Summer Graduation Edition

CRSL Newsletter

June 28, 2021

Congratulations to our 2021 Graduates!

Dear Friends,

Last summer after our first remote semester we continued to issue newsletters to stay in touch. This summer we will release fewer issues, but we will be in touch via

a couple of summer editions.

We know many of you are deep into internships and summer jobs, and many of you may be working on finding the right set of plans for the summer. There is no "right " thing to be doing right now. It has been an unprecedented year and if you find yourself somewhat adrift, be easy and accepting with yourself as you can. Sometimes spiritual growth happens when we feel still and even stagnant, we just don’t always know it’s happening.

Seniors, we hope you keep in touch, and everyone else, we can't wait to see you--often and in person--in the fall.

Matilda and the CRSL staff: Anna, Kim, and Maureen

Thank You's and Farewells

The CRSL is run not only by our staff but by our talented and dedicated interns. We are deeply grateful to interns Liah Gilvar-Parke, Sophie Schneider, and Dot Whalen for stepping into our hybrid model this spring and showing up both on zoom and in person!

We are so sad to say goodbye to Maeve Orlowski-Scherer and Shanelle Whyte. (Maeve is pictured here.)

Maeve majored in Religion and English. While interning with us, Maeve traveled with CRSL "honorary intern" and student activist Emma Walker to

Eastern Europe, where she photographed and wrote about iconography. She will study religion in a Master's level program this fall. Maeve facilitated our beloved Soup Salad and Soul program, wrote for our blog, assisted with communications, conducted research for our Center, and sat on our Student Advisory Board among many other things. Maeve has been a supportive presence for other students and our CRSL "family.” She will be especially missed for her mixture of deep warmth and dry sense of humor.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Shanelle comes from a Jamaican household, headed by a single mother. She graduated as a first generation student with a B.A. in government and Study of Women and Gender (SWAG). She was inducted into the Pi Sigma Alpha National Honor Society and will attend Rutgers Law School in the fall. Shanelle served as part of the Black Student Alliance, the Bridge Program, Smith Christian Fellowship, Blackappella, House Council, and Student Government. (Shanelle smiles for a graduation picture.)

She was also a L.E.D. scholar and a member of the Campus Safety Advisory Group - all while working at the CRSL for three years. She was one of the catalysts for CRSL's Black Spirituality Conference in 2019 and served as our student newsletter editor throughout her internship. "What I’ll miss most about the CRSL is the staff and their consistent support and cool vibes." Her take away from the CRSL is "to live life whole." We will miss Shanelle’s laughter and positive spirit.

It will be a long five years but we will look forward to seeing Shanelle and Maeve when they come back for reunion!

Matilda's Commencement Invocation on May 30, 2021

Good morning and welcome. Before we begin this morning, I invite us to take a moment of quiet, acknowledging and cherishing all those we have loved and lost this past year, from Covid or otherwise. May their memories be a blessing, may broken hearts among us let in the light of the world. We ask in this moment for an end to violence, dispossession and xenophobia. In a time when breath has not been, and for some has never been, guaranteed, and has been extinguished by forces of hate or inequality, I invite us all to breathe deeply in the name of justice and truth.

I now offer Smith College’s Land Acknowledgment.

We acknowledge that this campus is built within the ancestral homelands of the Nonotuck peoples. We also recognize our present-day neighboring Indigenous nations: The Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West, and the Abenaki to the North. We acknowledge too the presence of Native people among and all around us.

Welcome to parents, grandparents, siblings, family and chosen family, faculty and staff who have completed one herculean task after another, with grit and grace, culminating in today. Welcome to all of you watching from all over the world. Welcome everyone.

Welcome seniors.

This was not the senior year that you pictured. This is not the graduation ceremony that you pictured. There is distance between those of us here, and those joining us remotely from miles away. As with the past 14 months, we are socially distanced. As we look around; we see the space between the chairs.

But let us take a moment to consider these spaces. Writers and musicians talk about the white space, or the space between the words or the notes—this is where we read the real meaning, hear the real music.

Let us consider how the spaces have opened up in which the disparities in the health system, an even deeper understanding of the environmental crisis and the urgency which it must be addressed, state sanctioned violence against people of color and black and brown bodies; have all been more fully revealed. In the words of Adrienne Marie Brown Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.

So, let us pull back the veil. Let us consider the spaces which have opened new visions of connection, understanding, and liberation. For this past year you have shifted, pivoted, adapted, in ways many of us never could have imagined. And

you will resist an easy return to a familiar that would not sustain this fragile and precious earth.

Amidst your majors and your clubs and your internships and all the amazing things you have done here at Smith--this too is your learning and your legacy.

This morning, let’s get ready to move into these spaces and all they have to offer us.

As you listen to our speakers, glean inspiration from our honorees. I invite you to notice how they reveal the gaps wherein truth elides alternative reality; as Smith has always done for you. Find the white spaces where the real meaning lives, hang out in between the notes of the music of your hopes.

Settle into the spaces where you will find the new normal, build the new world...

Let us begin.

Matilda is CRSL's Director of Religious and Spiritual Life and College Chaplain.

Morning Prayers

by Joy Harjo

I have missed the guardian spirit

of Sangre de Cristos,

those mountains

against which I destroyed myself

every morning I was sick

with loving and fighting

in those small years.

In that season I looked up

to a blue conception of faith

a notion of the sacred in

the elegant border of cedar trees

becoming mountain and sky.

This is how we were born into the world:

Sky fell in love with earth, wore turquoise,

cantered in on a black horse.

Earth dressed herself fragrantly,

with regard for aesthetics of holy romance.

Their love decorated the mountains with sunrise,

weaved valleys delicate with the edging of sunset.

This morning I look toward the east

and I am lonely for those mountains

Though I’ve said good-bye to the girl

with her urgent prayers for redemption.

I used to believe in a vision

that would save the people

carry us all to the top of the mountain

during the flood

of human destruction.

I know nothing anymore

as I place my feet into the next world

except this:

the nothingness

is vast and stunning,

brims with details

of steaming, dark coffee

ashes of campfires

the bells on yaks or sheep

sirens careening through a deluge

of humans

or the dead carried through fire,

through the mist of baking sweet

bread and breathing.

This is how we will leave this world:

on horses of sunrise and sunset

from the shadow of the mountains

who witnessed every battle

every small struggle.

Mindful Mondays

Offered Mondays, June 28, July 12, 19 and August 2, 16

Mindful Mondays offers practice, reflection and conversation drawing on secular mindfulness, somatics and traditional Buddhist teachings. Our intention is to build community and grow the capacity to be with what is in service of the liberation of all beings. From the curious to the experienced and everyone in between, all are welcome. Please contact aostow@smith.edu with questions.

Center for Religious and Spiritual Life

Helen Hills Hills Chapel

123-125 Elm Street

Northampton, Massachusetts 01063

Contact: kalston@smith.edu www.smith.edu/religiouslife

For news, events and programs: smith.edu/edigest