Journey to India - Kolkata

Arrived this morning in Calcutta, after a long journey that took me from San Francisco (SFO) to Washington (IAD)… to Dubai (DBX) on United Airlines… to Calcutta (CCU) on Air Emirates. Okay, officially it is Kolkata, but so far everyone who is from here is saying "Calcutta" to me. Interesting.

On my arrival at the international airport in Kolkata, Thomas Kayyalackel met me. Thomas did this past year in Berkeley for the ISS at Don Bosco Hall. His mother's failing health necessitated his early departure during Holy Week. It was a loss for us at Don Bosco Hall, but did a world of good to his mother, whose health immediately recovered.

Thomas has a driver, and he picked me up in a landrover right from the arrivals lane at Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (CCU). It was about 10.00 when we arrived at the Salesian Provincial Headquarters in town, and after a quick shower and change of clothes, I was able to meet members of the provincial staff there in this very busy center. I joined the community for lunch and in the afternoon Thomas took me into the city, directly to the house founded by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa's founding center is in a very busy area of the city. One still sees street people and children begging… although the heavy traffic makes the area so noisy that it is very difficult to hear what people are saying to you. When we stepped out of the landrover, it was immediately obvious that here was a European and several children approached me asking for alms. I had no rupies with me. In fact, I had not even brought my wallet. Thomas took care of giving them something as he led me into a side alley and into the entrance of Mother Teresa's house.

We visited the care center, the children's hostel, and of course the rooms that were inhabited by the saint. A few of the sisters recognized Thomas, and invited us to stay for the Eucharist at 5.00 in the afternoon. We did stay and were able to concelebrate at the mass celebrated with over 100 people at Mother Teresa's tomb.

Of course I had brought my camera with me but was unable to take any photos of Mother Teresa's house. To my horror, I discovered that I packed the wrong batteries for my camera. I had brought akaline batteries. They did not work with the camera. Whoa!

Thankfully, Thomas had a contact who has contacts, and we went into a place into a popular shopping area filled with booths and stalls. What I needed were lithium batteries, and after conveying the concept in Bengali, we bought rechargeable lithium batteries and a recharger. Now we're in business.

Buying lithium batteries and a recharger on a Calcutta sidestreet… Frs Thomas and Augustine.

Aside from almost getting hit by a speeding bus, the trip around the streets of Kolkata was enlightening in itself.

Pizza for planning

Aldo Giraudo, Marco Bay and I went out to the Pizzeria Falco Matto for pizza last night. It is more than a month that we keep telling each other that “we need to get together and catch up on the news among us.”

Both Aldo and Marco have spent some time at Don Bosco Hall in Berkeley and are acquainted with the workings of the ISS, the DSPT and the GTU. Their interest goes beyond tourism, however. Aldo has been the one to push for the publication of Arthur Lenti’s monumental study of Don Bosco, and Marco has been the one to make set in motion our own ideas about distance learning. They have spoken; they have acted. All this interest needs to be reaffirmed with the serious planning for the future that can only take place while tasting bruschetta and sharing pizza. So, for the advancement of both the arts and the sciences, we braved the rain storm and the intense darkness, and made our visit to Falco Matto.

First on the agenda was a briefing on latest developments in our respective … um, respective? can I say departments? No, that is not right. Habitats? ummm… well, you work on the bruschetta for now and I will come up with the correct word. What I mean is, I let them know of the latest developments at the ISS and DSPT, and the concrete determination of both Gael Sullivan and Michael Sweeney to affiliate with the UPS through the School of Theology (facoltà di teologia).

Marco Bay surveys the Menu

Marco Bay spent the summer of 2000 at Don Bosco Hall, and has kept close ties with that community ever since. Last night he shared about his work in the School of Education in the area of adult learning packages, videocasts, and the steps he is taking to create distance-learning units for various courses and programs; clearly, Salesian spirituality is to be part of this, in Marco’s mind.

Aldo Giraudo on the terrace balcony of Don Bosco Hall: San Franciso Bay in the background

Aldo Giraudo visited Don Bosco Hall in 2003 and then again in 2006. He made his last visit to Berkeley in January of this year. Since then he has done a lot to talk up the ISS, even addressing the delegates of the General Chapter last March. As we nibbled on our mushroom salad last night, he told us of the developments at the Centro Studi Don Bosco, the courses for those doing spiritual theology with a specialization in Salesian Studies, and the final hurdles to clear for publishing the last three volumes of Arthur Lenti’s work on Don Bosco.

These three topics were nearly exhausted when the pizzas arrived.

Our conversation calmed for a few moments, as we cut into the hot pizza and took abundant care not to burn our mouths on the hot cheese. However, with heroic determination, we continued through our grueling agenda.

