Dear Valpo Community,

Valparaiso University has a long-held tradition of celebrating All Saints Day, in which we remember those who have passed away in the last year.  Names are read on All Saints Sunday (November 5, 2023), including the names of those who have died from our university community, whose photos are displayed all year on the third floor of the Christopher Center Library.  Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Latin American tradition to honor and commemorate the lives of the loved ones who are no longer with us, and to welcome acknowledging their continuing presence in our lives. The main part of this cultural-spiritual tradition is the ofrenda, an ornamental space dedicated to honoring our relatives. This year, Valpo wants to bring this important tradition to four key locations on campus to celebrate Dia de los Muertos in the university community.

We want to invite you to join us in celebrating that death does not separate us from our loved ones. You can be part of this tradition by sending a picture of your deceased loved ones through this form before October 27th, to be placed in one of the four ofrendas. We will print and frame your pictures to be placed on the ofrenda of your choice.

Consider joining us Monday evening, October 30th, in the Helge Center Multipurpose Room at 6:30 PM, to eat pozole and prepare elements of the ofrendas.This cultural tradition brings communities together. We hope that all Valpo Families can gather together to spend time sharing stories from their ancestors. The Ofrenda will be displayed in the Gloria Christi Chapel (lower level), the Christopher Center (2nd floor), the Harre Union (Grand Lounge), and Loke Hall (Brave Space)  from November 1st to November 8th.  The Chapel will be open until 10:00 pm During this time, please use the Gloria Christi Chapel entrance (east side of the Chapel) during concerts and events.

Blessings,

Calling and Spiritual Life/Institute for Leadership and Service, Office of Multicultural Programs, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources, Student Life

By Kat Peters, Assistant Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service

Calling and Spiritual Life Newsletter, October 11, 2023

My friend Julio is a rapper in Costa Rica – he comes from a Nicaraguan immigrant family that lives in a precario (what we call in the English translation a “shantytown”).  He raps about social issues that he sees in his community, an active place filled with the noise of life – music, conversations, construction, cooking, playing, vehicles, and more.  In order to hear himself think and without having regular access to a recording studio, he regularly records in his car, where he can have some quiet.  In both literal and artistic ways he’s trying to cut through the noise to help us listen to his message.

As a staff here at the Institute for Leadership and Service we have been talking a lot about listening this semester.  ILAS thinks about leadership and service on campus as flowing from a sense of purpose and calling.  As part of the Division of Calling and Spiritual Life, we recognize that our purpose and calling are genuine expressions of being in alignment with the work that is already going on in the world, work being done by God.  

In his 1980 speech at Spelman College, Howard Thurman called this alignment with ongoing, true work the “sound of the genuine”. Thurman pointed out that we are all listening for the sound of the genuine in ourselves, and in other people. 

What does it take to hear the sound of the genuine in ourselves in others, and to hear it well enough to come into alignment with it as we explore our purpose in life?  It takes real listening, which requires attentiveness, quiet, and a willingness to engage with difference, something Sharon Daloz Parks calls “the power of constructive encounters with otherness.”

Valparaiso University Black Student Organization (BSO) President, Tékeidra Masters, expressed this idea in a recent interview with the Torch for We Matter Week: “We have to realize that in order to be a servant leader, you have to be willing to serve those in need… and 9 times out of 10… they’re going to have some kind of difference, because we’re human and we’re diverse… [We Matter Week] isn’t just a BSO thing.  This is a community effort to uplift voices that are unheard, a community effort to listen, a community effort to learn, a community effort to celebrate, a community effort to pass on this information…”

As we listen, we are open to the reality that the stories people tell will be different from our own narratives, and each of our “narratives are shaped by the context in which we are embedded,” as Susan L. Maros points out in her book Calling in Context: Social Location and Vocational Formation, which we as an ILAS staff are working through this year.  These contextual differences make careful listening, accompanied by thoughtful reflection, so important.

