Posted: December 30

Looking back on the past year

(Rome) Today was another mild day, much warmer than one would expect at the end of December. So a few blocks into a planned long walk, I decided to return and get the bicycle out. Except for my legs being a bit rusty, the bike ride felt wonderful and it gave me a chance to reflect on the year that is coming soon to an end. In a few hours we will celebrate the New Year Roman-style, which means do-it-yourself fireworks all over the city. I will join men from my community up on the roof which has a great view of the city. And there will be rockets exploding all over the night sky. It is delicious chaos compared to the security-conscious American way of organizing fireworks to protect people from harm. Here in Rome fireworks are a vehicle for self-expression, a way of saying that you are alive again for another year. The explosions are a form of communal self-assertion. Of course, Rome's fireworks are nothing compared with those of Naples whose citizens raise the practice to an entirely higher level. Within five minutes of the new year's arrival in that southern Italian city, we could no longer see the rest of the city from the roof of the Jesuit community: the smoke from all the rockets and flares obscured everything in the town, the bay and even the bulk of Mount Vesuvius towering in the dark sky. Rome is more sophisticated, but stilly entirely chaotic.

My reflection over the past year feels a little more orderly. This is the seventh January that I am entering into as secretary for communication. There was less travel this year because three of the meetings that I normally attend took place in Rome. I hosted two groups of editors (one from the European cultural reviews, the other from Jesuit publications in the United States) as well as a group of web masters from Europe. The other big meeting that I helped plan was November's gathering of 130 people from all over the world who came to Denver to think about adult learning and distance education. It went really well and certainly stands out as a highlight. We are still working out the details on how to take the creative ideas from that meeting to the next step. The basic insight that we had was that the new means of communication open up possibilities of working together as Jesuit institutions who can focus our efforts almost anywhere in the world- provided we have the creativity and vision to want to do that.