabilities to our classrooms. After a few weeks, the person responsible for this program asked me if I was willing to welcome those students in my classes.
At first, I have to admit, I was very worried. I thought this extra diversity generated by the presence of these students affected by Down syndrome would
have been a disruption for the rest of the class. I imagined myself running around doing a lot of extra work, putting in jeopardy the normal flow of education, and risking to upset the behavioral balance of the class. In brief, I was measuring these kids’ arrival according to my measure. I was trying to fit the arrival of these new students into my personal categories, into my known structures. I was putting my scheme above the Unforeseeable.
However, I had the grace of saying, “yes,” to that
request. What followed was one of the most surprising years in education I had yet to be a part of. As a matter of fact, we often proclaim during different meetings and talks about the infinite dignity of each human being, but in reality, we are often scared about things not fitting our ways. Somehow, we are scared of not being fulfilled or happy if things are not as we plan them. The reality of teaching students with Down syndrome was a total surprise.
I had two students in my first year: Adam and James. I taught Theology 2, an introduction to Scripture, to both of them. Their personalities were wildly different. Adam was one of the purest human souls I had ever met in my entire existence. Even though his communication skills were not proficient, Adam stared at me for an entire year with eyes that begged me to teach him about God and everything related to him. Adam wanted to hear his name, wanted me to tell him how much I loved God, and why. Adam’s pure love for the material became a driving force for every single student in the room. They perceived he was interested in Something, and they wanted to know what it was. They learned from his kindness. James, instead, was an actor, a comedian and an ultra-dramatic personality. He bursted into tears or laughter in the most unpredictable moments. Sometimes, he was incredibly rude or inappropriate, but in a way that was so incredibly endearing and funny for everyone around him. At the same time, he listened to every single word I said during the whole year. I would even dare to say that during the time we spent in class, he had a real encounter with the Lord Jesus. Someway, somehow, Jesus Christ spoke to this young man, and
revealed to him all the beauty and reality of his life, as he did to many people beforehand. One day, James’ teacher rushed to see me because they could not find him. Like young Jesus in the temple, we finally located James’ whereabouts after a long half an hour of search. He was lying down and praying in front of the crucifix. Earlier that day we said Mass together as a school, and James wanted to spend extra time to speak to Jesus, to offer Jesus his love and friendship. James did not grow up in a religious family and he learned this only because some people welcomed him in a Catholic school.
After this experience, I was left with many questions. What is the real goal of Catholic education, in particular of teaching a religion class? How are we measuring our own work? Are we sure that the measure with which we assess our work does not make us blind to what really matters? What is the point of covering units, chapters, and procedures, if we are not alert in front of our students, ready to welcome the always surprising presence of the Risen Lord? We can work in a Catholic institution, in the least Catholic way possible, putting what our students do above what are students are. May the Lord always teach us, instead, to look at each of our students in the same way He would look at them. “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” (Mt 10:31).
Fr. Michele Benetti Physics Teacher Bishop Fenwick High School
A STUDENT’S WORTH
Questions for Conversation
1. When have you said, “yes” to an unknown?
2. When has a student surprised you?
3. How are you being called to be adaptable?
ADAPTING IN CRISIS
By Andrew Miller
Catholic school leaders, confronting a series of institutional crises, are constantly being asked to adapt. To their credit, Catholic school leaders have confronted these crises with a commitment to affirm human dignity and build solidarity in their school communities. It’s been empirically validated that Catholic school leaders adapt under the pressure of crisis. And through rapid material and organizational responses, Catholic school leaders have adapted to the current crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic to the best of their school’s capacity and their professional abilities.
But what if the issue isn’t whether we have the capacity or ability to adapt in crisis (which research shows we do), but how to actually take the first step toward adaptation?
In considering this question during the recent stay-at-home orders, I turned to the collected poems of the Victorian writer and Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ. Hopkins has some excellent lines in his “Terrible Sonnets” that express how hard adaptation can be when things look as bleak as they do right now in the COVID era. In Sonnet #44, Hopkins laments, “I
wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent this night!...But where I say hours I mean years, mean life…I am gall, I am heartburn.” Hopkins gets it. He speaks to the justifiable frustration we are all feeling right now at having to adapt to difficult, unsafe, or unrealistic circumstances that we would never have chosen, but now have to learn to accommodate into our daily routines. Sometimes, the call to adapt is forced upon us when we’re not ready. Sometimes, adaptation is called for when there’s no clear way for us to use our current professional skillset, when what we’ve learned or what we used to know to be right isn’t well-suited to address the confusion and uncertainty of a given crisis.
