 There's a reason that I hope that stars so far in us and brought in us rejoice. Good evening. Thank you for joining us on this very special occasion. I am Kimo Ayun, Provost Market University, and I will be your master of ceremonies for today's special celebration. It is indeed a pleasure to welcome members of the market community and our community friends to this grand occasion as we honor Father Gregory Boyle of the Society of Jesus. I would like to introduce Katherine Robertson, Communication Student Class of 21, to provide our invocation. Let us pause and recall that we are in the Holy Presence of God, in gracious God. You made us all in your image to be brothers and sisters united in love. In you, we are all blessed, worthy, and deserving of life lived to the fullest. Be with us this mission week. We are in the midst of a pandemic. We hope for a future free from disease, inequality, divisiveness, and injustice where the unity and dignity of all people is recognized. Bless Father Boyle and all at homeboy industries who show us that all your children have worth beyond measure. Watch over homeboy industries. Watch over all of us here today and continue to shower your blessings over the market community that we might live as persons for and with others in truly radical kinship. We make this prayer through our Lord who lives in reigns over all people. One God forever and ever. Amen. Thank you for that beautiful prayer. Catherine, it is now my privilege to introduce the 24th president, president of Marquette University, Dr. Michael Lovell. Good evening. Thank you, Provost Ayun, and thank you all for joining us as we begin the conferral and honorary degree on Father Gregory Boyle. It is a pleasure to join you during this year's mission week. Mission week's theme this year is open to hope. Remaining open to hope could be so difficult, especially during adverse circumstances. In Father Gregory Boyle's work with homeboy industries, he represented hope for a new beginning for so many. His work is a testament to the power of hope and the positivity in the face of adversity and uncertainty. As a Catholic Jesuit university, we are called to live as servant leaders to give ourselves to those in need. Father Boyle has done that in much, much more. I look forward to hearing from my colleagues and learning more about Father Boyle's many accomplishments as we move through this evening. With that, I turn it back over to Provost Ayun. To begin the conferring of the honorary degree, I present to you Dr. Jennifer Mani, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. President Lovell, I commend to you Reverend Gregory J. Boyle of the Society of Jesus. Gregory J. Boyle of the Society of Jesus has spent his career as an exemplar of cure personalities and bringer of hope. A Jesuit priest, he is the founder of homeboy industries, which is the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world. A native of Los Angeles, from 1986 to 1992, Father Boyle served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles, that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. During his years as pastor, Father Boyle witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence firsthand and took courageous and compassionate action. In 1988, Father Boyle, along with parish and community members, started what eventually would become homeboy industries, whose mission is to provide hope, training, and support to formerly gang involved and previously incarcerated men and women, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of their community. Homeboy Industries employs and trains former gang members in a wide range of social enterprises and provides critical services to men and women seeking a better life. Homeboy's holistic approach includes therapeutic and educational offerings, practical services like tattoo removal, and work readiness and job training focused social enterprises, serving thousands of men and women each year. The organization offers a path out of the cycles of violence and incarceration and helps people develop the strength and skills to transform their lives and create safer, healthier communities. Father Boyle has received numerous awards and recognitions, most notably the California Peace Prize, the 2017 Latari Medal from the University of Notre Dame, the oldest honor given to American Catholics, and the 2016 James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award. In 2014, President Obama named Father Boyle a champion of change. Currently, he serves as a committee member of California Governor Gavin Newsom's Economic and Job Recovery Task Force in response to COVID-19. Father Boyle is the author of the 2010 New York Times bestseller Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boneless Compassion. His second book, Barking to the Choir, The Power of Radical Kinship, was published in 2017. Because of his exemplary career as priest, CEO, writer, and entrepreneur, on behalf of our human family, President Lovell, I hereby recommend Reverend Gregory J. Boyle of the Society of Jesus for the Marquette University degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa. Reverend Gregory J. Boyle of the Society of Jesus, by the power vested in me by the State of Wisconsin and the trustees of Marquette University, I confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa. Congratulations, Father Boyle. We are so thankful for your work. This concludes our official degree ceremony. We will now listen to the inspiring words of Father Boyle as part of our special Ignite for Mission Week. It is my pleasure to present Father Boyle, advocate for justice and builder of communities, and the newest Marquette alum. Thank you very much. It's indeed an honor to be recognized in this way, and I have a great admiration and love for Marquette. And thank you for this. I sort of feel in solidarity with all the graduates who will receive this at the end of this year, and they too will receive it, and it'll be empty until you finish paying off your tuition. So let that be a lesson to you. There's a vision that undergirds all that you do at Marquette, and it's soaked with hope and the risen life. There's a vision of imagining a circle of compassion, and then imagine nobody standing outside that circle. You are sent from Marquette to dismantle the barriers that exclude. Martin Luther King said that what he said of church could be said of your time at Marquette. It's not the place you've come to. It's the place you go from, and you go from there to stand at the margins, and you are the only delivery system of hope that makes any sense. Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul that sings the song without the words and never stops at all. You go to the margins and you are anchored there because that's the only way the margins will get erased is if you stand out at them. Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills correctly when she suggested that the problem in the world is that we've just forgotten that we belong to each other. So how do we stand against forgetting that? How do we move out to the margins and stand with the particularity with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless to choose to stand with those whose dignity has been denied and those whose burdens are more than they can bear? Every once in a while you get so privileged to be able to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out. You get to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop and you stand with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. You stand at the margins and you brace yourselves because indeed people will accuse you of wasting your time. But the prophet Jeremiah writes in this place of which you say it is a waste there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness the voices of those who sing. You go to the margins and other voices get heard for you are the only delivery system of hope that makes any sense human beings. And so we return people to themselves at the margins. If I go to the margins to make a difference then it's about me and it can't be about me. But if I go to the margins so that the folks at the margins make me different then it's about us. And that's how hope is engendered. And then we choose to become the notice of God in the world. We choose to be tender as God is tender with us. The God who loves us without measure and without regret. A couple three years ago I buried my 92-year-old mother and she had eight kids and I had buried my father some 25 years earlier and she died the way all of us would like to I think surrounded by our family, our kids, our grandchildren in her own bed, in her own home. And she was sharp as a tack till the very end. In fact in her last year of her life she watched so much MSNBC. She was becoming Rachel Maddow and she wasn't a lick afraid of dying. In fact about three weeks before she died she looked at me and she was positively giddy and she said I've never done this before which is something you might say just before skydiving. In fact the day before she died I happened to be alone in her room and she was asleep. It never happened that I was there alone and she woke up from her nap and she saw me there and she said oh for crying out loud and she went back to sleep well she was pissed off that she hadn't died yet. Sorry but the next day again as luck would have it I was there all by myself at the foot of her bed and she was asleep and at exactly noon she lifted her head and she opened her eyes and she let out this wondrous glorious gasp and she left us skydiving and no one in earshot of that sound would ever be afraid of death again but in the last weeks of her life there'd be two of us or five of us or all eight of my siblings her kids and she'd be in and out of consciousness and when she would come to she would lock on to one of us and she would say with breathless delight you're here, you're here and all people at the margins want is for you to look them in the eye and to say you're here, you're here. The homies at homeboy industries often say that they're used to that they're used to being watched but they're not used to being seen and so you try to see each other which is how hope gets transmitted there's a Buddhist saying oh nobly born remember who you really are and you want people to inhabit that truth to become that truth and then as you look in people's eyes and say you're here everybody inhabits their mutual dignity and nobility you see each other and people are filled with hope in an exquisitely mutual way. Every gang member man and woman who walks through our doors at homeboy comes barricaded behind a wall of shame and disgrace and the only thing that can scale that wall is tenderness which is the methodology of hope it is how we deliver it every gang member who walks through our doors at homeboy industries comes with a disorganized attachment mom was either frightened or frightening and you can't calm yourself down if you've never been soothed if it's true enough that the traumatized are more likely to cause trauma it's equally true that the cherished will be able to find their way to the joy there is in cherishing themselves and others and so we see each other and Marquette is not the place you've come to it will always be the place you go from and you go from there to take seriously what Jesus took seriously which lucky for us are only four things they're big things but only four inclusion non-violence unconditional loving kindness and compassionate acceptance we choose to be in the world who god is tender we notice the notice of god and then we choose to be in the world who god is compassionate loving and kind at homeboy industries we're kind of allergic to the notion of holding the bar up and asking gang members to measure up instead we hold the mirror up and we seek to return people to themselves to their goodness which is unshakable but you have to dismantle the messages of shame and disgrace that have bombarded their lives there's an odd line in the acts