The Next Step in Space

Published: April 25, 2012

On May 19, an event I’ve anticipated for months should finally take place: SpaceX Corp., in Hawthorne, Calif., will launch its Falcon rocket mounted with a Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to dock with the International Space Station.

If the mission is successful, SpaceX will be the first private company to launch a vehicle that completes a rendezvous and docks with the ISS. The launch also is significant because the U.S. government decided to end the shuttle program after 30 years with the last mission in July 2011. With no shuttle, NASA intends to rely on private companies to take over the mission of resupplying the space station. Some say a successful mission by SpaceX will signal the start of a new era of commercial space exploration.

Tom Mueller M.S. ’92 is vice president of propulsion development at SpaceX. He is also a co-founder of the company, with entrepreneur Elon Musk. SpaceX and a second company, Orbital Sciences, are the leading players in the private space mission field, and Orbital Sciences is scheduled to test a rocket in May, then launch to the ISS later this year.

We interviewed Mueller in our fall 2011 issue. Interest in anything related to SpaceX and Tom Mueller is high in parts of the science community. The Mueller interview, in fact, became popular online after it was picked up by several science and space-related blogs. It's easy to see why: Mueller talks about his own outside-the-box thinking as a designer as well as the future of private space exploration. The interview is informative, and my favorite part was when Mueller described getting in trouble as a kid when his father discovered he'd taken apart the family lawn mower.

A few weeks ago, I took a walk over to Seaver Hall to talk with Jeff Sanny, professor of physics in the Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering, about the SpaceX launch. Although he never taught Mueller in a class, Sanny has been involved in space-related research throughout his career and has received NSF funding for his work for the past 21 years.

Sanny says the SpaceX launch is particularly significant because of its implications for business. Space exploration will “no longer be a monopoly of the government,” he explains. “There will be more innovation in research and development, and more competition. Every year, NASA funding gets cut, so it’s good that private business is picking up the slack.”

I also called freelance writer Doug McInnis, who conducted the interview, to ask him his impressions of the SpaceX project and Mueller himself. McInnis, who writes from Caspar, Wyo., has been published in the New York Times, New Scientist magazine and Dartmouth Medicine, so he knows a few things about the complex and completely fascinating world of science.

McInnis, like Sanny, sees the launch as important to the future of space research and exploration: “We are not likely to make significant advances in manned space flight, because of federal budget decisions, unless the civilian sector steps in to fill the gap. My conversation with Mueller made me a believer that this can and is likely to happen.”

I especially was fascinated when McInnis told me what intrigued him about Mueller. “What struck me about him is that he is quietly competent,” McInnis recalls. “There’s no bravado about the guy. He was simply addressing the issues as they came and trying to solve them.” To McInnis, that kind of persistence was one reason for NASA's remarkable successes, despite the fact of occasional failures.

Launch schedules are always a bit iffy, and the SpaceX launch itself has experienced a few delays. But I'll be keeping my eyes on the heavens during the next two weeks.

(Photo of Tom Mueller M.S. '92 by Jon Rou)

Popular Mechanics recently wrote about the SpaceX launch. Wired magazine posted a story that describes the mission with some detail. Also, SpaceX co-founder and CEO Elon Musk appeared in an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that was both entertaining and informative.

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Sam Fischer's Triple Crown Path

Published: April 10, 2012

It was a baseball fan’s dream: a 30-minute conversation with a player who will likely go down in the history books as the greatest hitter in LMU softball history — Sam Fischer.

In the upcoming issue of LMU Magazine, due out in May, you’ll find a story about Fischer, who just weeks into the 2012 season had established herself as the all-LMU home run leader and the all-time LMU RBI leader. Fischer also hits for average. Throughout the season, she’s been in the top 5 hitters in the nation for batting average, and is No. 2 at the moment. And she’s well on track to finish as LMU’s all-time leader in career batting average.

And while we’re talking about amazing things seen at Smith Field, let the record show that Fischer has been pushed to the max by teammate Kelly Sarginson, a senior, who last year set an LMU record and a Pacific Coast Softball Conference record for homers in a single season, with 18. Fischer and Sarginson bat third and fourth in the line-up, and I’ll confess that when our No. 3 and 4 hitters are due up, I often imagine what it must’ve been like to see Mickey Mantle in the batter’s box and Roger Maris on deck. Fischer herself says they make one another better.

