The Dreaded Dis-O

Here is a little about Dis-O and my experience this year

The mission of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps is service and formation. It’s both. As a part of our formation as international Jesuit volunteers, our program coordinators facilitate a reorientation/disorientation retreat for us.  The first year is so cool! You get to reorient to the mission, gear up for another year, and spend time with your fellow volunteers from other communities. However, the second time around they call the retreat disorientation. It marks the beginning of the end. We begin to talk about “next steps” and “saying goodbye.” I was nervous going into the retreat… The beautiful part of this experience is that we enter into life here. But that makes it impossible to say goodbye… How do I say goodbye to a life?

My nerves make me hesitant, resistant, guarded. I resigned to just pray for a miracle because the impossibility of saying goodbye made it too ridiculous to be true. It’s certainly out of my realm, my mere human capabilities, so I’ll toss it to God.

God answers prayers. I warmed up to the space and community on the retreat. By the time we reached the last day and were asked to begin thinking how to share our experience with our stateside communities, I was surprisingly willing to enter into the exercise. First I wanted to pray—for each person who will ask, “How was it?” I hope I can pray for each of you: my family who loves me but can’t wrap their heads around my off-the-wall life decisions sometimes, my friends who want to know everything, and even those college friends and neighbors who have grown out of touch but will undoubtedly ask, “Where were you? What were you doing?”

I’m nervous to share my story… I want to honor this experience and the people here. I don’t know how to communicate two years of life living. I want to share. I’m scared to share. I want to be understood. I egotistically think that no one will understand me sometimes. I’ll be imperfect and inadequate. But I’m praying for each of you, and I hope and trust that’ll fill in the gaps.

Here is a reflection from my disorientation retreat.

It’s a beginning of goodbyes and hellos.

{Full disclosure: This could be viewed as a compilation of all the prayers and saints who accompany me. Almost all is borrowed. I’m not original.}

I’m posed the question: How have you grown and what have you learned in this time as a Jesuit volunteer? It boils down to my mission (and that of St. Terese of Liseaux):  to be love.

The final word is love of course.

But I’ve learned, grown and been formed because I got lost. I find a lot of truth in our JVC slogan, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” That’s how it happened. Baby step by baby step I ventured a little more, gave up a little more, unlearned a little more.
I gave myself to this experience: “full-time, long-term service.” Not shifts at a soup kitchen. Not Saturday mornings. Not a mission trip. I gave up my culture, future plans, expectations, family, friends, my skill set… all I have to this life. I gave to my students and teachers, to my neighborhood and the JVC community, to Tacneños like my host family. And as all those things I gave up slowly melted away or changed or grew into something better… I slowly began to find myself. I became attentive to the little moments of clarity, the presence of God. For brief, divine moments I saw/ understood clearly who and whose I am becoming. A person moved by faith. A daughter. A mother. A teacher. A servant. Giving myself to the adventure of increasing attentiveness to God’s presence, I woke up a little more. I experienced communion—with God and others. We can only know love in community—from our Triune God to our neighbors: sisters and brothers. We must understand more divine connectedness. I think I’m understanding a little more—that the secret is love and that love comes with community. That heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet too. That we know each other in the breaking of the bread—in the sacred ordinariness of living together. When we know that sacredness, the GLORY of the everyday and the call to GLORIFY the Lord by our own light, we can’t help but sing and dance and exclaim shouts of praise.

I prayed to God, and she answered my prayers. She showered me in Graces, the ones I’ve been begging for since the very beginning of my discernment with JVC

Openness     Gratitude      Courage

She held my hand. Ever so gently and slowly She led me into the wilderness. She changed my lot, empowered me to be a bold participant, rather than a saint-in-waiting.

It really has been a bold, wild adventure—falling in love. But for all the greatness, the deepness, the vastness, the courageous foolishness of this love, it really was all very small how it happened. It happened in the walks to school and trips to the market. It happened over lunch and laughing on the living room couch. It happened in a hug and a smile. I fell in love when I was welcomed in as sister, mother, daughter and friend. I fell in song and dance. In laughter, triumph and failure. I fell in love walking through the mountains and playing kickball. I fell when I received notes from students and when they included me in on their jokes. I fell in love looking up at the desert stars and admiring the sunset each day. I fell in love smelling freshly baked bread and eating avocados and mangoes…. Even in doing laundry and cooking dinner!

It was all very small, except for the Graces I received and the joyful peace that I felt. It was so small and simple how it all happened—as we sat there talking. It is not until we step back and take the long view that we realize that it really happened.

We lived into each day with spirituality, community, social justice and simple living. We lost ourselves in the service, in the living of daily life, and we woke up to find ourselves in these values. They are a part of us and us them. It’s a beautifully messy thing of overflow. It’s an unbound love for God and the world that cannot be undone. We are ruined for life.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.

I hope I communicate these values through my being. This beautifully terrible love has no words. I hope others come to know the little way—that they feel the Divine, joyful peace and encounter their own Graces. I hope in the freedom I’ve found.

I trust that this is only the beginning, a step along the way, and opportunity for God’s Grace to enter in and do the rest.

Praise be to God that this is a life-long adventure of increasing attentiveness to Her presence, growing in dependence and failing foolishly, dangerously in love.

                                                                                                          Amen.