Loving Fiercely: A Reflection on Parenting in the time of Covid
By Kathy Coffey-Guenther, PhD, senior mission and Ignatian leadership specialist
It is hard to believe that it has been just a few short weeks since we said our goodbyes, finished last minute packing and moving details, and left our college students on campus to begin the most unusual year in memory!
As our students sort out what it all means, from social distancing and cafeteria etiquette to understanding hybrid classes to in-person class spaces to synchronous and asynchronous timings of lectures, our minds and hearts may certainly feel unsettled about it all.
No matter how we as parents may have prepared ourselves and our students for this transition to college, it seems that there was no way to prepare emotionally, mentally, physically or spiritually for these past months of pandemic living on or off campus.
And so, I bring myself, once again, back to conversations with Mary, the mother of Jesus. I remember once again how Mary responded to the angel Gabriel’s unexpected message from God with her “yes” to being the mother of the savior of the world, without any sense of what that “yes” meant. I remember back to Mary seeing her son first teaching in the temple when he was still a boy, lost from his parents at the time, and how she had that first inkling of how her love for him, and her commitment to loving him as he fulfilled his life path, would pierce her heart.
I remember how Mary truly saw and believed her son, asking him to perform one of his first public miracles at the wedding at Cana, pushing him a bit, as only a loving mother can. And I remember how, finally, Mary accompanied her son along the Via Dolorosa to the cross and beyond, allowing her fierce love for him to give her the courage to remain present.
Mary reminds me that her fierce love and growing understanding of Jesus, her “human” son, invited her from her earliest days of parenting to know that the fiercest love for her child meant trusting and letting go along the way. Mary knew that her son, Jesus, was meant to serve the world, not just her family, and in serving the world, her son would encounter situations and people and places that would inform and influence and teach him, for good and love and for sorrow and challenge. Mary knew that she would accompany him in spirit and person along his path, and that his journey would bring gifts and love to her heart, as well as sorrow and heartbreak, for whatever he encountered as he engaged in his complicated world at the time.
We too, are invited to love our students fiercely these days, with a passion that allows us to accompany them on their paths to serve the world for good and for challenge, and we, too, will experience the gifts and love of our students’ encounters as well as their challenges and sorrows. We, too, like Mary, will feel our hearts pierced as our children find their complicated paths in loving the world with full hearts and spirits in a time of pandemic, when the rules of engagement seem to constantly shift.
Most likely, when we left our children on campus, we hoped that they would develop and grow and change through their academic and social opportunities to know themselves and the world in new and important ways, even with and despite the pandemic. But I wonder if we truly understood the fierce love that would be asked of our students as well.
Each of our students, upon returning to campus, was offered a social contract to consider that outlined the necessary elements of living and learning at the university these days to ensure the best opportunity for optimal health and well-being for all. This social contract calls for a heightened awareness for how each member of our community lives, for the choices each makes, and for the care that one demonstrates in daily living for the Common Good of all. Each of our students are challenged and invited each day to be mindful of their own footprint on the health and well-being of their neighbor as well as themselves, the heart of the social teachings of the Catholic Church.
As Mary taught Jesus how to love fiercely, Jesus returned the lesson again and again through his life.
In these days of pandemic living, we parents have taught our students how to love fiercely through our acts of faith and trust deemed necessary in letting go and allowing our students to continue to follow their academic and personal paths of growth and development these days. And similarly, our students are returning the lessons of loving fiercely back to us again and again as they navigate a college experience bound in love and care and action for and on behalf of self and other.
While the pandemic is definitely limiting some of the “norms” of the college experience, this measure of fierce loving by our students for one another is witnessed every day on campus through the deeds and committed actions they take to care for one another and protect their shared vision of their fall semester on campus.
Pandemic living seems to invite a powerful response, and the fierce love experienced by Jesus and his mother is demonstrated each day on this campus this fall.
As a parent myself, I could not be prouder of my student and of all of these students in the way they are living to serve the greater good. They truly are demonstrating how to live as women and men for and with others.
AMDG