Any player who leads a team in home runs, RBIs or batting average for a season is worth taking note of. To lead in all three categories completes the legendary Triple Crown, last accomplished in major league baseball in 1967 by Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox. Others who’ve done it? Frank Robinson, Mantle, Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig, to name a few of the few.

Fischer, as I write this in mid-April, leads the PCSC in all three Triple Crown categories for the current season. But more amazing is that she will almost certainly end the season as the all-time LMU career leader in all three categories. Fischer will be LMU’s Career Triple Crown winner. It’s difficult to imagine that any future LMU softball player will match this accomplishment.

I became a baseball fan by watching the Baltimore Orioles lose a World Series in 1979, then win one in 1983. How I wish I could’ve sat down to talk with Cal Ripken about positioning in the field, with Eddie Murray about whether power hitters really have holes in their swing. Later, after moving west, I did get to ask Eddie Williams — a wonderful, and unheralded, Dodger pinch hitter whose career was slowed by injuries — about the mentality of the occasional batter. When I interviewed Fischer for our magazine story, I decided to ask her about hitting, and hitting only: Who would you most like to get a hit off? When you're at the plate, do you analyze all the possibilities like Kevin Costner in "Bull Durham"? When you have a chance to sit down with a great hitter, there's no reason to discuss anything else.

For LMU sports fans, especially those who love the game played on the diamond, the Lions softball team, with shortstop Sam Fischer, is a team one should consider changing one’s schedule to see. Although the season will end this month, the team plays two doubleheaders at home this coming weekend, on April 14 and 15 (the final games will take place later in April at the University of San Diego and Saint Mary’s College). First game starts at 10 a.m. each day. If LMU takes the PCSC Coastal Division title, then the team will play at home May 11 and 12 for the conference title. Follow all team news and check the schedule here.

Photo by Jon Rou

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Braiding Poetry and Jazz

Published: February 9, 2012

Last week, two events on campus brought together poets and jazz musicians, and the joining of the two was partly the result of two people, Paul Harris, chair of the Department of English, and David Ornette Cherry, whose collaboration goes back a generation to their fathers.

On Wednesday, Feb. 1, the English Department hosted a poetry reading featuring jazz musician Cherry, who accompanied Professor John Menaghan and several students as they read their work. Menaghan read from his jazz poems, which draw on jazz musicians, music and rhythms. He’s read them elsewhere, too, and you can hear him online in a podcast from City of the Angels Music, website about the jazz music community in Los Angeles. Students Nareen Melkonian, Zahra Lipson, Hillary Scheppers and Bianca Darby-Matteoda read pieces in a variety of forms. They were introduced by Sarah Maclay, poet and profess of English.

Cherry, son of the great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, often accompanies spoken word artists by playing an electric keyboard or pulling selected instrumentals, DJ-style, from a vast music archive on his laptop. Cherry reads over the poems beforehand, then moves to the music that suits. It’s an exercise in spontaneity, of course, and it makes for a wondrous, improvised experiment in sounds. Watching the duet taking place between each student and Cherry was especially fun. Their interactions, made up of nonverbal glances and nods of the head, reminded me of the unspoken conversation between a drummer and bass player.

The next night, at the Marymount Institute for Faith, Culture and the Arts, Cherry brought his band The Ensemble for Improvisors and poet Kamau Daaood. Daaood’s poetry — an example is here — rumbled out from somewhere deep in the heart, and the band, overflowing with world music influences, brought the funk, as well as jazz.

A highlight was Harris’ “Don’s Horn,” also delivered to Cherry’s music. Harris practices constrained writing, a literary form in which an author imposes a condition on his or her work. (Harris’ “Alpha Rap” is on the Internet.) "Solo-O's Solo: To Honor Joys Born of Don's Horn," which pays tribute to Don Cherry, is a long poem whose words may use only the vowel “o.” That struck me as a contrivance for only a few seconds. Harris’ work soon became an eruption of thought and comment, full and complete despite its banishing of a, e, i and u. The combination of words and music blew the roof off and reached up to the heavens.

