About a year ago, while walking along Linden Lane, I bumped into a Jesuit whose wisdom and faith I deeply esteem. Maybe he recognized my slower pace and sensed that I was worried. Somehow he could tell how overwhelmed I was feeling about my duties as a newly-elected student government president. Too overtly sure that I could handle any task with ease (although not feeling that way on the inside) he knew exactly what to say to me: "When you do not have the answers, and you rarely will, just remember to be reflective, attentive, and loving." The simplicity of his advice was compelling. But after a year of service to Boston College, I believe his words are indispensable. For if we abide by the credo "to be reflective, attentive, and loving," might our community rekindle its flame of humility, and steady itself on a firmer position of love and listening. This is exactly what we need.
At BC, you find extraordinary people who do ordinary things. Musicians, athletes, poets, travelers, activists, scholars, artists, patriots, and volunteers - somehow an amazingly diverse group of students survive here by living ordinary lives together. Most of us are taught from day one, typically in a PULSE or Perspectives course, why we should choose to do everyday things with great love. Perhaps it is through the experience of a service project, a persuasive lecture, or a 4 a.m. conversation with your roommates, but one day you are suddenly struck by the belief that you can create a world "here" that reflects a world you want "out there." It is a terribly exciting, lights-on sort of moment that should happen to each one of us. In a very Ignatian sense, it is a desire to "go set the world a flame;" a saying that BC seems to like, a lot.
If we do not choose to pay attention, however, something tragic could happen to us on our way from Newton to Lower, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, or maybe in flight from Boston to Berlin. Some of us will lose the flame entirely. Others will turn into over-ambitious flame jugglers. But worst of all, far too many of us will decide to judge the flames instead of knowing them, which can sadly keep us from knowing one another. In this regrettable look at the flames, falls the shadow.
There is only one way for us to fight a campus trend of judging before knowing. Simply, we must become more reflective, attentive, and loving people. In adopting this credo we can finally start to admit that we know far less than we like to think. Not only concerning our passionate views of a world infinitely bigger than ourselves, but more critically, in our everyday consideration toward one another. What a humbling experiment it is to reject the absolutist positions, and to embark on an intellectual journey to last us a lifetime. For it is in knowing, not judging, that we can listen better and love longer. Fortunately, at almost no place other than BC can we discover within the most ordinary of circumstances, the very flames of all those people we never tried or even cared to see as extraordinary. A practiced belief in this at home could indeed make our world more just.
If I could go back to that moment on Linden Lane, I probably would have asked the Jesuit how to get the credo right. Today, I am glad that I still have a whole life to figure it out.
Grace Simmons is the former president of the Undergraduate Government of Boston College and a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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