Spring 2015 Stories

Remember to breathe. While preparing to deliver monologues as part my theater class’s final exam, many of my classmates and I fell victim to our nerves, forgetting to breathe while delivering our lines. “Remember to breathe,” our professor reminded us. “Breathe in the words. They serve as your inspiration.” I had never considered the relationship between breath and inspiration until that moment. In-spiration. Like respiration? I was struck by the connection. In-spire: to create a feeling in, to animate, to inhale. To receive the words in front of you, to be moved by them, and to breathe them back out anew. This odd little realization offered a key to my education. The best professors I had at Santa Clara University encouraged me to breathe in the words we read, to pause and think critically about them, and to breathe them out in a new way.

As an undergraduate student earning a history degree, I would invariably be asked the dreaded question: “So what can you do with that?” A man once even went so far as to warn me: “Be careful. A history degree is not very marketable.” These often well-meaning comments highlight the general misgivings today about the purpose of a liberal arts education. Studying the liberal arts cultivates critical thinking, and reading and writing skills that are necessary to be successful in most careers. Nevertheless, unlike students majoring in fields such as engineering, finance, or computer science, I did not have a clear career path set out in front of me after graduation. It is true, I did not choose to study history for the job prospects or the marketability; I studied history because it allowed me to take a deeper look, ask bigger questions, and seek to understand the world and my place in it. I studied the liberal arts because of the way it inspired me to critically engage with questions about who we are and how we ought to live.

With the growing emphasis on professional degrees over the liberal arts, Martha Nussbaum asserts: “we seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner.” In my senior year at Santa Clara, a history professor of mine finished out the last day of class by asking us: “What do you love?” After 10 weeks of study, his final note was not a summary review of our course themes, or the methodological skills we had learned to apply throughout the quarter. Instead, his final word was a question, inviting us to pay attention to what it is we love, because this is how we will begin to understand ourselves and our place in the world. At the time, graduation was fast approaching, and I was overwhelmed with insecurity and fear. Had I ultimately made a mistake studying history? I had visions of my life being defined by debt and unemployment, and I longed for a clear career path to present itself on the uncertain horizon ahead. And then, this question: “What do you love?” This invitation reminded me to breathe and helped me to re-focus on what I had learned.

I did not choose to come to Santa Clara because of its Jesuit, Catholic mission. Faith and religion were far removed from my life growing up, and I was dismissive of the significance of Santa Clara’s Catholic identity. However, during my time in college, I found myself reconsidering the world of faith I encountered in the classroom and on the campus. During my senior year, I read an excerpt of Introduction to Christianity for a class and was deeply moved and stirred by the questions this text and class presented. Having spent my life without belief in God, the thought of a divine reality rattled me to my core. I found myself sitting alone in Santa Clara’s Mission Church, considering what all of this meant, and what my place in it might be. Pope Benedict XVI called such considerations the “penetrating ‘perhaps’ which belief whispers in man’s ear.” I began reading theology books and openly asking questions about faith outside of class, and this whisper of ‘perhaps’ turned into a full shout. I believed in God, and this changed everything in my life. While faith was quite foreign to me, I found my professors and peers welcomed these conversations and validated the importance of my questions. Jesuit, Catholic universities are uniquely poised to prompt and host such inquiry and considerations, for a liberal arts education is centrally concerned with the human experience and search for truth.

For me, studying the liberal arts had allowed me to examine how my life might fit within Ignatian Leadership the greater story, to discern how my localized questions are rooted in a reality bigger than myself. Nussbaum suggests that humanities studies enrich our “ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a ‘citizen of the world’... to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.” The education we breathe in ultimately points us beyond ourselves and moves us to seek a greater good, a common good.

Where is my path pointed? My heart lies in the world of education, particularly in working with children. This is not something I have always known, but a realization that has unfolded gradually, as I reflected upon my experiences and those things that I love. I will soon begin a master’s program through the Alliance for Catholic Education at the University of Notre Dame and spend the next two years teaching third grade at a small Catholic school in Sacramento, California. It is strange and wonderful to see the transition ahead where I am not just the student in the classroom, but am charged with the education of others. My education at Santa Clara has challenged me to build something greater than my own resume, it has inspired me. My hope is that I can, in turn, “go and do likewise.”

Nicole Kelly graduated from Santa Clara University in 2013, with a B.A. in History. She has worked on staff as the Communications and Operations Specialist at SCU’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education since September 2013. Nicole will be pursuing a Master’s in Education through University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education Teaching Fellows program beginning summer 2015, and will be teaching third grade at St. Robert’s school in Sacramento, CA in the Fall.

Endnotes

1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6.
2. Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004).
3. Ratzinger, 40.
4. Nussbaum, 6.
5. William Spohn, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2000), 4.