The gig was raucous at times, and to experience world jazz, poetry and shouts and hollers in the Marymount Institute struck me as an appropriate tribute to faith, culture and arts. You could say it was an evening made possible several decades ago. Their fathers were close friends who met in New Hampshire, where Harris’, Joseph Harris, was a physics professor at Dartmouth College. Cherry, who now lives in Portland, Ore., was an L.A. resident for many years, and he and Harris have collaborated often.

During both evenings, I often closed my eyes for stretches at a time. I wanted to prevent my ears from being distracted by my eyes. In church, I often listen to the reading of the Gospel in the same way, to hear and only hear, to imagine the scenes the words describe. That seemed appropriate last week. For me, jazz and poetry are the imagination at prayer.

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Red Cabbage and Cool Water

Published: January 13, 2012

I have a friend at work who, as any good friend would, has steadily been offering advice to improve my life. I’ll call him Good Ben/Bad Ben.

Lately, Good Ben has been urging me to go with him to volunteer at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker soup kitchen. The Catholic Worker was started in New York City in 1933 by Dorothy Day, and today about 250 Worker hospitality houses/soup kitchens operate across the United States. Here in L.A., they’ve been cooking meals for the city’s poor and homeless since Easter Sunday 1970. The kitchen is at Sixth St. and Gladys Ave. in the Skid Row neighborhood.

Two Saturdays ago, I took Good Ben up on his offer. I showed up at 7:30 a.m., joined in the morning’s prayer, and spent a half-day buttering bread, chopping red cabbage, filling plastic bags with bagels, and walking from picnic table to picnic table offering cups of cool water to the guests. I’m not asking for God's gold star for cutting vegetables and pouring water. After all, God's grace is given freely, we can't earn it. The best part of the day was who I met.

An African American woman in a wheelchair came from the food line and asked me for water, then for my name. Hers, she said, was Mary. When I said Mary was my mother’s, as well as my sister’s — my sister, the nun — a five-minute conversation began. Mary told me about the poems she writes, reciting three, each about the faithfulness and providence of God. But the special moment came 10 minutes later, when she called out “Joe” from across the courtyard. I walked over to her table, where she introduced me to her friends. I arrived at the kitchen feeling anonymous, and in an instant I felt known.

The other special encounter was with an LMU alumnus, Rob Palmer ’85, and his daughter, Grace. I have a daughter named Grace, and, as sentimental as it may seem, I feel bonded to anyone who has named a daughter Grace. Rob’s been to Sixth and Gladys many times, and I was struck by how much fun he was having. I’m not sure he knew everyone, but he looked like a man surrounded by friends. At the end of the day, Grace, a high school freshman, was beaming, too. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself among the LMU community. Jeff Dietrich, a leader at the Worker, writes in his new book — titled “Broken and Shared” and published by the Marymount Institute Press — that he considers Greg Boyle, S.J., M.A. ’85, founder of Homeboy Industries, his pastor and first volunteer. And at least a handful of Jesuits across the country have helped shape Dietrich over the years.

I suppose I have Good Ben to thank for all of this. But what about Bad Ben? Well, 50 percent of Ben’s advice is excellent, dead on target — Good Ben's. The other 50 percent — this I’ve said straight to Bad Ben's face — is dreadful. For every invitation from Good Ben to head down to Skid Row, Bad Ben suggests a weekend in Las Vegas. As they say, let’s not go there.

Photo by Mike Wisniewski, Los Angeles Catholic Worker

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Remembering Clay

Published: April 13, 2011

Last night, we paid our respects to a young man who was changed by the world, in some ways for the better, in others for the worse. At a memorial service for Clay Hunt in Sacred Heart Chapel, we experienced the awful ambiguity of an event that was equal parts grief and gratitude.

Clay Hunt, 28 and a native of Houston, Texas, was an undergraduate student at LMU. He began his studies after serving in the U.S. Marine Corp in Iraq and Afghanistan. He arrived in Iraq in January 2007. In Anbar Province, a sniper wounded him. He was awarded a Purple Heart. After his recovery, Hunt was admitted to the U.S.M.C Scout Sniper School and was sent to Afghanistan. He was honorably discharged in April 2009.

