Plunge Weekend Reflection

Everything we engaged with on the plunge weekend had unique value and significance. For me personally, the talk with Sherrie Hesse made the greatest impact, hence I will be pursuing the second prompt.

Through her presentation I was mostly in a state of awe. It’s my dream to have an Indian experience and Sherrie showed me hers. What really hit me was that her work was with the Missionaries of Charity. She actually worked with the then-ancient Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Her detailed descriptions of the profound poverty she experienced was brutal. Her self-sacrifice in this way demands respect and attention. After her own reflections, she charged us to find our “own India.”

Once my imagination settled down and I was able to digest what we had just bore witness to, her story became much more relatable. She was a student intent on having a meaningful international experience, just like any of us. Her motivations to travel abroad were complex and compelling. Of course academic credit must have been a factor in addition to curiosity, call to service, and the desire for spiritual fulfillment. Clearly she had a transformational experience and wished that each of us could experience a similarly profound effect from our experiences.

One of my questions for her was in regard to the power of place. Her journal described in detail her increasing reliance on God, which in Judaism we call Adonai Yihreh. I asked if being back in a first–world environment of material excess diminished the intensity of her devotion. Her response addressed that there are different kind of difficulties in Canada, but that her “India” was transformational enough to cement the intensity of her spirituality. She went from a comfortable American city to one across the world where beggars abound and people die on the streets. Certainly the environment of Calcutta played a key role in shaping Sherrie’s spiritual development just as it did for Saint Teresa and the thousands of monastics and laity that worked with the Missionaries of Charity.

Such spiritual devotion appeals to me greatly and I imagine that this will be a hallmark of finding my “India” over the next three years. The Jewish perspective on personal spirituality remains open ended and rarely provides a unified answer. Most of the time you figure out what is important to you and pursue it unless you have a particularly zealous rabbi. For me, I do not do well with this ambiguity, so I often look to the lives of people who seem to have succeeded in this regard. Even though I do not profess Christianity, I have a love for the Saints. These men and women are unified only by their steadfast devotion to the Lord. Resultant of that commitment are usually some truly admirable actions. Sherrie’s talk reinvigorated my fascination with such narratives.

While I do not know exactly what my “India” has in store, I imagine that the combination of foreign place and spiritual context will have a life changing impact. Over the next three years in Global Citizen Scholars I fully intend to engage myself so that this can be a reality.