Aldo commented on how significant he found the symposium in 2007 on the motto of Don Bosco, Da mihi animas, coetera tolle. He had, in fact, been one of the participants in that week-long event organized at Don Bosco Hall by Ian Murdoch of Australia and Thomas Prendiville of San Francisco. Twenty Salesian scholars from Europe, Asia, Australia and America participated in the study symposium, and the acts were published. A follow-up should be taking place at Berkeley next summer, but Aldo also feels that we should plan an international, day-long seminar at the UPS. The theme of that could well be the Introduction to the Devout Life. The year 2009 will be the 400th anniversary of the publishing of that important work by Francis de Sales. This cannot be neglected, said Aldo.

As we waited for dessert, we brainstormed the names of Salesian scholars in Europe. Marco wrote down names and topics on a piece of the newsprint table cloth, and before we could spoon into the lemon custard, he was promising to enter all these names into his computer and email us with an outline of a proposal.

Espresso and a little glass of grappa ended the planning session. Ah, such rigor. With the second glass of grappa, we simply exchanged pleasantries, and ended the evening gathering… not without a lot of laughter.

Rain and pre-registration

Well, good old St Martin did not hold off the rain. It came again last night and continued through the night in Rome. In fact, this morning we were greeted with more thunder and lightening as we sipped our latte in the staff dinning room at the UPS. This morning as I walked to my office I kept to the porticoes as the rain continued. Now there seems to be a little bit of a break, but more rain is forecast for the final days of this week.

Yesterday evening I did a lot of e-mailing with my students from DSPT regarding the pre-registration now underway for Spring Semester 2009. One of the responsibilities of every instructor at DSPT is to help a group of students in a personalized way as academic advisor. I have 22 advisees this semester at DSPT… and the trick is to keep up the advising process even when I am away from Berkeley to teach in Rome for 12 weeks.

I am so happy that God created e-mail.

The real time for registration is during the last week of January 2009. This pre-registration process is just a convenience offered to the students, especially those who are looking to get into courses with limited enrollments (and for some reason, there are many professors at the GTU who love to limit the enrollment to their courses). It becomes troublesome to many students who cannot meet their requirements because they cannot get a timely response from professors to enroll in courses that are required.

But for others, particularly those in the Master of Divinity program (MDV), there is less need to worry about this. Their courses are offered on cycles with an agreement among the various school to schedule classes in the same core areas so as not to conflict. I am speaking of the three Catholic schools here because, understandably, the Catholic MDV programs have many more requirements that those of the schools of Protestant denominations at GTU. Why should that be? Because the Catholic schools must follow the indications of the Holy See and the Bishops Conference in the area of priestly formation.

The greater concern for the moment is for the members of the Institute of Salesian Studies (ISS). Most come from other countries and find the system a bit difficult to understand. Last August I was able to walk most of the ISS students through all of this, and they all seemed to fit in more easily to the DSPT and GTU as we started the term. Now I have been in contact with each of them to make sure that they are working through the registration process with ease. Internet and e-mail has been the great help in this.

All of which leads me to reflect that, with the internet, one can really live in two worlds at the same time… or even more worlds. What does that do to the psyche? Ah… good question.

(Photos. Above: autumn rain at UPS; below: portico at DSPT)

Bookshelves and vote of confidence

The afternoon of Trinity Sunday!

Bro. Michael Touchstone spent the day here at Don Bosco Hall because he goes through the accounts… He is enjoying the low-key but cordial sense in the community.

What kind of good news can I tell you? Alphonse Vu, youth ministry delegate for the California province, returned on Friday from Brazil. He arrived here yesterday for a series of meetings that take place early in the next week. He is very excited by the experience of a world meeting, and begins to see how there are new and different ways of doing Salesian work. May his enthusiasm become contagious.

Gael Sullivan received a donation for upgrading elements of the house. The top floor in the Leconte building has been recarpeted, and new tables and chairs have been purchased. Yesterday, a whole crew of people worked in Arthur Lenti's bedroom, installing new and more robust bookshelves. What Arthur has had to date were inexpensive shelves, but they were bowing under the weight of his many large tomes. Not only was there limited space for his collection, but there have been safety issues as well.

The new shelves arrived on Friday morning morning. No sooner had Gael Sullivan signed for them with the shippers than John Roche and Lito de la Cruz and his cousin mounted the stairs to Arthur's room to begin the transformation. The three ripped out the old shelves, cleared the built-in cabinets in the kitchen, cleared, mounted, installed, safety-bolted, and re-stocked the new shelves in Arthur's room. They worked late into the night on Friday and all of Saturday as well…

And now?

The room is now furnished well. He has room to work and he can access all his books. It is quite lovely really, and a vote of appreciation for the man who continues to do so much for Salesian scholarship.

St Ambrose Day

In Milan (we were saying at breakfast) this is the day when the Winter Season begins. For some that means skiing, but what it really means is that the Opera Lirica opens its season at the Teatro alla Scala, and the social and political life of Milano and Lombardia move into their most engaging time.

