The Compass Center

by Laura Micklich on Friday February 3, 2012

While one of my faults is that I can sometimes be impatient, this past Wednesday’s experience helped me grow.

Sitting in morning prayer, I had a difficult time concentrating. I leafed through my prayer book and couldn’t help but sigh at how long the psalms were. All I could think about was how much I wanted to accomplish in the office that morning, and prayer just felt like an impediment to my productivity. I felt that I owed it to the staff to get as much done as I could, as one of the members had been out sick the previous day.

Then, amidst this inner battle, I read a line that made me realize that my “work” isn’t just the tasks I preform in the office. It’s something greater than that. It’s something that St. Benedict taught…duh. It’s “Ora et Labora,” and what it means is that you do God’s work not only through your physical labor, but through your prayer and contemplation as well. All I needed was this simple reminder of what I believe about service in the first place: that what I do for others is ultimately connected to my spirituality. Each day the sisters pray, “Thy will be done,” which is exactly what they are doing by working in the community AND by praying for the members of that community, and all humanity. Prayer is work (and sometimes we feel that way!) and I feel it is one of my responsibilities.

 

by Kate Newman on February 1, 2012

My first impression of university president Jim Danko as he addressed the sophomore class shocked me: This guy was nervous. The president! Nervous! He fiddled with his microphone, searched the audience for his wife, very similarly to all of the things I do when I give a speech in class and feel more like vomiting and running from the room than actually speaking.

According to Pres. Danko, I should probably have that feeling more often. This speech is well-timed for much of the sophomore class, a time that is so often referred to as a “slump” that it is cliché (and where there’s smoke, there’s fire with those sort of things. Love is blind! Reach for the stars! Go with your gut!)

I’ve found that the best way to pull myself out of a slump is to do something that gives me that first-day-of-class-introduction-speech-in-a-foreign-language wave of nausea.  Whether it’s trying hot peppers on pizza (I never looked back after that one) or diving into a new relationship (or in some cases out of an old one), the things that seem terrifying usually turn out pretty wonderfully.  Or not. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

As a kid, I was as much in love with piles of mud and pill bugs as any other squirt on the playground, but my adventurous streak was more or less suffocated by my desire to be “the good one” for my recently divorced parents (and, I’ll admit, occasionally to see my little brother in trouble—sorry Mike!). I didn’t like mushrooms, didn’t ride roller coasters, didn’t publish my poetry under my own name in the school literary magazine.

I was a chicken, and my life got pretty boring. NO MORE! I now put mushrooms in, on, or around most things I eat. I rode TWO roller coasters this summer with moderate success (thank God for Dramamine). I’m still a little shy about sharing my poetry, but hey—my name’s on this blog, isn’t it?