Category: Soul

50 days in. It’s only when you silence your own thoughts that you can hear the grief for what was and what, in my heart, I know isn’t coming back anytime soon: the casualness of friendship; the intimacy of the chance meeting; the mindlessness of getting lost in a crowd; the pleasure of a good meal in a crowded restaurant.

I’ve been fighting these thoughts for weeks now but it wasn’t until last night, when I Zoomed into a Wednesday mindfulness session led by minister, that I heard how hard I was working to strangle these thoughts and keep the grief at bay. I’m still holding it at arm’s length, but I can now see how alive this grief is, how it wants a piece of me, how sometime in this long, long summer to come, I’m going to hold it close.

The world has gone and turned itself inside out and I act like I can just adjust my glasses and proceed as usual. I need to rearrange my heart. Reorient my soul. Reground my faith. Reset my intentions. I’m afraid—terrified, to be honest—of what I might find. But the only path is through. Are we brave enough to enter the Upside Down? Who will come out the other end?

This is my prayer on a rainy night: that, frightened, we might encounter each other and embrace in the Upside Down, then come out the other side, arm in arm.

When Greg Boyle, S.J., spoke Wednesday at the Chapel of Saint Joseph, most of the attendees knew the Jesuit priest and his ministry Homeboy Industries, the largest rehabilitation and re-entry program for gang members in the world, from his TED Talk or a report on 60 Minutes.

Many members of the Saint Joseph’s community have been involved more deeply, and practically. Here are two such stories. One recent graduate reached out to Homeboy and brokered a business deal that significantly increased Homeboy’s business reach and revenue. Another went there to serve for a year, found her calling, and stayed on as a case manager.

The Heart of the Deal

Service to others and business success are often separate. Madeline Mollahan ’18 found a way this year to bring them together.

Mollahan, who graduated this January from the food marketing co-op program, was hired by Stop & Shop, one of the largest grocers in the Northeast with 410 stores across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey, as a category analyst for specialty deli — hummus, salsa, guacamole, spreads, dips, and cheese products.

While looking for new products, she came upon Homeboy Industries, the Los Angeles-based rehabilitation and re-entry program founded by Boyle. She knew Homeboy from her time at Saint Joseph’s, and because her younger sister (who attends the University of Scranton) had participated in a service trip to Homeboy that deeply impacted her.

Mollahan took Homeboy’s offerings to her manager, and she gave her the green light — and asked her to take point on the relationship.

“I take great pride in having Homeboy [in Stop & Shop], not only because it has a Jesuit background, but because it goes to such a good cause,” Mollahan says. “That is heart-warming to me.

“It’s also a great, healthy product — no preservatives — and we’re giving such a quality product to my customers. That, as a professional, makes me feel good.”

Mollahan, from Boonton, New Jersey, did more than merely place Homeboy products on a store shelf. She worked with the publisher of Boyle’s best-selling book, Tattoos on the Heart, to have the book and the Homeboy story adjacent to the food products so customers encounter more than just guac and salsa.

“They can read on the package and see the book right there and put it together to understand what the story behind Homeboy is,” she says.

It’s worked. Since their introduction five weeks ago, Stop & Shop is selling a lot of Homeboy guacamole and salsa each week.

“I didn’t have to do any marketing. It almost sells itself,” she says, “which is pretty incredible to see.”

Thomas Vozzo, the CEO of Homeboy Industries, is appreciative. Homeboy earns more than 30 percent of its $20 million in annual revenue through its business operations (the rest comes through donations and government funding). The money supports the employment of about 250 Homeboys and Homegirls, former Los Angeles-area gang members who sign on for the 18-month program. Those employees, plus about another 1,000 people a month, receive services including job training, tattoo removal and anger-management therapy. And it works: While the average person incarcerated in California has a 2-in-3 chance of returning to jail, a UCLA study of people who participated in Homeboy’s programs found the recidivism rate dropped in half, to about 1 in 3.

“The Stop & Shop deal brought us to the East Coast,” he said. “It is very significant for us. And it’s a testament to Madeline. We depend on good people like her who know our mission and help to expand our work and business.”

Mollahan credits Saint Joseph’s generally, and the food co-op program specifically, for her ability to step into Stop & Shop and make an immediate impact.

“St. Joe’s definitely gave me the resources for that,” she says. “I owe my career right now to the food marketing co-op program, because I would not be in my position today if I didn’t have that experience with the food marketing co-op program.”

A Sense of Vocation

Molly Verghese ’17 graduated last year and decided to take a year off before starting work toward a doctoral degree in theology.

Her experience in the Inside-Out program at Graterford State Prison, where the class was comprised of 15 Saint Joseph’s students and 15 incarcerated men, awakened something in her.

“Getting to know the men’s stories … that just jolted me,” says Verghese, of Rochester, New York. “I still remember walking in the doors of the prison, and what overcame me was a sense of vocation — where your greatest gift meets the world’s greatest need.”

That sense of call eventually led her to pick up and move to Los Angeles last August for a service year through the Saint Joseph’s Worker Program. She started there as the manager for a diaper-distribution program. That provided an opportunity to get to know the community, and she became engaged and invested as she learned people’s stories.

She shared their challenges, too, and something shifted. One day, Verghese says, she was asked to drive a woman to the hospital who had been beaten with a baseball bat. It was difficult, but being there for another person in a time of need touched her. Later, when the woman needed help finding a place to live, she asked for Verghese to drive her. That drive was full of laughter, not pained silence.