How interesting that in sophisticated, post-modern, post-industrial Milano, everything wonderful about the city's life and culture is still gauged to have its yearly beginning on the feast of St Ambrose!

It just occured to me that our Salesian parish in Berkeley, which is under the patronage of St Ambrose, can increase the celebrating by engineering a piazza in front of the church, building a habitat for morning doves, and endorsing the arts (oh, but this last element is something that they already do).

As for beginnings at the UPS: this morning the latest issue of the "Salesian Spirituality Notebooks" (Quaderni di Spiritualità Salesiana) hit the shelves of the bookstore. This is a kind of popular journal developed by the Institute of Spiritual Theology here at the UPS. The theme of this issue is "Da Mihi Animas": Pastori dei giovani (Give me souls: Shepherds of young people).

This edition of the Quaderni is a contribution in the reflections for the next General Chapter, and was edited by Aldo Giraudo. We actually discussed the theme for this issue back in May 2006, and Aldo has put a lot of work into this.

Along with others of our Institute, I too offer an article in this issue on the spiritual heritage of St Francis de Sales. It is an article that I worked on while at the UPS last Spring, and then made it into my presentation for last summer's symposium on the Da Mihi Animas motto of Don Bosco that we held at the ISS in Berkeley. That presentation was well received, and afterwards I reworked my intervention for publication in the Fall 2007 issue for the Journal of Salesian Studies. So far the Fall issue has not been printed.

My plan is to take the article that I have developed in the Quaderni and include it in the Italian version of my class notes (which I am developing for publication as a book). I will do the same with my Journal article for the English version. That is a project that has been on my agenda for two years already, but I cannot quite pull it all together. Maybe I need to have Aldo act as an editor for me too, as he has done for the Quaderni and for Arthur Lenti (hmmm… this is a thought!).

Still, it is all very exciting… and of course, we don't do it for the feast of St Ambrose, but for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, which begins this evening!

Welcome News for Don Bosco Hall

The good news from Berkeley is that Jorge Santiago from Puerto Rico, who came for one semester, will now stay for two years!! At the same time, a letter came to Tom Prendiville from the Stanley Foundation with a 25,000. check for scholarships for Salesians from mission territories. It is a repeat of last year when with the help of Katie Calvert from the development office of the Western Dominican Province, helped us (ISS and DSPT) to apply for a grant. That work began way back in the Summer of 2005, and Katie succeeded in getting a grant for our students in 2006, and now again in 2007.

It seems that Katie is no longer working for the Western Dominicans. However, Tom Prendiville tells me that he will invite Gael Sullivan, as new director of the ISS, to speak with Michael Sweeney (DSPT president) and contact Katie to let her know that all her efforts have yielded good results.

And the timing is perfect: Jorge was refused a place in Chile but is accepted to DSPT: the grant can offset his tuition and living expenses so that his province is not going to lose and we get to keep him on board. Ah, if only DBH could hire Katie to do some grant writing proposals for our international students! This would take the edge out of things, economically … and that is a big part of our problem in bringing in Salesians for our programs.

Well, it is not the time to worry about this. It is time to rejoice with Jorge, with the DBH community, and to thank Katie and the Dominicans for all their efforts to help us to flourish. All this fits with my comments from yesterday. How important it is that we get the word out (PR, advertise, whatever…) about the ISS and our Salesian programs.

Continuing the series

The satisfaction on the face of Aldo Giraudo (pictured above) speaks volumes, don't you think? Oh … well, I think so.

Today Aldo presented me with a copy of volume 2 of Arthur Lenti's series, Don Bosco, Life and Spirit. He is sending 24 copies of the book to Arthur in Berkeley. The project continues, then, at a good pace.

The volume was delivered to the LAS last Wednesday, 14 November, thanks largely to the efforts of Aldo and of the Centro Studi Don Bosco here at the University. However, it was only yesterday that the LAS put Arthur’s second volume out for sale. Both Aldo and I have already communicated with Arthur via e-mail. I have not heard back from him, but Aldo tells me that he received an enthusiastic reply.

Arthur Lenti offers an extraordinary resource in this series… and I am hearing from a number of quarters how much his work is appreciated. Aldo tells me that there is already a move to translate the series into Spanish. Aldo Giraudo, by the way, remains the most enthusiastic supporter of Arthur Lenti's efforts and of the work of the ISS. Others in Rome seem to think that our Berkeley initiative has run its course. We need more "good PR" and less aggravation, I feel… but that is another story. For now, we bask in the sunshine-joy of Arthur's series.

