Recognizing and Embracing Reality

Last week I attended the Jesuit FAC attack where children from local Nativity Schools came to just have fun and play games in the FAC. Although this was not Loyola students going out into the city, it was still an interesting way to interact with the children of the city. I think this demonstrated an important ideal that not only should people being going out into the city to help the poor, to help the less fortunate, but also we should reach out and welcome them into our community. I think this is very important to keep this balance because I think that having the relationship both ways is the only way that the relationship will last and be effective. While observing these kids I was observing part of the city in a foreign and strange environment. I think that by bringing these children in it only helped to strengthen the link between Loyola and the city of Baltimore, I think the kids really felt welcome and were having fun experiencing our view of the city while we viewed them. I thought that the kids would be more in awe of the situation and place. I used to tour inner-city kids from Hartford around our school and their reaction was always awe and amazement. But it seemed that these kids were just really happy to be there than amazed that they were there. I think this shows that the bond between Baltimore and Loyola is strengthening because these kids are not scared to enter our community. It really showed me their adventurous nature and bravery, because there are still college students and adults that are afraid to go into the city, but these children embraced our community and they really showed me what it meant to reach out and expand beyond your own horizons.
This experience related really well to Rev. Kolvenbach'’s speech about The Service of Faith and Promotion of Justice in Jesuit Higher Education as well as the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. That is, that one needs to and must have the ability to accept reality. Rev. Kolvenbach states that students must "...“let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively" (pg. 34), emphasizing the fact that students can’t just sit back and watch reality they need to experience reality and get involved even if it isn'’t the perfect world that they had imagined. This idea of reality and the acceptance of reality are also present in Nathaniel Hawthorne'’s "The Birthmark"” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman'’s "“The Yellow Wallpaper"”. In both of these stories the husbands lose touch with reality and refuse to see their wives as who they are. In Hawthorne'’s story, the husband's goal is to make his wife more beautiful than she already is, and in Gilman'’s the husband is trying relentlessly to cure his wife of depression. Both of these men think that there is an instant cure, and instant fix to the reality of their wives lives.
This idea of an instant fix is an important aspect to look at when we look at fixing the City of Baltimore, or integrating the Loyola community into the city. It is important to recognize the reality that this will not happen quickly and will not happen as fast as anyone would like it to. It needs to be done in small steps, such as bringing children from neighborhood schools to Loyola just to play some games with students. These small steps are what are going to bring the city into Loyola and also put Loyola into the city.