I.M.A.P. Post-Immersion Experience

Key to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola is reflection. To reflect is to discern the true meaning behind this experience and identify its significance to your reality/identity. Your experience is uniquely your own and others may not fully know what you have gone through and what you are now experiencing. You are the one who must navigate yourself back into the reality of Marquette University, but you don’t have to do it alone. By bringing meaning to all the feelings and discomfort one often experiences when returning to campus, reflection inevitably leads to a greater sense of being. Look to mentors on campus who can help you ask those reflective questions: Campus Ministry, the Jesuit community, professors in class, your hall minister and other respected staff may be helpful for you.

Now that you know, what are you going to do about this “knowing”? Get busy helping similar groups of people that you just spent your time serving! There are many ways in which you can be involved in service on this Campus. In Campus Ministry, Midnight Run offers a weekly volunteer opportunity where you develop a relationship with those you serve and the group you serve with. M.A.P. is a weeklong domestic service opportunity during spring break. I.M.A.P. is a two-week international immersion opportunity. The Center for Community Service offers many volunteer opportunities as well. Getting busy focusing on being a source for change here in Milwaukee is just as valuable as your connections abroad. Love and care for another is the best way to help yourself find meaning in any location. You just came back from proving that abroad, now prove it with local service!

Please be patient with yourself through this process. Whether your faith allows for God to be a part of your experience or whether your faith tells you it is something else, the meaning to the following words from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. still hold true.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability – and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense, and incomplete.

For more information on Campus Ministry or to meet with a staff member, visit the Alumni Memorial Union, room 236, weekdays from 8:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. or, contact the office by phone, (414) 288-6873.