Letters From Home: Anna Mercedes

Dear Bennies,

In spring of 2017, when most of you were finishing your first year at Saint Ben’s, I was teaching an upper level theology course and stretching myself to do something new with my teaching. In fancy terms, I was trying to add a learning goal in an affective learning domain; in more basic terms, I wanted to know if we could learn a way to feel, not just learn more things in our heads. Meanwhile, I wanted to know if we could do so in a way that mattered for inclusion and justice. So while I always have a bunch of “head” learning goals on my syllabus, that spring I added something we can call a “heart” goal: “Communicate openness to difference.”

My students were great. They tried hard. I tried hard. And what did we learn? Communicating openness to difference is hard!

During this particular semester some odd circumstances had me teaching the course in the basement of Main, despite having an office all the way over in the Quad. This was before Main was renovated, so your fantastic President MDH was directly upstairs from my classroom in her old office. And when Mary would have open office hours, I would stop by and tell her about my flailing attempts to help us “communicate openness to difference” in the classroom. One of Mary’s responses was to go and get the Becoming Community grant! And with that grant we’re still learning how we might communicate openness to difference, in new ways all the time—because the differences you’ll encounter tomorrow are different from the ones you encountered yesterday.

We’re never done with difference. And sometimes those differences are inside yourself. You’ll encounter parts of you that are different from the you that you knew before. How can you communicate openness to that emerging part of yourself? Sometimes those differences are in a person you’ve known for years, even a best friend or a lover that you really thought you knew completely. But that person may be in the process of coming into themselves, or coming out about themselves, and asking you to come along for the journey—to be open to the difference. Sometimes those differences are ones we label in social categories: political, racial, sexual, economic. It seems to me that to practice openness to all the difference creating life around us is to stay fully alive. But it’s hard. It’s dangerous. Sometimes it hurts even if it intends healing.

You graduated on the verge of a turning world. The global pandemic and the uprisings for racial justice centered right here in Minnesota mark a turbulent and powerful opportunity for you to show our world just how well you know how to dance with difference and help our world turn toward better life. I’m ready for you to teach me: Bennies, show me how. Enroll me in your life’s syllabus. I’m open to the difference you are, the difference you will make.

Love,

Anna Mercedes, professor and pastor