Last night, Clay’s parents shared stories that were both humorous and honest. Clay’s mother, Susan Selke, remembered that her son so enjoyed LMU that he took her to one of his first classes at LMU. Then in his mid-20s, Clay must’ve been the only student unembarrassed to walk into a classroom accompanied by his mom, she remarked.

Clay’s father, Stacy Hunt, testified to the profound effects of war that shaped his son. Clay saw at least five of his closest friends die in action, and more than one in his own arms. That experience was the heart of the darkness that Clay battled thereafter, and, perhaps, the biggest factor in his taking his life March 31. Yet, Clay’s military service also cemented bonds between him and his comrades. Perhaps more telling still, his experiences as a Marine convinced him that he had much to give the world and that the world needed it from him, and from others.

Clay came to LMU in fall 2009. His major, as one might expect, was physical and occupational therapy. His family members and his colleague, Britney Holland ’10, herself a veteran, commented that Clay became somewhat infamous for his sporadic appearances in class. Clay was not sleeping in. He and Jake Wood, a fellow Marine had founded Team Rubicon, an emergency relief squad made up of former soldiers with unique skills. If Clay wasn’t in his assigned seat, he was probably in a disaster zone.

After Haiti was struck by an earthquake in January 2010, Clay and his comrades found a way there within a week, setting up medical facilities and helping to improve transportation. Later, he returned for a second visit. He and his team also helped victims of Chile’s earthquake in February 2010. In September 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama praised Team Rubicon at the sixth annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York. Clay also was deeply committed to helping veterans readjust to civilian life. He helped Holland when she founded LMU's Student Veterans Association, which helps veterans as they adjust to student life as well as veterans beyond the campus community. He also traveled to Washington, D.C., to persuade members of Congress about the need for effective programs for veterans.

It was said repeatedly at his memorial service that Clay Hunt relished being at LMU. His time here was brief. While here, he wrestled with demons. Yet, Clay didn’t wait till he had overcome his demons to help others. “I find it fitting that all of Clay’s accomplishments at LMU involved service,” Holland said. The demons did not eat up that part of Clay — a remarkable testimony to his character.

In Clay Hunt, grief and gift lived together, uneasily, in his heart. Perhaps our grief will pass. But Clay's gift to us will not. Our most lasting tribute to him will be to give to others.

To learn more about Team Rubicon, go here.

Photo courtesy of Team Rubicon. Clay Hunt is standing near his friend and co-founder of Team Rubicon, Jake Wood.

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The Spy's Tale

Published: March 27, 2011

On Sunday, March 27, a small, frail woman with a big story came to LMU: Marthe Cohn, spy.

Cohn, born in 1920, is a French Jew who was raised in a family that spoke German as well as they spoke French. Her fluency made her valuable in the Second World War to French intelligence officers, who in January 1945 needed information about size and movements of the retreating German armies. Her command of the German language also was her protection when as she walked across the border from Switzerland into Germany to learn all she could about the enemy locations and plans.

Marthe Cohn spoke to members of the Jewish Book and Discussion Group at the William H. Hannon Library about her book “Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany.” Trained as a nurse, Cohn was a social worker for the French army in early 1945 when an officer asked her to mind his phone for a time. Apologizing for the boredom of the task, he said he’d offer her a book to read but all of his were in German. When she replied that she read German, he asked if she also could speak it. Then came the most serious question of all: Would she be willing to cross into Nazi Germany under false pretenses and gather information about enemy troops? She was asked to risk her life.

Although the war was nearing its end and the Nazi army was in disarray, the French army desperately needed accurate information for their advances. Cohn was briefed on German military organization, trained in code communication and taught to fire a variety of weapons. She concocted a story to explain her presence in a war zone, and she walked across the Switzerland-Germany border and pretended to be a daughter of the Reich in search of her fiancé, Hans, a German soldier rumored to be fighting in the area.

Petite, blond and beautiful, Cohn befriended civilians and even soldiers who would have turned her in had they known she was a Jew, let alone a spy. When a member of the audience asked her feelings about interacting with people under false premises, Cohn said she knew her assignment required deception.

