We are a society of Campus Ministers, lay and ordained, working with Episcopal campus ministries and ecumenical campus ministries that include Episcopalians.
Click on the title above to access the whole Academic Year Prayer Cycle. Since not all of our campuses start their semesters on the same dates, we recommend that you align the prayer cycle to your own academic year. Suggested prayer...
UW’s International Student Services asked St. Francis House to make a short quiz to help people learn about Pentecost, as part of a larger, educational diversity project on campus. Thanks to those on FB who lent inspiration to the quiz, which is made t…
Last Sunday was pretty much my first Real Day at work. My first two Sundays with St. John’s were spent in the whirl of Palm Sunday and Easter, so Easter 2 was my first Normal, Regular opportunity to see how everything functioned when we weren’t concerned with either Welcoming Our New Rector or Celebrating Our […]
I got to have Easter dinner with a seminary classmate that I haven’t seen since graduation (hooray! Hi, Ann!) Not only did Ann recommend an AMAZING documentary about people who raise and show chickens (Chicken People on Amazon Prime–go watch it. I’ll wait.) our host also borrowed for our viewing, an 18th century engraving of […]
People become priests for different reasons. Some people crave the power (that is a big let down, let me tell you), some people want to take care of other people. Me, I wanted to rebuke Jerry Falwell, and also to sing the Exsultet so I could travel through time. It’s always nice to achieve your […]
Maundy Thursday is my favorite service, and has been since I was a wee small child. The acute juxtaposition of the glory and assurance of the Eucharist, alongside the desolation of the stripping of the altar, and the betrayal in the dark. The modern, American, suburban church is bad at negative feelings. We don’t do […]
Confession time: In the run-up to my first Sunday at St. John’s, I was feeling pretty good. I had finished my sermon, I had begun to unpack my mountain of boxes, I had figured out where Wegman’s was–life looked great. When I arrived at church on Sunday morning, I could not get my sermon to […]
Whew. At some point, when talking to St. John’s, I said that I would begin my official ministry on Palm Sunday. In the middle of moving cross-country at the end of Lent, I realized that this may not have been the best idea that I ever had. But aside from the whirlwind nature of blowing […]
The following is a guest post by Tom Waselchuk, St. Francis House 1982-1990. I share it on the heels of yesterday’s post, detailing St. Francis House’s continuing involvement in the Sanctuary movement in 2018. Also, check out this post from a year ago that provides some additional historical context for St. Francis House’s role in beginning the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s. Tom’s article comes from that formative time. In this season of Lent, in which folks either prepare for baptism or are invited to reconnect with what it means to have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, I find Tom’s story and invitation to action to be beautiful expressions of what it looks like to belong to each other as sisters and brothers in the Body of Christ.
In the mid-1980s St. Francis House joined a nationwide, faith-based coalition called the Sanctuary Movement, the primary goal of which was to provide shelter and support to political refugees fleeing the widespread violence of civil wars in Central America. In the summer of 1984 one of those refugees, Carmen Maria Garcia, fled her home in El Salvador and, though seven months pregnant, waded across the Rio Grande, linked up with an “underground railroad” network that brought her to Madison and St. Francis House. Carmen’s son Dalton was born that October, and Carmen lived at SFH for about a year.
My wife Dana Johnson and I were deeply involved in the Sanctuary program, supporting and helping to resettle Carmen and other refugees while giving them a public forum to bear witness to the horrific conditions from which they fled. My intent here is not to go into great detail about the turmoil in Central America during those years. Rather I hope to shine a light on a history we, you and I, share by virtue of our connection to SFH and to ask you, dear reader, for material help for Carmen and Dalton.
In order to introduce you to these two amazing people, a little background into the conditions that caused Carmen to flee her home is warranted. The Salvadoran Civil War began after a 1979 military coup brought the Revolutionary Government Junta to power. Catholic activists protested against the junta’s oppression of impoverished citizens. Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated on March 24, 1980, while saying Mass. On December 2, 1980, four Catholic missionaries from the United States working in El Salvador were raped and murdered by five members of the El Salvador National Guard. In December 1981 the Salvadoran Army brutally murdered over 800 civilians in the village of El Mozote. The details of all of these and other crimes are public record; suffice it to say that activities of the Salvadoran government, army, and National Guard created chaos, terror, and a flood of political refugees.
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| Dalton and Carmen |
So, having escaped and begun a new life at SFH, Carmen and Dalton moved to the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago where Carmen became an active member of St. Pius V Catholic Church. She married and bought a house in Summit IL, and life unfolded. But then a series of misfortunes befell her. She was forced to quit her job in order to care full time for her husband who had suffered a brain hemorrhage following a fall. He died in 2007. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit and destroyed the equity in their home. Attempts to refinance were unsuccessful. After years of mounting debts, taxes, inflexible bankers, a freak flood (with crippling damage to the home), Carmen and Dalton lost their home in February 2017. Up against the wall, they decided their best option was to walk away from the crushing debt and start over.
