“Serving Christ’s mission today means paying special attention to its global context. This context requires us to act as a universal body with a universal mission, realizing at the same time the radical diversity of our situations. It is a worldwide community-and, simultaneously, as a network of local communities-that we seek to serve others across the world. Our mission of faith and justice, dialogue of religions and cultures, has acquired dimensions that no longer allow us to conceive of the world as composed of separate entities; we must see it as a unified whole in which we depend upon one another.” (GC.35, D.2, No. 20)

A new word has emerged to describe the new reality of our historic moment: glocal… a combination of the words global and local… it is an adjective that captures well the global-local context in which live today: “of or relating to the interconnection of global and local issues, factors, etc”. (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/glocal#). We are interconnected in a way that is unprecedented in history. Not only do we know in real time what is happening in any corner of the world, but our local contexts are affected by situations far away without any control on our part. Two good examples come easily to mind: (1) the COVID pandemic began in China but quickly spread to all corners of the world affecting everybody. All of a sudden our local lives came to a halt and were impacted greatly. (2) The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war that has resulted has impacted the local price of many commodities in all continents… we cannot live in isolated local communities anymore. For better or for worse our lives are interconnected.

As we know the first Jesuits created a system of schools throughout the world united by a common goal of serving God and neighbor, a common curriculum and a common spirituality that advised them to be flexible “according to circumstances of places and persons (Constitutions #395). This happened in a time that many local communities were discovering that the world was wider than they thought and a sense of one world with different continents and cultures was emerging. The Jesuits, no doubt, significantly contributed to this new awareness through their journeys, their writings, and their unquenched thirst for bringing the gospel to all cultures. In some cases, the only written documents about cultures and peoples long gone are the ones offered by these Jesuit missionaries. In many cases, they honored and respected the new cultures as Mateo Ricci did in China or the missionaries in the reductions did.

Some years ago, I had the chance to visit some of the old Jesuit reductions in Paraguay. When visiting one of the reductions, now in the hands of the government, the guide, a Guarani descendant, offered a history of the reduction. He did not know I was a Jesuit. He explained that thanks to the Jesuits in these reductions he was still able to speak his native language and keep his culture. He explained that Jesuits learned the local language, wrote the first grammars of the language, and taught the Guaranies to write their own language and keep many of their own traditions. In this sense, the Jesuits were able to honor that God was present in this culture much before they arrived… they were not bringing God to these lands… they were recognizing how God was working there.

Today, the world has changed. As we said before we live in glocal contexts where both the local and the global touch all aspects of our lives. This new reality should lead us, as Pope Francis argues, to a dream: “Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all (Fratelli Tutti #8). This dream of a single humanity is the origin  of our Ignatian perspective on global citizenship. It is the expansion of the solidarity and responsibility to all humans, creatures and to all creation. This is the person for and with others that Fr. General Sosa expanded in his discussion of Fr. Arrupe’s prophetic invitation fifty years ago in Valencia.

For our schools, that is, for our leadership teams, faculty, parents, and students this is an invitation to a new perspective, the glocal perspective in which we recognize that the local and the global are now interconnected in ways that affect our daily lives. This also implies that Jesuit schools need now to see how their decisions, curriculum and formation impacts not only the local context but the global context… Today there are no local decisions without global implication and no global events without local implications. As Christians we want to understand how God is working in this new reality and make sure that our efforts to offer quality education to the new generation can be aligned with what God is doing in our history. Fr. General Sosa reminds us often that we are in “…a change in era. More than ever, we are aware of being part of a single human community, that we share a single planet and have a common destiny” (#31 JESEDU-Rio2017). Moreover, Fr. General argues that this change requires that “our institutions need to be aware of the anthropological and cultural change we’re experiencing, and they need to know how to educate and train in a new way for a different future” (#49 JESEDU-Rio2017).

Our educational tradition can really help us to navigate this new era. Arrupe expressed confidence that the Ignatian spirit, that constitutes the core of our education, “allow(s) us to renew ourselves continually… a keen spiritual sensibility for discerning the ways in which God wants Christianity to be lived at the different stages of history” (Men & Women for Others, #17). Our most recent official document A Living Tradition (LT) expresses this same spirit as it wants to promote “an ongoing exercise of discernment” and states that “[t]here is a temptation to rely on a proven past. Jesuit schools must be more than the best of the past, as some will argue; they are not museums in which a living charism has become frozen” (LT 153). Applied to our present theme, we need to discern how to educate in the new glocal reality of our world. “This will require our schools to live in the creative tension between being locally and globally rooted and aware. We want our students to recognize, value and celebrate their local community, tradition, and culture, and at the same time, be able to communicate, work and identify with other members of our global community.” (187) This is what glocal means for us as individuals and as Jesuit Schools! We want to learn to live in the creative tension of being members of a global network with a global mission, with global responsibilities, but at the same time being completely present and active in our local contexts as important actors of our communities.

During Pope Francis’s address to General Congregation 36th he emphasized that in the Society, as Saint Ignatius explained, things are always in fieri, that is, in the process of being, unfinished, becoming, pending, not yet fully developed…

As Pope Francis reminded us, our “way of proceeding” is a process, a journey: “I rather like Ignatius’ way of seeing everything – except for what is absolutely essential – as constantly developing, in fieri…” We draw profit, Pope Francis indicated, from” holding tensions together”: contemplation and action, faith and justice, charism and institutions, community, and mission. We are pilgrims. Our path involves facing the creative tensions brought about by the diversity of persons and ministries in the Society. In seeking to progress in following the Lord, the Society must constantly re-imagine and discern… (GC 36, D. 2, #28).

For our schools one of those creative tensions is to exist in the glocal… to educate in the unavoidable glocal context of our lives today, without sacrificing the local or the global…