Newly Ordained Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco Padre Alum ...

CAMPUS MINISTRY
12
Summer 2008 ~ Life Changing Experience for Serra Students
Junipero Serra Immersion Program ~ Inaugural trip to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward
by Patrick Cody
Summer Immersion Coordinator
The new Junípero Serra
Immersion Program exists
to further the work of the gospel
in our students’ lives and in the
world. Summer 2008 marked
our inaugural trip. We traveled
to post-Katrina New Orleans to
spend two weeks living out our
encounter in faith and service
according to the Four Tenets,
or guiding values ~ Spirituality,
Justice, Solidarity, Community.
An average day brought each
one of our participants face-toface
with very real experiences
of the tenets. Consider the
following:
The setting: We lived and
worked in the Lower Ninth
Ward. This is truly a neighborhood on the brink. All around
there are signs of destruction and poverty: abandoned homes,
condemned buildings, a bare foundation where a house once
stood, overgrown vegetation as the swamp reclaims its former
domain. We were accommodated in St. Maurice’s parish
rectory, no longer a functioning parish; it is one of more than
forty to be closed in the wake of the Katrina disaster. From
our porch we could see and hear the barges up and down
Industrial Canal no more than two hundred yards away, and
eerily above us.
This cross-street in New Orleans speaks volumes in its simplicity.
Our work: We joined with
local parishes and labored
in heat and humidity to do what
needed to be done. We cleared
overgrown vegetation for those
unable to return to their homes
(the city has begun to levy fines for
unkempt yards)> We put ourselves
to the bittersweet work of gutting
Mrs. Flemming’s home which had
not yet been touched in the three
years since the storm and flood.
We volunteered at the Harry
Thompson Center, which provides
the many homeless with shower,
laundry, meals, health and legal
services. We helped a non-profit
to get off the ground through our
demolition and clean up of its once
flooded home.
The close of the day: We
would return home each
afternoon physically spent but
would go to bed spiritually charged.
All of our meals were shopped for, prepared, and cleaned up by
student participants. Every day after our simple meals—prayed
over and taken together—we would have time for student-led
reflection in which we reviewed our day’s activities, examined
the day’s emotion, tried to better understand what we had seen
and done, wrote in journals, and closed with a reading from
scripture.
It is not too much to say that each one of us had a life-changing
experience, a graced experience. In the midst of great suffering,
we came to know that there is even greater hope. The people of
New Orleans remain in our hearts!
Serra Padres haul a rolled up section
of carpet out of the house they gutted.
Immersion participants constructed this
makeshift grotto with religious items they
found inside a house they spent days gutting.
Serra will be returning to New Orleans in the summer of 2009 and adding a second trip to our docket, too. If you would like to
learn more about the program, read further statements from the participants, or see photos, please visit the Campus Ministry
section of the Serra website.