So, what then does it take? How do we begin to adapt amid the pervasive mood of despair brought on by the extreme conditions facing us in this current crisis?
In a study I am working on with colleagues here at the Lynch School, we’ve been tracking how complex adaptive leadership in Catholic schools emerges. We’ve found that one driver of a school’s ability to be adaptive is deciding to accurately make sense of the initial conditions creating crisis. In other words, you have to enhance your community’s ability to calmly take stock of confusion and uncertainty in the face of really messy circumstances. This dispassionate discernment helps school leaders combat the kind of despair that, as Hopkins rightly notes, can make us feel as if the dark time is endless.
And Hopkins has a few lines related to this dispassionate discernment. In Sonnet #41, he asserts, “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man in me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.” Hopkins gets it again: you make a simple decision to not embrace despair. You decide to adapt. You decide to take note of what needs to be done, complexly, dispassionately, even if you can’t yet do the things that need to be done.
As my team’s research has started to show, sometimes the best initial response when asked to adapt isn’t to act. A better way to adapt is to decide to figure out complex issues carefully and thoughtfully within their appropriate context. I’d wager that it’s this kind of discernment that has happened throughout the history of US Catholic schooling that has helped see us through the most uncertain of crises.
Andrew Miller Lynch School of Education Boston College
ADAPTING IN CRISIS
Questions for Conversation
1. What are common ways that you and your colleagues are asked to respond when adapting to crisis-induced change?
2. What benefits might there be from taking time for dispassionate discernment prior to acting when called to adapt in times of crisis?
3. Why is the process of adaptation necessary as a way to adequately confront dark, despairing times?
WHEN THE PATH CHANGES
By Kerry Cronin
Right about now, it seems that we have a lot of thinking to do about adaptability. Our resilience is being tried in all sorts of ways in the grip of this pandemic--in the midst of working from home or the loss of work; of simultaneously working and home schooling; of trying to write final papers back home at the kitchen table; of learning the new ropes of online technologies and the old ropes of family dynamics in close quarters--the list goes on and on. I think most of us have realized that our muscles of adaptation are in need of some strength training. We’re getting that now, for better or worse.
The 18th century philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, pointed to a version of adaptability, perfectability, as the unique human quality that distinguishes us from other animals. Rousseau understood this as a person’s ability to physically, and eventually intellectually, adapt to new circumstances, to rise to the level of new questions, and imagine new solutions to old problems. But adaptability comes in many other forms: emotional, psychological, and spiritual. I wonder about my own spiritual adaptability lately. I think of St. Ignatius’ fervent desire to serve God in the Holy Land, only to be turned away once he had arrived. In his zeal, he yearned to prove his worthiness as a pilgrim, and yet, what was really needed, was to allow his own goals to subside, so that God’s could increase. He would instead go to Rome, shedding the pilgrim’s path, and taking up the path of the administrator. It was not quite as romantic an option as life in the Holy Land, but the truth is matching our will to God’s often turns out to be less romantic and dramatic, and more practical and hard-won. Spiritual adaptability must certainly entail the ability to forge new paths to God and each other.
On the other hand, as my muscles of adaptability are stretched to their limits by news of suffering in this pandemic, I’m reminded that there are some truths
about ourselves that don’t change. They are things about us that won’t admit of much adaptation:
• What doesn’t change is our need for real human contact and connection.
• What doesn’t subside is our desire to embrace each other in friendship, love and a sign of peace.
• What can’t be denied is that (as the adage goes) “we don’t have bodies, we are bodies” as we struggle to find safe spaces to move, methods to calm our anxieties, and new modes to keep ourselves and each other healthy.
• What doesn’t go away is our deep yearning to hold the ones we love, especially when they are in pain and dying.
• What doesn’t alter is our longing for love, friendship, and the joy of spontaneously finding ourselves once again, together.
A seminary professor once told me that he reminds his very zealous seminarians that to answer God’s call well, they will need many things: empathy, love of the poor and the despised, the ability to write a good homily, a knack for balancing budgets. But perhaps the most important thing needed to answer God’s call is to cultivate a deep interior life—one that will sustain them when they head into the wind, when the path changes, and when something more is called for. May we all have the depth to adapt to these strange circumstances, to know what we cannot and should not change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Kerry Cronin Philosophy Department Boston College
WHEN THE PATH CHANGES
Questions for Conversation
1. What has been my most helpful power of adaptability in the past month?
2. What would I like to make sure does NOT change during this time of quarantine and social distancing?
3. What spiritual adaptation could I work on in the next few weeks?
