Glimpses of the Divine: Becky Vires

Becky Vires, Jesuit Volunteer '24-'25

Joppa Mountain, TN 2025

Can I tell you a secret? I'd never actually been on a school-run immersion trip before taking a group of students to Tennessee this past March. Oh, I have lots of experience leading retreats and reflections, I attended Catholic Heart Work Camp as a high schooler, I'd spent a good 7 months at this point leading service and justice programing at Detroit Mercy... but I'd never done something quite like this. And yet, somehow, I found myself in a rental car with a gaggle of undergraduate girls, a backpack with a binder and a first-aid kit, and several energy drinks. "Be patient with me," I remember telling them more than once, "I'm not actually an adult; I'm 23."

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a Jesuit Volunteer, let me introduce myself briefly. My name is Becky, and like I said, I'm 23 years old. I graduated from Creighton University in Omaha, NE last May (Roll Jays!) with a BS in Chemistry and Art History (odd pair, I know. I did archeological work.) before moving to Detroit for a year-long placement with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I live in intentional community with 3 other JVs (all between the ages of 21 and 24 at the start of the program year) on a small communal budget. We build our lives around the core pillars of simple living, community, spirituality, and social justice. As a house, we enjoy making soup out of other people's leftovers, playing Dungeons and Dragons, trashy reality TV, and talking ourselves into getting invited to fun events for free. We all work in the non-profit sector in different way: in ministry, in legal assistance, in homelessness services. My official job title is "Associate University Minister," and I mostly work under Sammy, our University Minister for Service and Justice.

I think my experience of our trip to Joppa Mountain, TN probably looks and sounds pretty different than the experience of the students we brought with us. For one thing, I was the one white-knuckled driving up switchbacks in the dark with a car full of laughing, lovable liabilities... sorry, students. I also don't think I fully processed until part of the way into the trip that being the adult leader on an immersion trip means you're going to have a different relationship with the participants than when you're a student on a similar experience. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I think it really surprised me. I know from my own tangential experiences and my friends' stories of their own immersion trips that the relationships you make on these trips are just as big a part of how you remember the experience as the work you do and places you go. I know the adult leaders matters to that group dynamic, but I became quickly aware that there's an almost... parasocial element to that relationship. I know my friends and I talked about our college campus ministry staff when they weren't there, that we banded together to troll them in meetings, that we had our own theories about their lives outside of our interactions... but somehow I wasn't expecting it from the other side. Even more surprising to me was the fact that I was totally okay with it, enjoyed it, even. Maybe I actually am an adult... because, sure, I wasn't in on all the jokes or staying up late to look at the stars and talk, but I got to have the incredible experience of stepping back and seeing the trip through my students' eyes... and that was more than okay with me. 

There's this Thomas Merton quote from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that has been rattling around in my heart since I heard it for the first time in college. The whole block of text is worth reading, but an abbreviated part of it goes like this:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

One of the most beautiful part of my immersion trip was watching my students have their very own "Fourth and Walnut" moments: driving in a 12-passenger van through backstreets in rural Tennessee grilling one of the Glenmary staff about local politics and community and life circumstance, expressing their fascination and surprise at the complexity and diversity of life this deep into Appalachia; gently explaining Black hairstyles to truly ancient nuns in a monastery outside of Cincinnati; meeting an old "Southern gentleman's" extended handshake with a hand over her heart and head nod and watching him pivot and respond in kind; running around playing catch with the young son of a local immigrant family that had us over for dinner; eyeing the Catholics' Ash Wednesday ashes warily and asking "So... is this, like, an always thing?" It was like waking from a dream of separateness. 

I can't help but wonder what our world would look like if we all were able to experience each other with the same curiosity and assumed goodwill with which I saw these girls interact with these new, and sometimes scary, experiences. I wouldn't call the trip perfect; I wouldn't even call these experiences perfect. We ran into ignorance and insensitivity and uncomfortable moments more than once. As much as my students were interacting with new people in a new place with a new culture, the folks we met were also interacting with someone from a different city, region, skin color, religion, or life experience and that didn't always follow some sort of perfect script. Even amongst their peers from more similar backgrounds, we ran into miscommunication and division. But, God, when I look at it now, I just see my students, shining like the sun. I want to be able to describe it to everyone I meet to say, "LOOK! See! This world is full of so many people and when they interact it can be SO beautiful!" But Thomas Merton was right. It cannot be explained, only experienced deep in one's own heart. 

The other aspect of this removing the illusion of separateness I experienced on this trip was an experience of unity with the non-human created world. I'd never heard that turn of phrase before this year, the "non-human created world." I like it; I think I'm prone to forgetting that we humans are the created world, in equal parts as a way to elevate us too high and to sink us too low. We spent one of our service days at a place called Narrow Ridge, which is an earth literacy center. We toured their eco-lodge and their massive library, saw their natural burial grounds, and helped them clear a new trail. Rain was on the horizon; the forest was silent and completely still. It was like a church sanctuary late at night, empty but thrumming with some incomprehensible Divine power and goodness. You could hear your own heart beat... but in a cool, nature way not a freaky, horror movie way. I remember feeling completely unimportant and impossibly connected all at the same time. 

Eric Weiner in Thin Places: Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer writes:

"I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever."

And in the Bible, in 1 Kings 19:11-13, we hear in the story of Elijah:

"Then the LORD said: Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will pass by. There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD—but the LORD was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake—but the LORD was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire—but the LORD was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave."

A thin place, a glimpse of the Infinite Whatever, the light silent sound that marks the presence of God, the calm before the storm like the breath before a scream or a song... pick your phrasing, I felt it pulling up weeds and stamping down dirt high up on a mountain in Eastern Tennessee. I was moved to hear that my students did, too. We all found we could breathe again in this little pocket of peace.

Managing 6 undergraduate students for a week is... surprisingly hard work. By the time we got back to Detroit at the end of the trip and, in quick succession, hit a pothole, got cut off in traffic, and drove through a cloud of suspicious smelling smoke (at which point one of my students laughed and said "Yeah... we're home!"), I was beyond ready to go out to dinner with my housemates and then sleep for 16 hours straight. But as I watched the last student load their suitcase into a waiting car and hopped into the JV car, I knew something had shifted for me. Some... perception of myself, of my students, of the world and our place within it... something indescribable that can only be experienced in the depths of one's heart had tumbled into place. Somewhere underneath the bonfire smoke and freezing wind and tight muscles and muddy boots was hiding, still and silent, a glimpse of the Divine.