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For many students on Northwestern’s campus, this week is just another week, but for some, it has been Passover, the Jewish festival celebrating springtime and freedom from slavery in Egypt. It has also been Holy Week, the seven days leading up to Easter.
Father Bradley Zamora is the Chaplain at Sheil Catholic Center, Northwestern’s Catholic church. He described how at Sheil, the focus of this year’s Lent, the 40 days before Easter, has been about surrendering to love, not lies.
(Fr. Bradley Zamora): Lent in its actual meaning is springtime, this opportunity where new life can happen. And yes we begin this season marked with ashes, a reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return, but dust comes from the earth and new life comes from the earth. And so it’s really an opportunity for us to look for where are those pockets in our life where we need that springtime to come.
The Catholic Center hosted events throughout the week, including a special mass on Palm Sunday. On this Good Friday, there will not be mass, the only day a year when it is not held. The weekend, though, culminates in what Fr. Zamora – the mother of all liturgies, on Saturday night and mass on Easter morning.
(Zamora): We’ll break open the good news of Jesus’s resurrection and the difference that makes in our life. So that’s the span of the week. I’m tired just talking about it! But it’s one of the most beautiful times in the life of the church, and as chaplain, this is my fourth year being on campus, it’s one of the most beautiful times on campus where students chose to come and celebrate these things. These aren’t holy days of obligation as we call them. It’s an opportunity just for us to come together and really live the gift of who Jesus is for us through his passion, through, his death, and through his resurrection.
Reverend Julie Windsor Mitchell works at University Campus Ministry, a progressive Christian group also called U-C-M. She described how students had the opportunity to walk through the stations of the cross in Pilsen to celebrate Good Friday. On Sunday morning, they will also celebrate Jesus’s resurrection.
(Rev. Julie Windsor Mitchell): We do an ecumenical service with the Lutheran campus ministry and we have a sunrise service on clark st beach at 6 o’clock in the morning.
(Mitchell): And it’s the most beautiful, awe-inspiring service ever. We’re going to have a choir of students who are going to sing. We always read scripture, there’s a sermon, we take communion together.
She finds value in holding the service with another religious group on campus.
(Mitchell): It’s really a wonderful thing to be able to do with other faith communities that share your faith. To actually celebrate that together. It’s so joyous and wonderful to do that.
For Rabbi Jessica Lott at Hillel, the holiday of passover is also joyous. She described the importance of holding a seder, a meal around which families gather, and making beautiful that which seems like an obligation.
(Rabbi Jessica Lott): So it’s really a storytelling and celebration exercise. There’s a book called a haggadah which means the telling and its supposed to guide you through, how to tell the story and questions you might have about it, theres a bunch of ritual objects and food you might eat and they are there to help you tell the story.
Hillel hosts seders in their building but they also help students who live off campus host their own seders, an important part of Hillel’s effort to help students grow into their faith.
(Lott): Its really one of those first Jewish adult moments. Most people have been to a seder but they haven’t run it themselves. Part of our philosophy here at Hillel is that we want to help Jewish kids, you were Jewish kids, and we want you to become Jewish adults and this is the process. Just like the university is helping you become professionals and helping you become normal adult humans. We’re helping people learn the skills and tools and competencies to be Jewish adults.
Reverend Julie agreed that faith-based organizations, and especially UCM, create space for students to learn more about what they believe and turn that into a faith practice.
(Mitchell): The role of faith-based organizations at Northwestern I think is really important. So many students come here with a faith background and they’re looking to practice their faith in a place where they do feel at home where they feel welcomed, where they can leave all of those pressures of Northwestern behind.
UCM also helps students to take a break from the stress of academics by partnering with residential services on a community garden. On Maundy Thursday, they participated in the planting of the Garden of Eatin’, a garden in their backyard, near Allison, that grows vegetables for students struggling with food insecurity.
(Mitchell): That’s not necessarily related to typical practice for holy week but it makes sense for us to integrate that with holy week because we want to emphasize us taking care of God’s creation so we’ll be doing that by planting our first vegetables.
The extension of faith into the real world is something that Rabbi Lott also emphasized..
(Lott): Really Hillel exists to engage students in Jewish life and learning and to sort of meet students where they are, enrich their lives, so that they can enrich the Jewish people and the world.
The quarter system can make it difficult for students to find time to think more deeply about faith. Fr. Zamora said that on top of community, the Catholic center provides refuge for students to take a pause from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
(Zamora): I think we all need that break, and so I’m grateful that our mission exists on campus to give that to our students, let alone give them a space to wrestle with the questions of faith and difference that it makes in their life.
Faith-based organizations on campus serve students looking for community, while also providing a safe space for exploration and discovery. While Sheil, Hillel and UCM serve students of different religions, their leaders described similar themes of welcome and safety.
(Mitchell): We’ve really, or we want to become a space, for students to explore what they believe, not be told what to believe but really make faith their own and think about questions of faith and be in dialogue with other people who are their peers who are also asking similar questions of faith.
(Lott): While you’re in college is exactly the time to be exploring what the customs and practices and stories and experiences that matter to me. What are the things that I bring from home that I want to keep, and what are the things that I didn’t grow up with but now seem to matter to me and hillel is here to help students explore that.
All three leaders invited students to visit their respective spaces even if they do not identify as Christian or Jewish.
(Zamora): My immediate response is to go to three words that changed the lives of those who followed [Jesus] and that is: ‘come and see.’ Come and see what exists here on the campus of Northwestern University.
On Sunday Sheil Catholic Center will be holding mass at 9:30 a.m., 11 a.m., and 5 p.m. University Christian ministry, alongside the Lutheran campus ministry, will have a sunrise Easter service at 6 A-M. There will be an intercampus worship night at 8pm. Hillel will be hosting seder at 7:30 to mark the conclusion of passover week.
For WNUR News, I’m Rachel Spears.
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