Dana and I have kept in touch with Carmen from the very beginning. We are godparents to Dalton. We have, over the years, been able to help with small amounts of money to help with various expenses, school supplies, heating bills, rent payments and the like. The Garcias have never been what most of us would describe as “well off,” and we have always wished we could do more. In addition to offering them direct help, we’ve now organized a GoFundMe campaign to help put them on a more solid financial footing and get them back into a home of their own.
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| Dane Johnson, Tom Waselchuk, and Carmen Maria Garcia |
For Dana and me, the past is indeed present. If you’re reading this, you too have a connection with St. Francis House. Perhaps you were around to witness the struggles and excitement of the Sanctuary Movement. More likely you weren’t, and you see this as a bit of history unrelated to you. Either way, we ask for your help. In a world of such desperate want and need, I feel almost sheepish to ask for this help from you. We are strangers to each other. But to quote Rev. Tom Woodward, pastor at SFH during the Sanctuary years, “While we have no legal obligation to assist Carmen, she was so critical to the church’s witness through St. Francis House that we want to be of support for her at this time.”
I could not have foreseen this moment 35 years ago, but the past is indeed present and I want to bear witness to Carmen and Dalton, to assure them that memories remain and love of God’s people abides.
Here’s how to help. Donations can be made directly to Carmen and Dalton via this link.
There is also more information at the site about the specifics of their journey and their plans for finding a new home. You may also contact me if you have any questions about this effort.
Thank you.
Tom Waselchuk: twasel@gdinet.com
Today at Hillel, the professional organization of religious workers on campus (the aptly named University Religious Workers) enjoyed at our monthly gathering a rich conversation with Thomas Browne. Tom is Senior Assistant Dean for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS) as well as the Minority/Disadvantaged student coordinator for CALS.
Tom shared candidly, clearly, and generously about the on-campus realities that result in some students leaving their UW experience as “Badgers for life” while others leave beaten down, noting that students and faculty of color are disproportionately likely to find themselves in the latter camp. Though hopefully not news to the gathering in the “new” sense (because it’s not), Tom illuminated the conversation with historical references, a clear summary of current university structures and initiatives, and areas for growth – including ways communities of faith on campus can support and share in this work.
Tom highlighted the support of Chancellor Becky Blank with respect to the work of diversity and opening the resources of the UW to all people. In particular, he drew attention to the following statement for which the hope is “that it becomes a part of the fabric of the UW.”
The statement’s language about excellence and its pursuit, and their relationship to diversity, called to mind the following quote of St. Francis de Sales that has been rattling around in my heart for the last come of weeks:
the Church is a garden patterned with countless flowers, so there must be a variety of sizes, colors, scents — of perfections, after all. Each has its value, its charm, its joy; while the whole vast cluster of these variations makes for beauty in its most graceful form.
There is both the variety of perfections and that perfection that requires our God-given variety.
Later on in the day, some interfaith and ecumenical colleagues and I met at Pres House with Rabbi Bonnie Margulis to talk about the Sanctuary movement in Madison, in which St. Francis House played an important historical role. Again, as with the university’s desire to weave the commitment to diversity into the life of the university, we found ourselves imagining what it would look like for especially communities of faith on campus to make visible the communication of safe spaces, not just or even primarily in a residential sense, but spaces that visibly communicate a space made safe for conversation. Early in the day, Tom Browne had characterized such spaces my mutual trust and genuine respect: i.e., “I respect your background, and you respect I don’t get it, but I’m here.”
In the conversation with Rabbi Bonnie, we observed that the commitment to be people and places of sanctuary is very often in place, that is, is oftentimes already embedded within the faith traditions to which we adhere. What is needed then, says my friend and director of the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry Ulrich Rosenhagen, is intentional connection to the peculiar aspects of our traditions that bring us into these conversations. These aspects for solidarity are, of course, diverse. So, for example, Episcopalians might point to the baptismal promise that Christ is there, in each one, to be sought and served. But how is it that people of faith who possess such foundations find it difficult to give them voice? Is there, somehow, a beautiful opportunity in the invitation to solidarity and partnered diversity exactly the possibility of reconnecting with each tradition’s peculiar variety of perfection? In other words, what if Christian identity is not preserved in isolation, but rather quite the opposite?
In his marvelous little book, Being Christian, Rowan Williams writes that
…baptism means being with Jesus ‘in the depths’: the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need – but also in the depths of God’s love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be
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If all this is correct, baptism does not confer on us a status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don’t go down in to the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!
When we are brought to be where Jesus is in baptism we let our defences down so as to be where he is, in the depths of human chaos. And that means letting our defences down before God. Openness to the Spirit comes as we go with Jesus to take this risk of love and solidarity…”
None of this can be taken for granted or taken as obvious, least of all for Christians. In her thought-provoking book Disunity in Christ Christena Cleveland cites research that suggests that Christians can be more favorably inclined toward Christians who are different from themselves, by focusing on primary identities, like baptism. Alarmingly, being so inclined often results in harsher treatment toward non-Christians. This reality is so true as to likely be the Christian’s basic experience and also the non-Christian’s experience of Christians. In other words, the act of being present and connected to the unique perfections is necessary both because it will ground us and because the world is not accustomed to articulations like these in the name of Christ.
Lord, open our Lips. And our mouth shall proclaim your praise.