of the apostles and it says simply and all came upon everyone and it suggests that the measure of our health in any community at all may well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it a number of years ago I was invited to speak to 600 social workers in Richmond Virginia and it was one of those in-service days from nine to five in social workers commandeer a hotel ballroom and they each get credit for workshops and breakout sessions and keynotes so I've done a lot of these and I figured you know I they were inviting me to do a keynote and then I so I bought my ticket but a week before I was to fly I pulled out the original letter inviting me and to my horror I discovered that I was to be the only speaker from nine to five all damn day and I told myself what the homies often say oh hell no I am not going to be the only speaker so I pulled two homies one of our of trainees in our 18 month training program Andre and Jose they were from enemy gangs and they were in their like their ninth month of their 18 months with us and I sat them down and I said look at the end of the week you're flying with me to Richmond Virginia I'd like you to get up and tell your stories take your time because we got a long ass day to fill well I'd never heard their stories and Jose gets up first and he's like 25 years old at the time a gang member been to prison um tattooed uh at that juncture in his time with us he had become a very valued member of our substance abuse team a man solid in his own recovery and now he's helping younger homies and homegirls with their addiction issues so not only had he been in prison but he also had a stretch as a homeless man and an even longer stretch as a heroin addict and so uh he starts and he looks at this group of 600 social workers and he says I guess you can say my mom and me we didn't get along so good I think I was six when my mom looked at me and said why don't you just kill yourself you're such a burden to me well 600 social workers audibly gas and he says it sounds way worser in Spanish and we got whiplash going from gas to laugh and then he continued I think I was nine when my mom drove me down to the deepest part of Baja California and she walks me up to an orphanage and she knocks on the door and the guy comes and the guy comes to the door and she says I found this kid and she left me there for 90 days until my grandmother could get out of her where she had dumped me and my grandmother rescued me my mom beat me every single day with of my elementary school years with things you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn't every day my back was bloodied and scarred in fact I had to wear three t-shirts to school each day first t-shirt because the blood would seep through and second t-shirt you could still see it finally the third t-shirt you couldn't see any blood but kids at school they'd make fun of me a fool it's 100 degrees why you're wearing three t-shirts and then he stopped speaking so overwhelmed with emotion and he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could see and when he could regain his speech he said through his tears I wore three t-shirts well into my adult years because I was ashamed of my wounds I didn't want anybody to see him but now I welcome my wounds I run my fingers over my scars my wounds are my friends after all how can I help heal the wounded if I don't welcome my own wounds and awe came upon everyone the measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins but only in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them for the truth of the matter is this if we don't welcome our own wounds we may well be tempted to despise the wounded we don't go to the margins to make a difference we go to the margins so that the folks there make us different god says in the covenant as I have loved you so must you have a special preferential care and love for the widow orphan and the stranger and these are the folks who when those words were written society saw as those who they could live without they were the folks cut off and marquette is not the place you've come to it's the place you go from to repair severed belonging to foster and nurture a community of beloved belonging to imagine a circle of compassion and then imagine nobody standing outside that circle homeboy industries was born a long time ago in 1988 when I was pastor of the poorest parish in the city highest concentration of gang activity in the world eight gangs in the two housing projects which made up my parish all at war with each other I buried my first young person killed because of the sadness in 1988 and tomorrow I will bury my 240th a young man named Anthony Fierros who I've known for a long time so we did a lot of things we started a jobs program and a school and then we started social enterprises and nobody intends to do such a thing but we backed our way now into becoming the largest gang intervention rehab re-entry program on the planet 15,000 folks a year wander through our doors and we try to see them we try to welcome them so that they can feel safe and then our concern is not surviving as the fittest but thriving as the nurtured and pretty soon homeboy becomes a sanctuary and before too long they themselves become the sanctuary that they sought and then they go home and they present that sanctuary to their kids and suddenly you've broken a cycle our program doesn't exist for those who need help it's only for those who want it and in the old days I would ride my bike through the housing projects kind of patrolling the eight gangs and I remember one night very very late probably near midnight I was straddling my beach cruiser bike and I was talking to some homies in the darkness in this overhang in the projects and I could look in the parking lot and I saw this guy we all called Bandit and Bandit was running up to cars and he was selling crack cocaine and then he was counting his money as he walked back to where the group was he didn't know I had arrived in the meantime and I wish I