Care for the whole person
For the first handful of years after my incarceration, I would lay in bed at night and imagine that the grief and sorrow I felt was so strong that it would cause me to shatter into a million tiny little pieces as I slept. Then I would hope that maybe the broken pieces of myself would come together again and get mixed up and rearranged into a different order and I wouldn’t have to be myself any longer. I could be someone who wasn’t a convict, or a cripple. I don’t know when I stopped thinking these things, or wanting to break apart, but I think it might have a lot to do with Loyola.
One of the things you find in a Jesuit education is the people involved seem to have an odd fascination with two little Latin words: cura personalis. It means something like “care for the whole person.” The idea here has to do with cultivating well-rounded persons. However, I was sitting in a presentation lovingly crafted by the leaders of our program about its – and by extension, our – future and it hit me like a lightning bolt, setting my mind and heart ablaze with a renewed love for this Ignatian education thing that we are doing, smoothing the rough callouses of my once battered and embittered heart.
Cura personalis just might mean care for more than the incarcerated person. Maybe it has to do with my animas – the animating principle inside of me, what I call my person, my I – taking flight and leaving behind the shackles and barbed wire, this broken and defeated person. Far above it all I can see a million billion possibilities cascading out, and a Voice belonging to me and you and everyone whispers, “The world, and you, are so much more than you know.”
CM is a student in Loyola University New Orleans' Prison Education Program at Rayburn, LA.
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