December 4
Embrace the spiritual journey of Advent with a reflection about hope from Stephen Szolosi, director of spiritual formation at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology. This season invites us to pause and reflect on our anticipation of the coming of Christ.
Representatives of the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation recently shared their hope with SCU’s Jesuit School of Theology. President of that Foundation, Monique Maddox, with another descendant, Katrina Albrandt, recounted learning of the sale of enslaved ancestors by the Jesuits in 1838. They reflected on confronting that trauma personally and on walking a path to reconciliation with the Jesuits today. An international group of faculty, staff, and students, lay and religious, listened as our guests spoke of their hope-filled efforts to reconcile with the present successors of Jesuit enslavers. As they spoke, they acknowledged history’s pain and suggested that they did so oriented by a tearful promise of honoring ancestors, restoring scathed relationships, attending to the descendants, and modeling racial reconciliation for America. They shared their hope in redemptive love.
When speaking to a recent assembly, Pope Francis connected education to the gift of hope, saying: “Understand your mission in the educational and cultural field as a call to broaden horizons, to overflow with inner vitality, to make room for possibilities unseen, to bestow the ways of the gift that only becomes wider when it is shared.” I carry into Advent a sense of having received such hope from our visitors. Their witness encouraged us not to neglect the brokenness that we know personally and in the world, but instead to engage these wounds with vulnerability, patience, and love. They revealed to us the face of Christ just as we begin this season with a call to be hopeful, to broaden our horizons, to look again for unrecognized opportunities, and to welcome into our world the one who gives hope by daringly drawing close to us.
As we enter this season, may we let such hope animate our prayer that we might bring others such hope as well.
Stephen serves as the Director of Spiritual Formation at Santa Clara's Jesuit School of Theology, contributing to the community’s liturgies and other occasions for spiritual nourishment. He's recently been fed himself by reading poetry and about that art’s relationship to Christianity’s contemplative tradition