“My only goal was to get as much information as I could, and I used them,” she admitted. “At the same time, I was very grateful for the information they gave me. I felt if I’m risking my life, I want to do the best job I can.”

By the end of Cohn’s talk, I realized that her work in 1945, her book and her conversation at LMU were the parts of one story that she felt obligated to tell: the lie of Nazi ideology. She had witnessed the power of a belief that was based on scapegoating others. “Foreigners in every country,” she said, “are the first ones to get the shaft, to be taken, [and] segregated.” Cohn’s answer to the lie was to act.

“You cannot change the minds of people,” she said. “The only thing [to do] is be an example. Your life must be an example. And you must follow your conscience.”

Photo: Josie Morris

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Building with Haze and Mist

Published: March 8, 2011

On the second floor of University Hall hangs a photograph of the Loyola College groundbreaking celebration of May 20, 1928. A temporary stage hovers in the background, while benches and folding chairs, cars parked haphazardly and people fitted out in their finest populate the picture from the faraway to the foreground. From other photos of the day, we know that at least one bishop was present, many priests, and, without a doubt, much of the lay Catholic leadership of the city of Los Angeles.

Each time I pass the photograph, the day seems almost a fiction and the people frozen in time, as if they are rendered in painting. The air was filled with filmy haze, as if a veil obscured them, making them insubstantial, nothing but actors on a stage. When that day’s light was dimmed, surely all was dismantled, and the drama that must have existed in someone's suspended belief gone, evaporating into the mist.

I thought of that photo today as I sat in the next-to-last row of Sacred Heart Chapel awaiting the start of the Inauguration Mass to celebrate the investiture of David W. Burcham as LMU’s 15th president. From my faraway vantage point, the altar seemed to take the place of that temporary stage, as bishops, priests, nuns and lay leaders gathered to celebrate. Then I realized that it was not the 1928 photo that failed to come alive but my eyes.

Eighty years ago, the people captured by a photo were the community that gathered around this university. Their bishop, Jesuits and lay leaders were present to set forth on new land the path for a private university founded on the values of a religious faith and the charism of a religious order founded by a 15th century Spaniard who was a priest and a war veteran.

They could barely describe the day that we witnessed at LMU today — we celebrated the university’s most recent milestone — even though they may have imagined something like it. The field on which they gathered, no more than low grasses, dirt roads and barely rolling hills, dwarfed them. And today, the university that stands there would dwarf them, too.

Some of them surely imagined an edifice, or several, that would gradually take shape. But they could not know what decades later would be the testimony of their vision and work. In a sense, they didn’t know what they were building.

Today, we inaugurated our 15th president. We can look back over eight decades and see and touch what has come of the work. But, in a sense, we don’t know what we’re building either. We continue to build something that, we hope, in 80 years will be handed to people we cannot name or describe and can barely imagine. Not a one among us today, probably, will be in the chapel with them then. Only a few of our names will be remembered. When they look at our photos, our cars will seem slow; our clothes, quaint; our mobile devices, toys.

We do not know what the LMU community in 80 years will have in its hands. But it’s only by acting today as best we can that they will have anything to treasure then.

It’s a paradoxical thing to witness: On a day celebrating vision and institution — things foundational — we see clearly our transience that is mystically at core of it all. We, too, are made up of haze, mist and spirit, and we build something permanent, something needed by the world.

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The Road From Flames to Freedom

Published: February 17, 2011

Four African American men who helped change U.S. history and who live in Los Angeles testified about their experiences in the Civil Rights movement at a documentary screening on campus this past week: Robert Farrell, Michael Grubbs, Claude Liggins and Robert Singleton, professor in the LMU Department of Economics.

The four were Freedom Riders in 1961, and they, and along with Raymond Arsenault, author of “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” spoke after a viewing of “Freedom Riders,” a new documentary by Stanley Nelson that was spurred by Arsenault's book. The film focuses on the hundreds of Americans who during the Civil Rights movement challenged Southern segregation laws that separated blacks and whites in interstate travel despite Supreme Court rulings that judged those laws unconstitutional. The Freedom Riders' example has inspired nonviolent protest movements around the world for decades since.

