Dear College Faculty and Staff,
This week, I would so like to celebrate the late winter quarter sun and your many accomplishments in classrooms, labs and studios. Those are all so good and real, but I draw your attention elsewhere, as I am sobered and anguished by this week's news. There is war again in Europe. It is a tragic folly that will result only in suffering.
When I was growing up, the Vietnam war was raging. In our home, my pacifist father displayed an excerpt from The Histories, by Herodotus, that resonates very strongly with me this week:
“Tell me Croesus, who was it who persuaded you to march against my country and be my enemy rather than my friend?”
“My lord,” Croesus replied, “the luck was yours when I did it, and the loss was mine. The god of the Greeks encouraged me to fight you: the blame is his. No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons…”
Jesuit higher education today draws on its spiritual and intellectual commitments to oppose war, and the unimaginable horrors it inevitably brings. I invite us all to pray for peace, compassion and reason to prevail over violence, and to spare our human family ever more suffering.
In solidarity,
Daniel