Maros argues that “storytelling is an essential part of how we articulate our understanding of the unique nature of our individual and communal responses to God’s calling” (p. 10). We discern the work that God is already doing and contemplate how we are being called to participate in that work, listening to spiritual stories, to our own inner voices, and to each other’s stories.

At ILAS we will soon be unveiling a new podcast called Listening For Purpose.  Our student staff will be interviewing campus community members – students, faculty and staff – to listen to those stories and to come to a deeper understanding of our community, with all of the contexts and callings that make it up.  

We invite you to listen.

Kat Peters is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service at Valparaiso University. 

September 25, 2023 

Kat Peters (on “How I Sabbath, or Try To”)

Text: Genesis 2:4-7

How is your breathing today?  When was the last time you took a deep breath?  

Several people have already spoken about the story of Creation as a place for us to ground our thinking about the Sabbath.  Today we return to Genesis to look for more clues on how our identity as creatures of God connects us to God’s life-giving self.  God breathed into the first human’s nostrils the breath of life.

Breathing is something that we don’t often think about, at least not on a day-to-day basis.  If you do yoga, you might remember that you are often asked to return to your breath as you deepen a stretch or a pose.  People who are giving birth are coached to breathe as a way to focus through intense pain.  

But on a day to day basis, many of us may fall victim to a now-studied phenomenon called “email apnea,” or “screen apnea.”  When Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive studied this, she found that 80 percent of people hold their breath or breathe shallowly while checking email.

During the pandemic, when I was confronted (not for the first time in my life) with the realities of anxiety, I came to understand that a lot of my anxiety can be mediated through physical practices.  Getting enough sleep, exercising sufficiently, eating healthy food and drinking water, and yes, breathing, would help solve a large part of my anxiety.  

As I focused on my breath, I experienced the strange sensation of questioning whether I deserved to take a deep breath.  It was as if I was rushing from obligation to obligation, thought to thought, and that taking a deep breath was somehow wasting time, or being selfish.

Author James Nestor writes in his book “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art” that deep breathing, especially through the nose, has many positive health effects.  He writes about “how the nose filters heat and treats raw air…how it can trigger different hormones to flood into our bodies, how it can lower our blood pressure, how the stages of a woman’s menstrual cycle are correlated to different areas of the nose, how [the nose] monitors heart rate – on and on and on – even helps store memories.”  The nose does that.

Nestor also found that deep breaths have calming effects, while fast breathing amps up energy, as a sort of fight or flight response.  This is why we have email apnea – like how a cat that is waiting to pounce on prey takes shallow breaths, so we contemplate our next moves on email with bated breath.  And then we end up exhausted, even if we were just sitting at our computers all day.

Our reading from Genesis reminds us that the breath into our nostrils that gave us life comes from God.  Perhaps this can remind us how sacred our breath is.

When I have been able to give myself permission to take deep breaths, I find that I can slow my thoughts and get a better handle on whatever anxiety I might be experiencing.  And cultivating a daily practice of deep breathing (a daily Sabbath practice, if you will) has helped to prevent anxiety from rearing its ugly head too often.

It turns out that this focus on the breath lends itself to prayer and worship.  James Nestor found that many religious prayers and songs follow the framework of slow breaths – specifically a five-and-a-half second (or longer) exhale.  For the past several weeks I have been noticing in Morning Prayer that many of our hymns and liturgical songs have this exact amount of breathing built in.  This morning, I have asked our musicians to do a purposeful breath after each 4 bars of the hymn.  I invite you to sing intentionally this way in the last 2 verses of the hymn.  

I would like to close with a practice taught to me by the President of my Lutheran Deaconess community, Deaconess Deborah Graf.  She encourages the board and the community to practice what is called a Trinitarian Breath Prayer.  After I name each person of the Trinity, I invite you to take a long inhale, and a long exhale.  It doesn’t much matter what you think about when you do so – the breath, the living breath that comes from God, will do its own work.

Creator God, we thank you for giving us the breath of life.  We come to you as creatures in the name of the Father….. And of the Son…. and of the Holy Spirit…. Amen.