Alumni update

I am a guest blogger on my high school's alumni website today, thanks to an invitation from one of my former English teachers. He had visited this blog, and so asked me to write about my VSC experience. It was a good exercise to try to distill a year into one short article. I hope the stories I chose to tell will help people realize what a volunteer year is all about.

While I was killing time in San Antonio, I was able to read Pope Benedict's new social justice encyclical Caritas in Vertitate (Love in Truth). Besides making me look business-like in the hotel restaurant, this was serendipitous, as I discovered a great quotation to use in my article.

“Only through an encounter with God are we able to see in the other something more than just another creature, to recognize the divine image in the other, thus truly coming to discover him or her and to mature in a love that ‘becomes concern and care for the other.’” You can't get much more Vincentian than that. The Holy Father also cited a scripture verse that is the Daughters of Charity motto: The charity of Christ urges us. (2 Cor 5:14)

P.S. Fun Fact: The teacher who requested this article also got me on the road to Museum Studies. I wrote my first public history paper for his class my sophomore year of high school. He forbade any "depressing" topics, so I researched the history of the Smithsonian Institution. I liked the idea, but it turned out to be even more fun than I expected.