NaBloPoMo February 2014: Day 8: Learning from the Past, Hoping for the Future, and sometimes getting disappointed at changes

I am very disappointed.

I was googling the all-girls Catholic high school I went to, Fontbonne Academy, the other day and it came up in my search box with a series of news articles, opinion articles, and news blogs about the administration rescinding a job offer to a food service worker because he was gay, married, and listed his husband as his emergency contact and a group of alumnae protesting this movement which screams of discrimination and runs strongly counter to what we were taught at the school itself when we were students.

I understand from an academic standpoint that they felt they were advised by the Archdiocese against hiring him for his honesty, however, like the other alumnae, I'm not all that happy about it.

This is the very progressive high school that heavily influenced me to get involved in social justice/social action groups. This is the high school where I learned what the Day of Silence was for the very first time outside of the internet.

This is the high school where I had a theology teacher who encouraged us women to push for the Archdiocese to allow women to be ordained at least to be deaconesses as that was a serving option in the early days of the Church.

This is the high school that didn't flinch when I saw God as something like Mother-Father, as an all-encompasing One God. I always loved our Sign-of-the-Cross: "In the Name of the Creator, The Redeemer and the Holy Spirit."

This is the high school that made me realize that I liked women's schools because I could have conversations I wouldn't be getting in a co-ed program. Women's schools talk and do and push against the boundaries of society, we ask hard questions and we try to tell ALL the stories.

I'm not afraid of that school being my past because it made me a lot of who I am: a courageous, smart, strong woman (mostly) who isn't afraid to turn things on their head, to dream, to speak, to act. But I am very concerned for its future, since what I valued most about my education there was being a courageous woman who would stand on the side of love always, even when it was hard.