For my part (hey! that's me in the photo!), I am most pleased to see Arthur's work come to print. He has been the mainstay of the ISS in Berkeley since the onset, and now he is making an important contribution to the entire Salesian World. Yesterday in my class on Salesian Spirituality (TA2232) I presented a number of books to the students, and showed them Arthur's first volume. Now I will show them the two volumes together, and encourage them to delve into them.

Meetings, meetings and more meetings

Summer has not finished (and I have been so busy that it seems like it has not started) but we are already having meetings for the new academic year. Our team met this morning at 9.00 and stayed hard at it until past noon.

Perhaps I have not blogged it, but there is a great novelty at Don Bosco Hall (DBH) and the Institute of Salesian Spirituality (ISS) at Berkeley: a new director and new team for Hall and Institute!

Gael Sullivan is director; Marc Rougeau takes finances and plant manager; John Roche is on the teaching team. The great thing is that all three of them are enthusiastic about joining the community at Berkeley. This is certainly encouraging to Mary Greenan, John Rasor, Arthur Lenti and me, who remain from the old and ancient DBH team.

This is not to say that we do not face some real issues of viability for the ISS, for theology in Berkeley for Salesians, and for the work of ongoing formation for the province. The challenges are tremendous.There will be very few doing the ISS this year, and Thien Nguyen will be our only theology student after Tho Bui leaves following his ordination on 29 December.

New approaches need to be developed for DBH. Gael, Marc and John have good ideas and much enthusiasm, so it is a hope-filled time for those at 1831 Arch Street.

John Roche defends his thesis

This afternoon John Roche successfully defended his thesis. The theme he chose was Spiritual Accompaniment. The Salesian Pontifical University has awarded John with the Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL) and is now qualified to teach theology. He will join the teaching team at the Institute of Salesian Studies at Don Bosco Hall in Berkeley.

Accompaniment? Is that about music? What is spiritual accompaniment?

Ah… you will have to read John’s thesis to find out! (j/k). It is a way of considering spiritual direction in the style and spirit of St Francis de Sales and the praxis of St John Bosco. Instead of sitting impartial in the role of spiritual guru, the Salesian guides those seeking spiritual direction by walking with them, journeying alongside them… and in the process, experiences everything of the same journey.

John entitled his thesis: The Salesian Youth Spirituality of Accompaniment: Fr. Juan Vecchi’s Vision of Youth Spirituality for a New Moment. However, in the course of the writing, John opened up three areas of investigation. I thought that he could have reduced all this to one, because he has the topics of three different theses really. Throughout the writing and correcting, he attempted to narrow it down, narrow it down… but in the end he wanted to be comprehensive in all this.

Well the defense went well, as I said. John had a huge group following the exchange, so much so that we had to move the examination to a bigger room. John was very articulate as well, and did extremely well on the oral examination. My own thought is that he will have a lot of material from this thesis that he can develop into courses for the ISS when he gets there for the Autumn Term.

Great work, John! Congratulations.

The coast is clear

Every month we try to bring the community on an outing, if not for the entire day, then at least for the afternoon. Since we still less than a month into the academic year, today was a good day to just get away, visit some wonder of the Bay Area, enjoy a piece of Nature and picnic together. After morning classes, we left in several vehicles for Point Reyes.

The weather was cool but perfectly clear, and the crowd enjoyed the drive as across the Marin peninsula into Point Reyes National Park. It took an hour for us to go from Berkeley to the park, but once in the park, it took another hour to drive the narrow highland roads to the famous Point Reyes and its lighthouse. This gave us plenty of time for stories and sharing on the way to and from the landmarks. Once there, the scenery was magnificent. Rarely have I seen it so pristine and lovely (and I tend to visit the point at least once a year).

As I just said, we like to do outings in this community of Don Bosco Hall. This has been the practice since the ISS began in 1984. We are not always conscious that we live in such a beautiful part of the world, but those who come from other countries are certainly interested in site-seeing and doing a bit of tourism for culture and play and so forth. This is why we program a number of community outings over the course of the year. Each month, a day-trip; each semester two extended, three-day trips. We consider these activities important in the development of the Don Bosco Hall community.

At the same time, most of the real community-building comes from the day-to-day activities and developing relationship. This is why Tom Prendiville always encourages spontaneous outings for small or large groups.

Well, that's the theory. Today the practice went very well. Everyone loved the lighthouse. Those who took the famous Point Reyes earthquake trail were fascinated by the science and history of our area (and checked to make sure their rooms were earthquake proofed once we got home). The evening came to a climax with Arthur Lenti (assisted by Mary Greenan) barbecuing a supper for us all. Some of the Salesians from the provincial house in San Francisco came to the barbecue, invited by Tom Prendiville and Arthur. What's more, a couple of young adults who wandered into the grove where we were spread out, struck up a conversation with our ISS people, and ended by joining us for dinner too. This was not a problem. We always bring more food than we can possibly consume.

And so the drive home was serene and happy.