For daring to ride side-by-side on buses and trains and for using white-only public facilities, Freedom Riders were heckled, spat on, clawed, punched, clubbed, beaten, and fire-bombed. Three hundred volunteers were arrested and imprisoned in Parchman State Penitentiary, Mississippi’s most infamous prison. Through their determined peaceful protest, the Freedom Riders succeeded in bringing the nation’s attention to racial injustice, and they demonstrated the viability of nonviolent political action in changing both laws and attitudes.

Liggins, who then was a 20-year-old student at Los Angeles City College, said no one could mistake the danger in joining the Freedom Rides. In June 1961, he traveled from New Orleans to Jackson, Miss., on the Illinois Central Railroad. Just five weeks earlier, the nation learned that riders in Alabama were trapped inside their Greyhound bus by a crowd as a white man threw a flaming package inside, setting the back of the coach afire. But the attacks on the first of the Freedom Rides ultimately backfired. The project grew.

“When violence was happening in Alabama,” Liggins told students and faculty in the School of Film and Television's Mayer Theater, “I was ready to go. Violence didn’t stop anybody. It encouraged people.”

“I wasn’t afraid to die,” Liggins said, “I felt so committed that I was willing to give my life. I felt free.”

Although the Civil Rights veterans now receive credit and thanks for their acts of courage, they then met opposition from many fronts: Southern police who collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan; governors who accused them of incitement; parents and friends who counseled them against interrupting their college studies; and even Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. himself, who discouraged the rides in fear that they would spark a backlash jeopardizing other movement goals.

After the rides were over, those arrested often found that the price of the commitment was not fully paid. Singleton was a 25-year-old UCLA graduate student when he rode a train from New Orleans to Jackson, Miss., in July 1961. When it was time to enter the job market, he found that application forms usually included a question about whether an applicant had an arrest record. That was often a job-killer. Singleton resorted to writing “Freedom Rider” across the top of applications. Anyone who objected to it was someone he didn’t want to work for, he explained, while others would be interested in him immediately. Farrell, a former Los Angeles city councilman (1974–91), decided to go into politics in his community, where his experience would be viewed as a “badge of honor,” he said. In August 1961, he was a UCLA graduate student when he and 17 others tried to desegregate a Houston railway station.

Grubbs, who also was studying at UCLA in 1961 rode the train with Singleton and Singleton’s wife, Helen (a 1985 LMU graduate school alumna who was not present at the screening). When the activists were asked by an LMU student if they believed their actions decades ago inspired Egypt’s young people who recently helped force the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, Grubbs took the question.

“I believe in my heart,” he said, “that what we’ve experienced today would not have happened if the young students [on Freedom Rides] hadn’t stood up to injustice. Wherever there is injustice, young people must gather your friends, stand up and fight it.”

Liggins may have summed up the evening best after recalling his experience as a boy of 5 or 6 when he was refused service in a store. He asked the shopkeeper for something at the counter. A white customer then entered the store and told the owner that the child should not be served. The owner ordered Liggins to leave. Liggins said that ever after he wanted to make things change.

“The movement may have been able to be without me,” he said, “but I couldn’t be me without the movement.”

"Freedom Riders" is scheduled to air on PBS' "American Experience" in May 2011. To see a trailer for the documentary, go here.

To listen to a 2007 NPR interview with Raymond Arsenault, author of “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” go here.

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Seasonal Change

Published: January 24, 2011

During the past few weeks, I’ve become enamored with the films of Yasujiro Ozu, a Japanese filmmaker. He made seminal movies about post-World War II Japan, including “Late Spring” and “Early Summer,” two I’ve seen recently. I’m attracted to his films because, at least in those movies, he confronts change and family relationships.

Ozu’s “Late Spring” and “Early Summer” take place in the aftermath of World War II and were made in 1949 and 1951, respectively. Japan, like it or not, was dealing with massive change in society, government, economy and, therefore, family relationships. Ozu’s films focus very tightly on how families are affected by the choices the younger generation makes in the context of an insular society in transition. In “Late Spring,” Noriko, a young unmarried woman played by the nearly beatific Setsuko Hara, wishes nothing more than to remain in her father’s household. In “Early Summer,” Hara’s character again is named Noriko. She is a 28-year-old woman who decides against her family’s wishes to marry a widowed man with a very young daughter. Her unusual decision ultimately forces her family to leave their household that had been home to three generations. Without her salary, the extended family — grandparents, children and grandchildren — cannot support their home.

