#JesuitEducated Reflection: William Fulco, S.J.
Jesuit education aims not just to empower the mind with knowledge and reasoning skills, but also to bring the mind into sync with the affectivity of the heart. In this way the whole person becomes integrated, and finds a clearer path to embrace the best of what is human and to find fulfillment therein.
This “whole person” approach to formation is congruent with the teaching of the biblical Book of Wisdom, 11:24, “Lord, you love all things that exist, and would not have made anything if you hated it.” The assumption here is that everything about persons–their background, appearance, what they can do, what they can’t do–all are gifts from God, even if they may seem to be negatives at times. Jesuit education aims to take even what may seem to someone to be a liability and expose it as possibility. After all, it is not what is given that so much determines who we are and where we are to find our fulfillment as rather the way we interface with and react to those realities. The typical college student (I am most familiar with students at that level) often struggles with a sense of self-identify and is inclined to see oneself as fraught with things he or she wishes were otherwise. Wisdom 12 goes on to urge looking again — “you may have missed something the first time around” — think in a different way. This perceiving things in a different way, finding the possibilities in all that exists, is at the heart of Jesuit education.
As one comes to reflect on ones own giftedness, one also begins to appreciate without fear or threat the differences in others, and ceases to be afraid of other ideas, approaches and understandings. As self-protective barriers fall, one begins more and more to find the beauty and possibilities in others, and to recognize that the “best of what is human” will manifest itself differently in each person depending on the special gifts of that person. It is a cliché –but one based in reality — that Jesuit education make a person a man or woman for others.This is a natural consequence of being integrated and at peace with oneself. There is a growing enthusiasm for appreciating the beauty in others as a person has found in himself, and when one encounters a person sorely lacking in self-fulfillment, there comes to the fore a desire to reach creatively into the darkness of that person’s heart and to assist him in the type of transformation that one has oneself experienced.
While enriching the mind with knowledge and promoting skills, Jesuit education wishes to set the heart free as well, and in so doing to inculcate a capacity to love others without fear and to seek their good.
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A native of Los Angeles, William J. Fulco, S.J. entered Society of Jesus in 1954 and was ordained as a Roman Catholic Priest in 1966. He holds both a B.A. in Latin & Greek classics and a M.A. in Theology from Santa Clara University, earned his M.A. & PhL in Philosophy at Gonzaga University and completed Ph.D. studies in Northwest and Comparative Semitics, Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Archaeology, Hieroglyphic & Hieratic Egyptian at Yale University. He has taught in the Department of Classics & Archaeology at Loyola Marymount University’s Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts since 1985 (previously lecturing at UC Berkeley), and has twice been listed among Who’s Who in Biblical Studies and Archaeology by the Biblical Archaeology Society of Washington D.C. In 1997 was appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Ancient Mediterranean Studies.
Learn more about the #JesuitEducated campaign spanning the 28 member schools of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities at http://bit.ly/LMU_je
