Just thinking about this class brings me a sense of peace. Which is a far cry from how I was feeling during our first gathering at the Abbey. My relationship with religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, has been…complicated. My mother grew up Greek Orthodox, as was her first husband. They divorced when she was 30. She then met and married my Jewish birth father, converting as part of the deal. Eleven years later they divorced, and she returned to her Greek roots. In her late 40s she married my stepfather, my dad, who was also Jewish. During the first 20 years of my life, I attended church and synagogue (with a brief stint in Hebrew school). I leaned towards an Orthodox church in my teens (cute altar boys) until the priest cornered me to ask about my mom’s marital and religious status. In college I had a fling with an Assemblies of God church (again, there was a boy) but neither the boy nor the church worked out. My first husband’s family was Catholic, so I went through RCIA at 25 to please his family and was married in the church. A divorce (sans annulment) seven years later and a second marriage by an internet-ordained friend cemented my lapsed status. When I participated in the March for Women on my 41st birthday the sign I held exclaimed my beliefs in equality, love, and science, all of which, in my experience, put me at odds with core beliefs of the Catholic church. I share all of this to explain that it did cross my mind to look out for lightening strikes during my time in Valyermo.

     Throughout the immersion it really struck all of us that monks…they’re just like us! In a work organization they struggle with role clarity, communication, group dynamics, priority setting, burnout – everything “normal people” struggle with. The fact that they also live together only adds layers of complexity to the properties and forces at play in the community. Our group had a discussion towards the end of our immersion in which it came out that most of us had struggled explaining to our friends and family why we would choose to spend nearly a week at a monastery in the high desert of California where we would be expected to be silent and/or at religious services for a good portion of our time. Dr. Carey shared with us that this was really the norm for students who took the class, and that in some ways it wouldn’t be any easier to explain when we got home. My experience at the Abbey is, in many ways, inexplicable, because the self-awareness, growth, and increased content knowledge are all tangled together. I remember telling my husband in our first dinner out after the retreat that everything felt so loud. I was so much more content to listen and observe. It’s a feeling and a state of being I am actively working to hold on to.

     The post-immersion discussion board for this class resulted in one of my favorite exchanges throughout my time at Gonzaga. It started with an annotated question I posted about Block’s text that I entitled “Conversations: Beyond Words.” This is clearly where my brain started putting together what I hope will be the focus of my PhD research. I talked about a Netflix special in which the comedian talked about how the language we have created regarding female empowerment is more rooted in the infantilization of women than it is in their actual empowerment. She called the whole phenomenon glitter language and made the point that we would never be okay with people talking to us that way in real life in our professional world. I connected that to Block’s sharing of Werner Erhard’s assertion that all transformation is linguistic, and that if we want a change in culture, we must be prepared to have a conversation we have not had before. Block builds on this later by defining conversation as not only speaking and listening, but also the designs of our buildings and public spaces, the way we inhabit and arrange our rooms and private spaces, and the space we give to the arts.

     As a society, we must choose our language and our conversation deliberately and with intention. If a company has shelves of motivational signage and required sexual harassment training, but women make up only 10% of its management, what is the actual conversation that company is having with its employees.  When our lower-income neighborhoods are food deserts and their schools lack educational materials and functioning HVAC, what is the conversation our politicians and school boards are having with those communities? This moment in this class is when my fascination with the need for consistency between spoken and lived values solidified.