“Late Spring” is wrenching, because Noriko’s emotional pain at the prospect of leaving her father sears her. And in “Early Summer,” the family is wounded because that film's Noriko, in a moment of sudden clarity, refuses the man they hoped she'd marry and, with little warning, makes her own choice. Not only does her life change but so do the livesof her husband-to-be and his daughter, a toddler. Together, they have a hopeful future. Noriko’s family, on the other hand, will never be the same. In time, Noriko’s parents accept their daughter’s decision, and their future.

Change comes to all of us, like it or not, including universities. Buildings come down; new ones rise up or take new forms. Campus paths disappear, and new ones are paved. Even worse: Our mentors retire, or die. A few days ago, I toured the renovated Charles Von Der Ahe Building, formerly home to the LMU library. From the outside, the building remains familiar. But the change on the inside is monumental. There are hints of the former library’s former self, but the Von Der Ahe building has a renewed purpose. The next generation will be well served by it, as well as preceding ones.

Change often comes with the musty air of melancholy. The future is transformed, but so is the past, which no longer carries on into the present or future as it once did, or seemed to. When I am at my wisest, I believe that is as it should be. There comes a time in life — if we are fortunate enough to live so long — when a family’s priority turns toward the next generation. Then, change that improves young lives is welcomed, even if it means the present, or past, feels as if it may be receding like a tide.

"Late Spring" and "Early Summer" are available through The Criterion Collection.

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The Story Bronzed

Published: November 16, 2010

Universities are considered places of texts and stories, but a foundational story was told in bronze this past week.

A sculpture symbolizing the mission of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary was unveiled Nov. 13 at the Marymount Institute for Faith, Culture and the Arts. Located in a small garden outside the institute’s offices in University Hall, the piece, by Will Pupa, depicts Father Jean Gailhac, Mother St. Jean, a woman in need and a boy. About 100 people were present — faculty, staff, alumni, sisters, including sisters of R.S.H.M. community, and members of the Marions and Gryphon Circle, two LMU service organizations made up of women students.

Gailhac was a priest serving a hospital in Béziers, France, who began to help prostitutes after he saw their suffering and need for assistance. He had befriended Eugene and Appollonie Cure, who took an interest in his work. When Eugene died, Appollonie told Gailhac that she wished to devote herself to the work, and she offered her resources for the effort. Together, they and four women founded a community in 1849 that became the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, under the credo “That all may have life.” Appollonie became the community's first mother superior, Mother St. Jean.

Pupa worked for several years on the project, spending time in research and conversations, particularly with Frances Gussenhoven, R.S.H.M., assistant director of the Center for Ignatian Spirituality and professor emerita of English. He placed an impoverished woman in the sculpture as a symbol of the service that was at the heart of the community’s founding, and a boy because the sisters also started an orphanage to care for the needs of children. In a corner of the work are books in a basket. That the nuns decided not only to feed, house and clothe prostitutes but also educate them, so they could leave that life behind, was a radical act at the time, Pupa said.

For the artist, a gratifying part of the day came in the comments especially from sisters who were present. Pupa included in the background of his work the top of the orphanage in France. No one referred to the building or pointed it out in the sculpture during the unveiling, but many of the nuns remarked to him during the reception that they recognized it.

A few days later, I asked Theresia de Vroom, director of the Marymount Institute and professor of English, why the sculpture is important to her. “You remember that in earlier times, people learned the Bible through pictures and art,” she said. “I wanted to have a bronze piece that told the story of the R.S.H.M.’s founding. And I asked the Marians and Gryphons to be here, too, because they’ll be the carriers of the story.”

It struck me as especially poignant that both women in the service orgs and the nuns were present. The story in the bronze is a story of service. That’s a story the women religious live every day, and that our students are learning.

"That All May Have Life" is by Will Pupa, artist in residence at the Marymount Institute for Faith, Culture and the Arts. The Marymount Institute is located in University Hall Suite 3000.

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