Stories

For many international students at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, coming to JST-SCU means crossing more than an ocean. We leave behind family, friends, cultures, languages, and the familiar places we call home. Yet, in a beautiful and often unexpected way, JST-SCU teaches us that home can also be found across the Atlantic.

At the heart of this experience is the Jesuit culture of hospitality—a hospitality rooted in the conviction that God is already in our midst.

At JST-SCU, hospitality is not simply a welcome at the door. It is a way of accompanying one another through the joys and sorrows of life. Jesuit companions have opened not only their homes but also their hearts to international students. They have celebrated with us when life gives us reasons to rejoice, accompanying students as they celebrate weddings, engagements, graduations, birthdays, and other precious moments. They make room at their tables and in their homes, allowing students far from their own families to experience the warmth of family.

In these moments of celebration, we encounter something deeper than human kindness. We encounter the generosity of God reflected through people who make space for one another. Their hospitality becomes a reminder that God's love often reaches us through human hands, open doors, shared meals, and joyful companionship.

This hospitality becomes especially meaningful during the summer, when housing can be difficult for international students to maintain. Jesuit communities have opened their doors and offered students a place to stay, reminding us that we are not merely students passing through an institution. We are members of a community that cares for us. More importantly, we are reminded that wherever God's people make room for one another, there is a place we can call home.

And hospitality at JST-SCU is not limited to moments of celebration.

For students who experience the painful loss of a parent, sibling, relative, or close friend while living thousands of miles from home, grief can feel particularly heavy. For African students especially, mourning is often deeply communal: we gather, we pray, we keep vigil, we remember, and we carry one another's sorrow. Yet being far from home can make this experience profoundly difficult.

In these moments, the Jesuit community has become a place of consolation. Jesuit homes become places where friends gather, where vigils are kept, where prayers are offered, stories are shared, tears are shed, and grief is carried together. The distance between California and Africa may be immense, but the distance between a grieving student and a caring community becomes remarkably small.

And perhaps this is where we most clearly recognize that God is in our midst.

God is present in the prayer whispered beside a grieving friend. God is present in the meal prepared for someone who has lost a loved one. God is present in the Jesuit who opens his home, in the friend who stays through the night, in the community that gathers when one of its members is hurting. In sharing another's grief, we discover that we do not carry our sorrow alone.

This is where cura personalis becomes more than a Jesuit ideal. It becomes incarnate.

To care for the whole person means to recognize that students are not simply minds pursuing degrees or names on a class roster. We are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends, spouses, people who celebrate, people who struggle, people who hope, and people who sometimes grieve. The Jesuit tradition of accompaniment recognizes the whole person and makes room for the whole of life.

At JST-SCU, this care points beyond ourselves. It becomes a way of encountering Christ in one another. We are reminded of His promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20)

For international students, this culture of hospitality is therefore a profound consolation. We may be far from our countries and our families, but at JST we discover another kind of family. We find people willing to walk with us through both joy and sorrow. We find a table at which we can sit, a home in which we can rest, and hearts willing to share both our happiness and our grief.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful gifts of studying at JST-SCU: discovering a real home across the Atlantic.

And home, as the Jesuit tradition reminds us, is not simply a place. It is a community of people who make space for one another, accompany one another, and help one another carry what life places upon our shoulders. Ultimately, it is a place where we can recognize that God has not left us alone.

At JST-SSCU, cura personalis has a face, a table, an open door, a listening heart, and a community willing to stay. It is hospitality made concrete. And through that hospitality, many of us international students have encountered something of God's own hospitality—the assurance that, even thousands of miles from home, we belong, we are accompanied, and God is in our midst.

This is the consolation we carry with us across the Atlantic and, God willing, wherever our journeys may lead.