In our final blog around the theme of “Love Thy Neighbor” from the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Dr. Michael James shares some recent learnings and reflections of how he is applying his learning from the experiences he has had as a member of our Christian unity cohort. Michael James is a Resident Minister and faculty member of Boston College and also is a member of the Focolare Movement, a lay ecclesial movement of the Roman Catholic Church who seek to promote brotherhood and to achieve a more united world in which people respect and value diversity in alignment with Jesus’ prayer “that they would be one” (Jn 17:21). 

Here, Michael shares how his experience during the Harvard Slavery Tour renewed his commitment to building unity through the “art of loving.”

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In the face of a climate on most college and university campuses that are too often marked by isolation, fragmentation, discontinuity, competition, and abject individualism, my experience during the Harvard Slavery Tour reminded me of my responsibility to build processes of repair on my own university campus that cultivate a culture of unity through practicing the “art of loving.” By practicing the “art of loving,” I can participate in generating the counter currents of interdependence, relational action, dialogue, reciprocity, and fraternity. 

In the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Tour Experience, we explored Harvard University’s entanglements with the institution of slavery. We walked for two hours, making ten stops in and around the nation’s first college campus, re-examining familiar terrain and learning about a part of Harvard’s history that has long been hidden in plain sight. The tour helps dispel the myth that the New England region did not play a significant role in slavery, profit from human trafficking, or contribute to the erasure of countless family histories. In addition, the tour elevates stories of Black women and men whose resistance and leadership have shaped the University—and our nation. Our tour was led by Rev. Rita Powell and Pastor Dan Smith, and it was intentional about taking space for prayerful reflection to remember and process a history that has been hidden for so long – too long. 

The art of loving

My experience of walking the Harvard Slavery Tour in communion with brothers and sisters in Christ reminded me of the sacramental opportunity I have to build unity on my own campus of Boston College. Christian colleges and universities offer a distinct, formative, and transformative student development experience – the kind of experience that is animated by the life of Jesus.  Christian unity calls us to encounter Jesus in one another through love. As a faculty member I am called to live a vocation that invites all members of our campus to build unity through a practice in the “art of loving.”

The “art of loving” is demanding. It requires us to love everyone – acknowledging that our dignity and value are not external, but inherent; not dependent on what we do, but who we are: made in the image of God, the Imago Dei (Gen 1:27).  

• It is selfless. It calls me to share the joy and pain of another person by letting go of my worn strong beliefs, opinions, and ideas in order to make the other’s perspective my own. 
• It is generous. I am asked to be the first to love in each encounter. I ask myself, “What is the will of God in this moment with this person?” The answer is simple: to love that person who is made in the image of God. I must initiate love for the other right away, without expecting anything in return. 
• It is reciprocal. I have come to understand, through the example of Jesus, that a person discovers his or her deepest, most authentic self by being detached from the self.  To enter into relationship, I must identify and embrace my own self-identity, while at the same time relinquishing it for the sake of the other.

 Jesus shows me through His ultimate sacrifice that I am myself, not when I close myself off from the other, but when I give myself, when out of love I lose myself in the other. In this way I actually find myself.

Embracing our shared humanity

The opportunity for reverence and reflection at the gravesites of enslaved people in Cambridge was the most formative moment for me on the Harvard Slavery Tour. I learned about Cicely and Jane, aged 13 and 22, who were the only known enslaved people buried in the Old Burying Ground, but for whom not much else is known. In prayer in front of the gravestones of Cicely and Jane, I recalled how I had grown increasingly more at peace with the weeks and then months of being sheltered-in-home during the spring and summer of 2020. Absent my daily commute to campus, I enjoyed reduced stress, more leisure time with my family, long meals and hikes in the park, and the luxury of time to read, write and work on lesson plans.  

However, the walls of silence I had built through self-isolation began crumbling. My conscience grew increasingly unsettled with each incident of violence and racism against brothers and sisters of color. I had been further jarred from my “comfort” as COVID-19 ravaged Black and Latino communities disproportionately compared to white communities. In this state of mind, I eagerly sought out sources of conversation, consolation and conversion.

James Baldwin, in his 1964 essay, Nothing Personal, spoke of the “miracle of love” that begins to “take flesh” when we encounter someone who embraces our wounds and is unafraid of making themselves vulnerable. As I reflected at that time on the national landscape of morally questionable leadership and the divisive nature of our public discourse, I recognized how prophetic Baldwin’s words were at that moment and endure today. 

Baldwin asks how we can navigate and embrace our shared humanity. He laments that “our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them.” In many ways, we as a society are still deluding ourselves that wounds are something to be hidden rather than fundamental realities to interrogate. 

Reflecting more deeply at that moment on my own paralysis to act, to make the connections that this particular moment necessitated, I decided to contact Black and Latino students with whom I shared spaces of teaching and learning over the last several academic semesters. My students spoke with me from locations including Miami, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City. Each person described their frustrations with the anemic debate about who is on the right and wrong side of public violence and the murders of black people, as well as the passivity of public conversations about the best way to correct systemic injustices. As these young people shared with me their increased sense of vulnerability to COVID-19 in communities of color, the slaying of Black lives, and their persistent personal encounters with racism and police violence, I experienced their outrage, devastation, exhaustion, fear, powerlessness, and anxiety.

As I entered into my students’ suffering, I heard Baldwin’s question echo – how do I navigate and embrace our shared humanity? The answer, Baldwin proposes, does not emerge in politics or law. As much as the correcting of social evils does require radically examining and repairing our political system, any change that does not begin on the individual level will be inert, at best. I recognized that the answer will not be something one can purchase or manufacture by oneself. Instead, the only adequate answer is something from beyond ourselves.

The founder of Focolare (a lay ecclesial movement in the Catholic Church that I am part of) Chiara Lubich presents the vision of “a world united” challenges me to look beyond myself as an educator, scholar, teacher and minister. Lubich explains,

“The goal that has been assigned to education (to form the human person so as to render him or her independent) is implemented almost paradoxically, by forming the ‘person-in-relationship,’ which for us means the human person in the image of the Trinity, one who is capable of continually transcending self…” It is through this spiritual and educational practice of mutual love, to the point of becoming completely one, that we work toward the achievement of the goal of all goals, expressed in Jesus’ prayer and testament: “May they all be one.’”

Lubich’s insight is that social justice begins from a personal choice to share the suffering of our brothers and sisters. In doing so, we look at our own woundedness and openly share our vulnerability. The more we deny our humanity, the more we become blinded to others’ humanity. We forfeit the grace that comes with the miracle of love.

Conclusion

Walking the Harvard Slavery Tour helped me to renew my commitment to build a unity that requires acknowledgement of exposed systemic injustices in Catholic higher education and in the broader social context. Building unity requires me to address Catholic campus cultures that have been historically fractured by the disparities attributed to students’ socio-economic status, race, gender, sexual identity, and ethnicity. It is my hope that by practicing the “art of loving” on my own campus, I contribute to the work of repair by cultivating unity that generates countercurrents of interdependence, relational action, authentic dialogue and an ethic of reciprocity that may, by a miracle of love, begin to change 400 years of a different narrative in our city, state, and country – one that has not been based on interdependence or love.