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It is so good to have you all moving back to campus this weekend. It’s been really quiet here, this past month or so. A weird feeling, being at a near-empty university after a semester of constantly going and moving and writing and thinking. Like a hollowed-out shell that echoes in places it shouldn’t.
Now, we’re moving back. Back to the same dorm room, with the same friends, and the same friendly faces. But not everything is the same. We’ll have new classes, new professors, we’ll feel new excitement and new anxieties. Perhaps the best part of it all, our return to campus life, is that we’ll meet new people - people we’ve never seen before, who we never knew existed. People with lives and experiences are as real as yours and mine. People who will teach us things we never knew about ourselves and the world around us, if we let them.
In a couple months, we’ll hit the two-year mark since the world really shut down because of the pandemic. And two years later, we find ourselves still in the midst of it. We’re not at square one, of course. We know things now about the virus that we didn’t back then. We have vaccines and boosters and better ways of treating the virus. But it isn’t the same, is it?
The world, your world, is different now, and there’s no sure way, or real way, of getting back to it. Maybe that’s okay for some us, and for others of us it isn’t. We have all experienced this one, common experience of pandemic differently. Individually, we have weighed our risks, we have decided what is important to us and what is not, and we have made sacrifices we wish we did not have to make.
Acknowledging these realities is so important, especially in an environment where we live together, or work together, so closely. We each have our own lived experiences. We each have our own victories and losses. We each have our own lives, woven together by love and heartache and joy and sadness. And while we share so many experiences together here at Ambrose, we do not experience those in the same way. What is important to you may not be near as important to me. The values that I hold in high regard, you may not. And that’s okay because we are not the same person, and we do not always see the world around us in the same way.
Each new semester gifts us the opportunity, however, to see the world around us differently. It is a time of new beginnings, when the people we meet afford us a glimpse of how they see the world. So the new person, the one you’ve never seen before, the one you never knew existed, turn your ear to them and listen. Listen to their story, to their experiences, to their loves and losses and joys and sorrows. Extend your own gracious hand to them, that you might learn from one another.
Dorothy Day once wrote that “we cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other.” Take time this semester to do that - to know one another, to hear one another, to see one another.
May our new semester be filled with new people, and new experiences, and new ways of seeing the world around us.
Have a question about a program or event going on in Campus Ministry? Got an idea for something you'd like to see happen? EMAIL US at ministry@sau.edu.
