By Michael Tanaka
The Gonzaga University mission calls its community toward a purpose; something greater than graduation or showing up to class and being nice. The Gonzaga mission is centered on the Jesuit ideology of “magis,” doing more for the greater glory of God, the transcendent, Yaweh, he-she-it, whichever name you call it, it is not about doing the best, the most, or the greatest. It’s about doing more than what you’re already doing, being more than you already are.
The Gonzaga mission is ultimately a call to action, a promise to educate students to live out lives of leadership and service for the common good. In November of 2017, after DACA was rescinded, Gonzaga President Thayne McCulloh released a statement on behalf of our university and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities prompting us all to labor for solidarity for and with the poor and marginalized of our society, guided by the commitment to uphold the dignity of every person, to work for the common good of our nation, and to promote a living faith that works for justice.
Gonzaga’s Student Body president at that time, Carlo Juntilla, also released a statement to the entire university calling us to advocate for and with our Dreamers in our own GU community and communities abroad, to hold steadfast and remain civically engaged during that turbulent time in our nation’s history. While we may have forgotten these sentiments provided by past and present leaders of our community, their calls to action are not any less important now, because this turbulence has yet to end.
The separation of families is nothing new to the history that I come from. I am a fourth-generation Japanese-American whose grandparents were incarcerated in Manzanar, a remote area of California, simply and solely because of their ethnicity. While they looked Japanese, they did not speak Japanese, but it was the way they looked that ensured the way they were treated. And it was the way they were treated that caused an intergenerational trauma that lasts with my family today.
There is an ever greater need to embrace and to love our neighbor, “the other,” as ourselves. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached an idea of equality that was founded on integration, where we should look to our neighbors for brother and sisterhood. To truly call someone our brother and sister, there has to be a deeply spiritual, humanized, and transcendent understanding of the other; that understands we are different but can, in many ways, relate through our feelings and experiences of being equitably a part of the “human family.” He famously said, “The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”
Needless to say, there is work to be done. This kind of community is not created on the basis of complacency. This kind of community is created by action, measured by how it serves those in need— how we define advocacy and ally-ship, how we act in the face of injustice, how we speak truth to the face of power, but most importantly, how we can embrace the “other” and recognize the dignity of the human person.
Gonzaga University students participate in a candlelight vigil. Photo courtesy of Gonzaga University.
Many of these aspects are embedded within our Jesuit mission statement to uphold these values for a lifetime. My only hope is to pass this on, to put this promise into practice and again pose a call to action for us all to come together. As Father Greg Boyle, S.J., the founder of Home Boys, famously said, “And so the voices at the margins get heard and the circle of compassion widens. Souls feeling their worth, refusing to forget that we belong to each other.”
Michael Tanaka, a political science and international studies major, is student body president of Gonzaga University.
The cover photo is featured courtesy of Gonzaga University.