could say he was overly embarrassed that I was there but not so much he was kind and gentle but he turned down every offer I ever gave him to redirect his life until one day he walked into homeboy industries I couldn't believe my eyes and I said he is a miracle that you've walked in here and he said I'm tired of being tired and so he began in our 18 month training program he had a case manager and a therapist he went to anger management class he got his tattoos removed he started to learn how to transform his pain so he didn't have to transmit it anymore and then he found his true self and loving which is the point and so one of our job developers found him a seamless job after his 18 months with us it was a low pay entry level warehouse kind of job but after five years he was you know the floor manager and years later he was promoted even further and I hadn't heard from him in a long time and no news is good news and but one Friday afternoon he calls me kind of in a panic and and he says gee you've got to bless my daughter and I said get my soul because she's sick is she in the hospital oh no no on Sunday she's going to Humboldt College imagine my my oldest my Jessica she's only 18 and she's a tiny chaparitan well Humboldt's far it's way up north and I don't know we're scared do you think you could give her a blessing before she goes and I said sure tomorrow is Saturday and I have baptisms at one and once you guys show up at 12 30 we'll do a little send-off and Bandit was married and had three kids and the whole family shows up at exactly 12 30 and so I say well let's put Jessica in in front of the altar and let's surround her with our bodies and everybody touch her and everybody put your hands on her shoulder go ahead put your hands on her head and and I tell them to bow their heads and to close their eyes and as the homies say I do a long-ass prayer you know I go on and on and and somewhere in the middle of this prayer I noticed that we've all become chi on this we're all crying and I don't know why we're crying except for the fact that Bandit and his wife do not know anybody who's ever gone to college except me certainly nobody in their families and so you know we wipe our eyes and we laugh about how mushy we got and to change the subject I look at little Jessica and and I said hey what are you gonna study at Humboldt College and she was very quick forensic psychology and I go damn forensic psychology and Bandit times that yeah she wants to study the criminal mind and Jessica turns and looks at her father and very deadpan does one of these you know and and Bandit's easier and laughs and says yeah I'm gonna be her first subject and so we go out to the parking lot and big up with ourselves and everybody piles into the car but Bandit hangs back and I'm glad he has and I look at him and I say can I tell you something I give you credit for the man you've chosen to become for choosing to walk in your own footsteps I'm proud of you and his eyes well up with tears and he says, you know what I'm proud of myself all my life people called me a low life a bueno a good for nothing I guess I showed him I said yeah I guess you did oh nobly born remember who you really are the christmas carol says long lay the world in sin and error pining till he appeared and the soul felt its worth and yet it's about jesus and yet it's about christmas but how is it not the job description of every graduate of marquette university you appear and the soul feels its worth we see people at the margins and we all inhabit our nobility and dignity we look each other in the eye and we say you're here you're here and the soul feels its worth marquette is not the place you've come to it was always going to be the place you go from and you go from here to sing the song without the words and to never stop at all you are the only delivery system of hope that makes any sense in our world people who choose to be the notice of god and you brace yourselves and pretty soon you cease to care if anyone accuses you of wasting your time at the margins for in this place of which you say it is a waste there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness the voices of those who sing thank you very much other boil it is an incredible honor to have got to hear you speak this evening we welcome you to the chapel holy family here um are you willing to do is a little bit of q&a now to kind of hear some absolutely awesome does anyone want to get started Rachel uh i'm going to relay it to father boil the other one spoke a lot about what they like homies and homegirls and very spoke focused on one with the homies and homegirls which is a very core value of certain leadership which is obviously a very big part of marquette and um i do it with the values of the whole i was just wondering how um the idea of serving leadership plays into your role in not a homeboy industry and i couldn't hear any of that i can relate it to you so um um rachel kind of just mentioned that um a huge um aspect of b&m marquette is um servant leadership and she just wanted to hear like how that kind of played out in starting homeboy industries and how it plays out in your every day every day to day life that's an excellent question i i think uh you know you don't go to the margins to save rescue or fix people you don't go to the margins to to somehow alter things for them you go there to be altered and you know i think a lot of times that this sort of is the flip side of the burnout question because people will always uh you know so even workers at homeboy senior staff sometimes will say i guess i'm just too compassionate because i'm i'm just feeling sort of burned out and you know i always gently tell them that i i think they feel that way because they've been doing it incorrectly that if you go to the margins to save and fix people then you will be depleted but if you go to the margins to delight in people it is eternally replenishing so it's the leadership that doesn't uh try to save the day but just kind of receive