This Summer, nine members of our faculty and staff are walking a route in Spain with sites related to the life of St. Ignatius. The following post by Mr. Stephen Pitts, SJ is the second in a series of their reflections.
As I write this, the Dallas Jesuit group is beginning their journey to Bilbao, where Max and I will meet them tomorrow evening, and we are finishing up a wonderful five days in Paris.
Thanks be to God, when we returned to the seminary on Thursday, our bags had been delivered. Since then, in addition to the usual sights, I have reconnected with two friends. One was my college roommate. We met in a math class at OU. He majored in Spanish and when we lived together my senior year, he could not yet speak French. Since then, he has spent four years in France, two more in Francophone Africa, and holds a masters degree in Romance Languages. What does one do with all of these degrees? He is an informatics engineer for a transport company in Paris and handles customer support in four languages. So this is a plug for study abroad and multilingualism. Not only does it broaden your perspective but it also increases your employability.
Yesterday I found myself sitting in a coffee shop run by a Sri Lankan speaking Japanese with another Jesuit a stone’s throw from where Ignatius, Francis Xavier, and Peter Faber loved while they were students at the University of Paris. This time last year I met this Japanese Jesuit when he was finishing his regency in Kobe, Japan at our high school there. Now he is set to begin theology studies in the fall at the Centre Sevres, the Jesuit university in Paris. Somehow fittingly, a Maroon 5 song came on in the background while we were talking, proof of the global reach of American culture.
The two of us tried to visit the chapel where the first Jesuits took their vows, but it was closed, so we went to Sacre Coeur instead: the basilica of the Sacred Heart. I have always had a devotion to the sacred heart since my own open heart surgery.
I can tie together this reflection around the theme of formative experiences in my early twenties that continue to affect me: the friends I made at OU, the time I spent in Japan, and the heart surgery. Also, I am reminded again of the international reach of the Society that I sometimes forget in Dallas. For Ignatius too the people he met and the life experiences of his twenties drastically altered the course of his life. This time tomorrow we will be in Loyola, where hopefully one of my colleagues, if he or she is not too tired, will pick up the mantle of the blog.
As an aside, I took a selfie at the tower of St James in Paris, the traditional starting point for pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Our route is different but our purpose is the same: to encounter God in the journey.
