Trinity Magazine: Fall 2005

The Sower’s Seed: Inspiring Lives of Service

Marie Dennis ’64 Reflects on Her Life of Service at Inaugural Sower’s Seed Lecture

Marie Dennis ‘64, director of the Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns, gave the inaugural address for Trinity’s Sower’s Seed Lecture in Notre Dame Chapel in September. The annual lecture series is made possible by The Sower’s Seed, a fund established at Trinity by Kelly Snider Dunn ’64, and the Dunn Family Charitable Foundation, to support the vision that was instilled in her as a student at Trinity: a sense of commitment to serve God by responding to the problems and needs of the world. The lecture series was established to plant seeds of perspective and inspiration among Trinity students and to inspire them to pursue lives of service.

The program features keynote addresses and other programs highlighting the work of Trinity graduates and kindred spirits who have sought to serve the poor and the oppressed. By sharing their stories, the speakers will expand the horizon of possibilities for students and invite further consideration of ways to work together for a better world.

The lecture this year, which was held on the eve of Cap and Gown Weekend, was followed by a dialogue over dinner. More than 120 participated in the discussions about living lives of service, including Trinity students, alumnae, faculty and staff, Sisters of Notre Dame, and lay volunteers and religious members of several organizations. Marie Dennis ’64 and Kelly Snider Dunn ’64, and members of her family, engaged in the lively dialogue.

The inaugural program took on a global dimension with the remarks of Dennis, who talked about the efforts of the Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns to effect change worldwide. She spoke about her journey from Trinity to activist and advocate, which included raising her family on a farm, and then living in Assisi House, an intentional community in Washington, D.C.
I was at Trinity during the Second Vatican Council. I remember clearly when I returned for my senior year asking one of the Sisters what the Council was all about. With amazing insight she said, “We are being called to move beyond ‘Jesus and me’ to include a deep concern about the world, a commitment to social justice.” I had no real idea what she meant, but five years later began slowly to understand…I had worked as a physicist for the U.S. Navy when I graduated from Trinity and spent two years on Guam while my husband served his time in the Air Force. Now we were settling in for the long haul with a growing family. It never occurred to me then that my life might move in unexpected directions – that in the years to come I would travel to Cambodia and Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Afghanistan, Colombia and Palestine – and perhaps 30 other countries; that I would have breakfast with the president of the United States; milk a cow and make hay (literally); accompany the president of Haiti on his return from exile; sit in vigil outside the White House through long nights on end with Sister Dianna Ortiz, a courageous survivor of torture in Guatemala; watch de-mining teams inch their way through mine fields; sit in meetings with the President of the World Bank and the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund; get deported from El Salvador for accompanying refugees back to their land; fast for 42 days; work on a project with the Archbishop of Canterbury; write books; spend time in jail; and on and on.

I was fully engaged with life “close to home” in those years – and very happy. I was at best a spectator to the larger dramas of our nation and of our world. How did I get from that life to one lived closer to the radical edge?

Slowly, in fact, the larger dramas had begun to come into focus. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., erupted into violence. Poor farm workers from California brought their grape boycott to the East Coast. People fleeing repression in Chile moved north. I began to ask “why” – a dangerous question that I had learned at Trinity. Why were there riots in our cities? Why are farm workers not protected by labor laws? Why did the United States support a brutal dictator in Chile?

I was moving to the margins – trying to look at life through the lens that the farm workers or the Chilean refugees or people living in Washington D.C.’s inner city were holding. I was beginning to see with new eyes through the lives and stories of people profoundly affected by poverty and violence, by structural injustice.

The rich teaching of the Catholic Church in the years after the Council was having a profound effect on me. So was the life giving experience of a good faith community…Shortly after we moved into Assisi Community I had the good fortune of being offered a job in the justice and peace office of Mary-knoll, the U.S.-based Catholic missionary movement founded almost 100 years ago and now present in 39 countries around the world….Our job is to bring the experience of Maryknoll missioners and of the mostly very poor communities where they live and work to the consciousness of people in the U.S. and especially into decision-making processes at the United Nations, the U.S. government, the World Bank and IMF – wherever policies are being developed and practices shaped that will have an impact on the poor and vulnerable, on the environment, on possibilities for peace.

There is so much I could say about our work. What I do now is a far, far cry from designing nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. The journey from there to here has been amazing, interesting, unpredictable – just taking the next right step, one at a time; trying to listen to the Spirit moving in my life; to live the values and use the skills I learned at home and at Trinity; to believe that we are all always becoming what God wants us to be...In the farthest reaches of my imagination I cannot think of work that I would rather do day by day. One of my sons a while ago said, “Mom, I’m not sure I quite understand what you do every day, but what is clear to me is that you are deeply happy. And that’s not something many of my friends can say about their parents at this age!”

Our work is interesting, exciting, and challenging. It is consistent with my deepest beliefs, meaningful and a source of great
satisfaction. I get up every morning happy to go to work and cannot imagine retiring. And I say all that despite the enormous obstacles we face day by day by day as we try to transform the way our world works toward something more just and more humane...There are many places to find this kind of life’s work should you be inclined. As my children settle into their own lives now, they give testimony to the variety of ways to work for social justice and peace. One approach is my own – find a job or a ministry in this field. But each of them has carved out his or her own path – as a teacher, a lawyer, a furniture maker, an office administrator, a dentist. And woven into the work they are doing; into the ways that they parent; into their relationships; into their lives as citizens are the values of and a deep commitment to social justice, peace and protection of the environment. I urge you to do the same:

• Open your heart; say yes; take some risks; cross borders; keep growing.
   
• Try to look at reality through the eyes of those who are poor, living on the margins of life, excluded.
   
• Make a life’s commitment to something you believe in, something that gives your life meaning.
   
• Integrate your values into the work you choose to do and into the way you live.
   
• Just take the next right step – you’ll know where to go once you get there.
   
• Find community – create or recreate it if you have to.
   
• Remember, always remember, that your life is a work in progress.
   
• Let the Spirit of the Living God lead the way.

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