people many years ago when i studied theology at western school of theology we were able to take courses at harvard and i had a class on ministry a team taught by henry nowan and parker palmer so it was kind of high powered and i remember some woman asked henry nowan uh you know what is ministry anyway and he was kind of frustrated and he said can you receive people and and that's always stuck with me was the only thing i remember from that class but it also reminds me of a there was a guy uh in houston i was giving a talk and uh and it was a young guy came up to me after uh the talk and he was a gang member tattooed uh had been in prison but now he was working in the streets of houston trying to uh kind of what do what we call hardcore gang intervention worker and he was very frustrated and he kind of pleaded with me with uh he was very earnest and he said how do you reach them meaning gang members and and i found myself saying to him for starters stop trying to reach them can you be reached by them and i think it's counterintuitive but i think that's what leadership is all about can you receive people can you be reached by people can you go to the margins and allow your heart to be altered uh so it's the opposite of things awesome thank you very much father boil um does anyone else have a question hope you want it okay we can do you ask awesome um i don't know if you heard that um but um she asked um did you ever have any story or experience that you would want anyone that you come across to know well yeah i've written two books of stories that i would want you know maybe people to know and and i just turned in my third book to my editor so um yeah i i don't know i mean they're all in the in the early days you know because the demonizing was writ large and at homeboy industries you know the first 10 years of our 33 years were marked by death threats bomb threats and hate mail never from gang members but from people who had demonized gang members and it was a short hop to demonize me for helping them and so in the early days stories kind of shook my fist you know and and they were kind of they were more frustrating and frustrated and i was always trying to put a human face on a on a person who had been demonized in our society you know it's probably not so much like that now now it's more just uh kind of delighting in people being uh so extraordinary and the day won't ever come when i have more courage or i am more noble or i am closer to god than the thousands and thousands of men and women uh you know i've been privileged to know so uh i guess i i tell stories that i want to reveal their hearts so that people can say oh yeah we belong to each other the great john lewis said we all live in the same house and and he doesn't say even though some people live on the third floor and others in the basement he says we all live in the same house he doesn't it's not an aspiration he doesn't say one day we might all live in the same house no he says it straight out we all live in the same house and it's a statement of fact waiting for us to recognize and to realize and uh once we realize it we will become it we will inhabit it it it'll become our truth um and the problem is we've forgotten that we belong to each other and if that's the problem then the solution is reminding each other awesome next question awesome so she asked um what are ways she can show tenderness of the heart um during these times of during just these current times and uh claire was it yeah she also mentioned that she read your book uh one of your books tattoos on the heart and she said it was really amazing so yeah i mean these are obviously challenging times uh so you know i never zoomed until uh the pandemic every tuesday night i have uh kind of i suppose you might call it a bible study with all these homies and it's when i signed off last night i i thought wow we've been doing this now for 11 months every tuesday night and uh and we're always moved to tears at people sharing their lives and their stories and their faith and and uh gang members who uh honest to god you know if their stories had been flames you'd have to keep your distance otherwise you'd get scorched and and that never would have happened without the pandemic i mean it's been in fact i i dedicate my third book to the to my tuesday night group it's it's kind of uh an extraordinary thing but texting i'm the mad texture now and even homies you know email which never happened before but like i have all these homies i call my dearly deported who are who have spent a time in prison and but weren't born here so they get deported and i got an email in the early part of the when we were all talking about ppe you know and and he just big huge block letters he said we are your mask and that was it and i knew exactly what he meant it was his way of holding his way of carino and tenderness it was his small gesture there are all these box cars of tenderness that you have to that they're they're gestures so if you know you know love is the answer uh and community is the context but tenderness is the methodology and if love doesn't become tender it just stays in the air or in your head or in your heart but tender is when it becomes connective tissue it's the thing that joins and uh so you have to be attentive to it uh because if you get distracted then your kindness gets forgotten and and you don't want to forget your kindness and so we're distracted only all the time and so you want to safeguard your attention so you can be absolutely tender with the person in front of you a homie named yeti who's from on duras and a gang member and and uh he told me the other day and here we're in the pandemic so we're we're masks we're at a distance we're constantly uh wiping everything down but the mayor considers us an essential organization so we've never closed and uh and he joined us during the pandemic so I always think maybe people didn't get the full blown cultural thing of homeboy like and you know and before the pandemic it's