“It was a powerful moment,” she says. “It said, ‘What is here? What’s stirring?’ ”

Verghese eventually was asked to stay on beyond her year and became a case manager at Homeboy. One of her clients, Sharnise Simmons, of South-Central LA, will be among the speakers Wednesday evening on the Saint Joseph’s campus.

“Molly is great, I can say anything to her and know it’s OK,” Simmons says. “Before this, I was very isolated. Now I can share my feelings.”

Verghese reflected on her experience at Homeboy and what it has provided her.

“The gift of being able to name our gifts,” she says. “It takes a mix of humility and confidence. And I couldn’t have done this without my experience at Saint Joseph’s.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at https://www.sju.edu/news-events/news/near-and-far-sju-grads-feed-boyles-mission.

This week, Rev. Lee Paczulla at my church was talking about a popular development metaphor: that people need roots and wings. It refers to our need to be both grounded and aflight.

“A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings.” – Hodding Carter, journalist, in his book Where Main Street Meets The River, 1953

A lot of times it gets used in reference to children. That we want our children to grow up with roots and wings—with a sense of grounding and connectedness AND with a sense of adventure and freedom. Me, I think it sounds like something for all of us, not just kids.

But, there’s an issue. As Rev. Lee correctly points out, this is a metaphor at odds with itself.

It’s also at odds with a world in which safety has been fetishized, where people wish to accept no risk—the expectation that all dangers can be screened from our lives. At the same time there is a lot of anger in the country that individuals’ wings are being clipped.

In short, this request for both total liberty (wings) AND total safety (root) is at odds with itself.

I felt this tension most recently on a Wednesday several weeks back when the family-owned company for which I’ve worked the past nine years announced it would entertain offers for sale.

I had two reactions at the same time:

• One that was essentially defensive. I have enjoyed my time here and I believe in the mission of the company, to help people to live fuller lives. I am 51, appreciate and like my employer, and know that it could be tough to find a similar one. How dare anyone consider anything that would threaten that mission (and me)?
• One that was more considered, that accepted the possibility that the family might be ready to separate from the company—that it might, indeed, be exhausted from the rapid changes in the publishing industry that have driven down the value of all publishing properties in the past two decades and, personally, recognizing something inside me, a yearning that it was time for something new.

I was struck by the duality and a deeper truth—it led me to realize that the tension between all these things does not play out in our extremes, not in our roots nor our wings. It hit me in my gut. Literally.

It made me appreciate that what an engaged person needs to resolve the tension between roots and wings, between liberty and safety, is a strong core. We need spiritual pilates, people! We need some holy abs.

And that got me to thinking about how the gut is not where reconciliation happens, and that perhaps it is more useful to think of the way we reconcile between roots and wings as a bridge, connecting two shores. The bridge metaphor is helpful in that a bridge cannot pull the sides together, it doesn’t make the two banks one. Instead, it can allow transport between them—of thoughts, of energy, of salves. A bridge enables flow,  across it and underneath it.

That’s helpful when thinking of many things, including this country, with two shores that are so far apart right now that there will be no resolution in the near term. The best we can hope for is a bridge to facilitate flow.

Closer to home, I need that personally, as I consider an uncertain future. With a son still in college and a family to tend to, I have a ravenous appetite for roots, for security. And I know that this world, ultimately and despite my deepest desires, is an uncertain place. As someone who recently renewed my wedding vows (after 25 years operating under the original ones) with a commitment to adventure, I yearn for wings, for what comes next.

How to reconcile the tension in these two desires?

I don’t know, and I don’t feel alone. I see this tension being played out among my friends (guys especially) who are, like me, well into the second act of their work careers and find that the benefits of having “made it” co-exist with the reality that you can quickly become a target, too, in any cost-savings plan. That your skills are expensive. Some, to use the HR language, have been “separated” or they have stepped out of their careers voluntarily. Some have re-created themselves; others are still trying to figure out how to proceed. I see it play out 300 million strong, in the coarse barking of our national conversation. The yearning for rootedness and flight—for safety and liberty, the politicized expression of this—is a tension that seems as if it is going to get worse before it resolves itself. And the resolution will not be the joining of the far shores, but an understanding that these two shores hold a fluid truth between them. We are not a nation but a vessel, holding the fates of these millions and millions of people, and many more, in its shores and beyond. These shores can be kind or cruel, informed or ignorant. But there is no movement without banks, within which the water flows.

And … back to the need for a resilient core. What are these spiritual pilates? What work can I do to contain these opposing desires at once, to span the river between two distant shores?

For me, that work revolves around compassion, self-awareness, and connection. With recognizing my abilities and my limitations, both formidable. With realizing that the path forward is a softening, not a hardening. And it is a connecting—that ultimately, strangely, the bridge is flow, too.

It is both listening and speaking. It is following a call and stepping up when needed. It is the new and the familiar. It is knowing that every day dawns a fresh creation and I have a curious place in it.

This image of standing on the bridge, and being of the flow, this fills me with light.

I hope you sense the light, too.

For the country, I know even less. And still—still I feel that until we wrestle this dual fetish for uncompromising safety and unquestioned liberty to the ground, we’ll be circling this same angry, frustrated, fruitless round as a nation. The answer, I think, is trust in and accountability to each other. We need to be able to manage the tension between stubborn rootedness and selfish flight. We need a center—again, a core. Or maybe it works to think of it as a Commons. With a reality we can agree on. Without that, it seems all discussion goes nowhere. So, yes, to roots and wings, but also to a strong stomach, a civil Commons, and a supple bridge.