From Garden to Table: Food for Thought
Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,
Between Commencement and Reunion, I had the privilege of attending the Rome Seminar organized by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities—an opportunity for educational, spiritual, and social renewal with leaders from other Catholic institutions. The setting for the seminar was the Vatican and its offices as well as other Catholic institutions in the Eternal City.
Every aspect of the experience was powerful, from meetings with the leaders of various Dicasteries in the Roman Curia to a Mass celebrated on the altar of the tomb of St. Peter to a private audience with His Holiness, Pope Francis. But I want to take a moment in this summer season of growth and thriving to reflect on two particular meetings—one with Rev. Dom Bernhard A. Eckerstorfer OSB, Rector of the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm at the Benedictine monastery on the Aventine Hill, and another with Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, Secretary of Education in the Vatican Dicastery of Culture and Education. Each used a powerful metaphor for Catholic higher education, and I love a good metaphor!
Rev. Eckerstorfer reflected on education as being like care for a garden, where we cultivate and enhance life. Young people, he mused, are seeking an abundant life, and our focus should be on preparing the ground for their becoming—their becoming who and what they want to be, not just what others want them to be. He talked about some key Benedictine tenets and practices that are essential in the garden of education: listening, humility, and dialogue. A garden, he observed, loves silence: it is a place of listening. Learning happens when we find the space to listen to our inner voice and to the voices of others. Above all, our colleges and universities should nurture listeners. Gardens also require humus or soil—the root of the word humility. Our educational institutions should also encourage humility, he suggested, by inviting us to acknowledge our limitations, to make room for others in conversation and activities, and to embrace gratitude. And finally, dialogue should be the liberating aspect of a liberal arts education. We teach students to be critical thinkers and to hone those skills in dialogue with others. But dialogue also requires responsibility. In our educational gardens, we need to treat everyone as capable of growth and worthy of attention and care.
We moved from the garden to the table when we met with Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi in the Dicastery for Culture and Education. Education, he proposed, is like cooking a meal. Cooking is perhaps the first “art” of humanity: animals feed, but we prepare, share, and pass on traditions through our meals. He emphasized how in cooking we might begin with a recipe, but we need to use our imaginations, not just the instructions. Applying the metaphor, he suggested that the role of a university or college is actually about awakening the appetite, about kindling a desire for further knowledge. He also emphasized the importance of diversity in our institutions, reminding us that the most interesting cooking involves mixing. A good cook knows that in preparing a meal, the ingredients can come from different places and cultures, and the most surprising and pleasing flavors are often those that bring together unexpected elements.
In my June letter, I wrote about some of the wonderful culminating experiences of the College’s academic year—reminders of the many ways our faculty and staff tend our “garden” and also set the table for students to come together in inquiry. This summer, while enjoying the fullness of flowers and leaves and the bounty of fruits and vegetables (including at our own SMC Sustainable Farm!), I plan to spend some time thinking about listening, humility, and dialogue.
For many years, I have kept Sister Joan Chittister’s modern edition of The Rule of Benedict on my bedside table. It’s interesting that the first word of this 1,500-year-old spiritual guide is listen: “Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” Sister Chittister interprets the first paragraph of the prologue: we need to pay attention, to listen “with feeling, with more than an academic interest.” She contends that “No one grows simply by doing what someone else forces us to do. We begin to grow when we finally want to grow,” when we make “our own decision to become what we can by doing what we must.”
As I contemplate our shared responsibility for tending and growing the Saint Mary’s garden—for the flourishing and becoming of our students and ourselves—I am finding much food for thought in my Rome experiences. I hope they might also feed something in you!
Warm regards,
Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President
July 1, 2024