constant hugs and morning meeting and everybody at the camaraderie is is thick but he said to me sometimes I feel indifferent which seemed like a very odd word for him to say he says but whenever I do I think of this place and I feel passionate which is also an odd word to use and you blink and you miss it and you don't want to miss it you don't want to be distracted by anything you want to be attentive enough to in every moment be anchored in the present moment so that you can find your true self and loving and that's the whole nine yards you know my joy yours your joy complete as Jesus says and and that's where you find it see one question gets a long ass answer so maybe we just need two more awesome does anyone want to go next okay so um she asked at what point in your life did you um reflect slash consider your vocation to the priesthood and the society of Jesus well I think priesthood was sort of an afterthought I mean I uh Jesuit was what I felt drawn to I was taught by the Jesuits this was during the Vietnam War and and uh and all the Jesuits uh who taught me were were had these two things that I admired they were prophetic and they were hilarious and for me that was kind of a good combo burger I I love both of those things and you know so people like Daniel Berrigan and and uh and then all the Jesuits I knew and you could never do this nowadays but it was like you know forget parent permission slips we didn't have cell phones I mean you I can't even believe we did stuff like this but we'd hop in a van a whole bunch of us with a Jesuits and and we'd drive up for the day to San Francisco to the largest anti-war rally in the country and not sleep a wink and drive home afterwards and there was a kind of like you'd call your parents from a payphone hey we're driving to San Francisco to this march and okay be safe okay see when you get home I mean that would never happen today I mean are you kidding me and yet it was wild and and uh it just galvanized a kind of a spirit of living the truth as if it were true and putting first things recognizably first and it was a way of living the marrow of the gospel which was very attractive to me and so I looked at these Jesuits and I said I'll have what they're having but uh you know priesthood was so secondary oh I guess oh yeah so I guess priesthood yeah that'll happen 13 years into this but but it was primarily wanting to be a Jesuit and uh so next year it'll be 50 years and uh I wouldn't trade my life for anybody's amazing amazing I'd be on words with um this excellent night that we've had um so that concludes questions and um Father Boyle I just want you to know that on behalf of the students here at Marquette um I welcome you to the Marquette community um you make our community stronger and I'd also like to uh throw a quick shout out to um and our greetings to all the people at Homeboy Industries um and just thank you um thank you for your time ministry and witness and I think we should all give them a great round of applause thank you thank you very much awesome it's been a pleasure so um that kind of concludes the whole uh talking portion of this um we are now going to move into our worship part of tonight uh with it being ignite um so Ashley can come up and join us and get us started okay so this next portion of our night we're going to transition into a little bit of musical worship so I'm going to plug in my phone and we'll play some music for everyone this isn't going to concern you guys exactly but for us in the room here please I encourage you to engage with the worship in whatever way you like pray on it meditate over it just sit back and enjoy and relax but we ask that you don't sing and that doesn't concern you guys but so yeah if you guys just want to join me I'm glad before you get started I think you're looking bright each and every one of you I think you've got a work that's on your eyes and the mission that you've put on has worked I think you've learned through your grace and as you sustain this you've kind of been going through this time may pray that you open up but it reminds me of my heart first you know me first awesome uh could you go through this to actualize there okay because you yeah if you keep on through this isn't me a few lyric lines can I go through like all of these yeah awesome now we're going to move on to announcements guys um our first announcement for you guys is that there's going to be a prayer service for national unity um that is next Thursday I'm at 8 30 p.m. here in the chapel or family um it is being sponsored by campus ministry and also the college republicans and college democrats um student organizations on campus it is an excellent opportunity to pray together for greater national unity and a shared commitment to the common good of all people um and then another announcement on that next slide um is ash ones oh next week's topic is ash Wednesday prayer service um with ash distribution so um be sure to sign up on the campus ministry um social media platforms the website um during the ignite time this week in the chapel or family will be hosting our own ash distribution so come get ashes sprinkled on your forehead or on the top of your head this year because of covid um so yeah that is next week and then i'm gonna hit next and before i uh so send you guys off um i first wanted to say thank you to all of our online viewers that we have had tonight um it's been a thrill having all of you join us tonight um and then also for everyone else be sure to check out the rest of our mission week um events going on with um throughout the rest of the week and also with the conclusion of mission week at the 6 p.m. mass at the church of the jesu um and yeah we'll see you guys next week um please wait in your seat um rob will come around and dismiss you guys um for everyone here in the chapel or family so on your way out if you see someone you could always um strike up a quick conversation um about that wonderful talk that we had from father boil tonight so ignite out