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A Message from the Vice President of University Advancement 

The beginning of the holiday season has me thinking about family, humility, and freedom. Why am I putting this in a missive to Loyola alumni and friends? Well, for starters, our university isn’t Ignatius University. Technically, we’re not named after an individual; we’re named after a family. The university’s seal is that of the Loyola family, using their symbol of bounty and generosity—the wolves and kettle—as a means of pointing toward St. Ignatius’s focus on gratitude for God’s grace.

Holiday season meals with extended family have yielded lots of jokes and memes in popular culture about awkward political discussions and eccentric relatives. Those are fun, but they also point to a truth: during the holiday season, many of us spend time with extended family we haven’t seen in a while. Sometimes that’s a wonderful experience, but sometimes it's uncomfortable or even painful. In the Ignatian tradition, we learn about leaning into that kind of discomfort to learn from it. Where is this coming from? Why am I feeling this? What grace is available here to me?

Most years at Loyola, the holiday season also means it’s time for the 1912 Society Dinner. This year’s was amazing and distinctive because it also served as the Inauguration dinner for Loyola’s 18th president, Dr. Xavier Cole. Those of us who work with him were happy to see members of Xavier’s extended family joining us for the events, and his inaugural remarks included references to his upbringing with his family in Biloxi, Mississippi. I appreciated Xavier’s humility in talking about his family. They knew who he was back then, and they know him now.

Bringing extended family around, in other words, means spending time with people who know parts of us and our stories not everyone knows. (And, of course, we know things about them not everyone knows.). For me, that can yield a kind of humility, which is a good thing. “Humility,” after all, comes from the Latin humus, the word for earth or soil—so humility is about being grounded and knowing one’s real place in the world.

The kind of freedom Ignatian spirituality and education seek starts with humility. So this December, if you reach an uncomfortable moment at a family gathering, it just might be a chance to learn, to be reminded of who you were, are, and seek to be. If not, a sense of humor is vital.

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Chris Wiseman '88