Scriptural Reflection by Stephanie Ragland (she/her) Seattle, WA ’78-79
What I find myself most moved by today is not simply the Scripture we’ve heard — though they are rich — but the sight of this room. A room filled with current and former Jesuit Volunteers, JV EnCorps members, and companions who have carried the mission of JVC Northwest for seventy years. Seventy years of people saying yes. Seventy years of stepping into the unknown. Seventy years of choosing sight over blindness, hope over fear, light over darkness, community over isolation.
1956 was, indeed, a remarkable year. Disneyland opened its gates, JVC Northwest took its first volunteers, and I was born. Three very different beginnings, but each in its own way an act of imagination, vulnerability, and hope. Each one a wager that the world could be more than it was.
And that is what strikes me about the Gospel scene and the words of St. Paul: they are not abstract ideals. They are lived realities in this room. They are written into the decades of stories represented here — stories of people who heard a call, sometimes subtle, sometimes blaring, and followed it into communities and relationships that were unfamiliar, challenging, and ultimately transformative.
You stepped into houses where you didn’t know a soul. You entered neighborhoods where you weren’t sure you belonged. You served alongside people whose lives, histories, and struggles were far from your own. And in doing so, you discovered something essential: that the Gospel is not a text to be admired but a life to be lived. It is incarnated every time someone chooses compassion over convenience, justice over comfort, presence over avoidance.
The singing duo the Indigo Girls capture this inner landscape so well when they sing: “The darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable and the lightness that has a call that’s hard to hear. I wrapped my fear around it like a blanket; I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it. I’m crawling on your shore.”
That tension, the hunger for darkness and the quiet call of light — that spiritual tug of war — is something every Jesuit volunteer, every person of faith, every human being knows intimately. Fear can feel like safety. Familiarity can feel like wisdom. And yet something in us keeps leaning toward the light, even when it whispers instead of shouts.
Many of you wrapped your fear around you like a blanket in those early days of service. You clung to what felt safe until it no longer held you. And then, you moved toward something truer — toward community, toward justice, toward a deeper sense of who you were called to be.
That movement — from fear to hope, from darkness to light — is the Gospel alive in you.
And today, as we gather across generations of volunteers, we see that this movement didn’t end when your service year ended. It shaped your careers, your families, your friendships, your faith. It shaped the way you show up in the world. It shaped the way you listen, the way you advocate, the way you love, where you choose to stand.
This room is a living history of hope practiced over time.
And so today is not simply a celebration of the past. It is a reminder — a gentle one, perhaps even a holy one — that the call continues. The world still hungers for the kind of hope you have practiced. The kind that is not naïve but courageous. The kind that does not deny the darkness but refuses to be defined by it. The kind that listens for the light even when it is hard to hear.
If the Gospel lives in this room, it is because each of you has carried its light into places that needed it. And that light — your light — continues to matter.
